The sun was so bright in Cadiz it blanched everything into a silent anger.
They were walking ahead of me, figures drenched in white
And I could see the past in the making.
The night fell, heavy and sullen, on Los Caños.
And I resigned myself to potatoes and eggs
And ketchup with a taste of regret.
The forest stretched like the rest of my life, forbidding and haunted.
And in the back seat
They weighed on my mind.
And now it’s gone.
A moment so past
It almost never happened.
What do you frame when you see memory happening?
And what do leave in your head,
Trailing like a dead dog’s tail?
1 comment:
I liked the first three parts because I could see pretty much everything, because they satisfy my vanity of having been there, though I recall having eaten fish and their eggs in Los Caños de Meca, not potatoes and eggs. When I open tuna cans over here now, I never remember the tuna we ate at Los Caños de Meca, maybe because I still have a hard time believing that both are tuna.
Melodrama and nostos put aside, I found the first three parts to be overly studied and deliberate. The idea of "I could see the past in the making" is genius. The idea of "taste of regret" is redundant with "Exit", even though over there it had a caustic taste and over here ketchup has its taste. In how many flavours just does regret come?
The whole idea of "ketchup with a taste of regret", however, is interesting. So is your comparison between the forest we walked through and your life.
The chronological shift towards the fourth and fifth parts is successful, especially that those are much more natural, which is why I liked them. The idea of the moment being "so past/ It almost never happened" stunned me at first, then I remembered you had a similar thing in a poem I cannot recall currently. Finally, your turn towards your reader at the fifth part is lively and good, and I loved your last similie.
Bises,
Ton frère Ahmad
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