Back from a week in SE Spain, the wonderful desert of Cabo de Gata-Nijar Natural Park. Our third visit. The first was on the anniversary of son Jake’s sudden death; the second was the occasion when my back took centre stage (ruptured disc and cracked vertebra – the journey back was a nightmare, straight to hospital and eventual surgery); this time my knee was vying for attention, but we managed some walking, strolling on the coast around Rodalquilar. I’ve fallen in love with Isleta del Moro, a beautiful fishing village just north of San Jose … is it too late to think of relocating here? Our base was El Jardin de los Suenos (The Garden of Dreams), a small hotel in an enchanting desert garden.
Some delightful experiences, with meals ranging from “Cow’s Cheek” in a cafe bar in Rodalquilar (love the rhyme more than the food: if only we’d known what it was before we ordered) to a Menu Gastronomique in Ora y Luz: fabulous food, a wine for each course, and an evening spent quite by chance in the delightful company of Sofia and Jose. Two orthopaedic specialists, stopping over en route from Malaga to a wedding in Lorca … something about the evening and the company made my knee better: could it have been the wine? The conversation had to include a reference to Lorca’s Blood Wedding (me, trying to show off), just as this blog has to include a poem for each of the three visits. Return to the Garden is a work in progress; I still have some tinkering to do.
Extinct Volcanoes
(Cabo de Gato, Almeria, Spain. May 2015)
Dry, desert heat. And crested larks rising,
singing, to swoop and perch as if in air.
Volcanoes’ molten rage, vented long ago,
contorted into crags and jagged peaks:
passion spent, now sculpted into tortured
eerie beauty. Only the larks moved, sang,
and led us through the clumps of colour, blood
on phallic stalks, gold bizarrely dripped
on sere, scorched ground.
And step by step, plodding
with the gravity of love and death and grief,
we moved into the curing arid space
of those extinct volcanoes, the healing
abandonment of self. Salt tears dried.
And on and on the larks took flight and sang.
The Garden of Dreams
(El Jardin de los Suenos. April 2017)
The old cat stretches, yawns, rolls over
into the bougainvillea’s shade, stares
towards my shuffle to the chair.
Her milky eyes close again. She sleeps.
Cushions hold me. Between the morphine
and the pain, I close my eyes and let
the darkness draw me in to where
the blind cat lies. Let me slide
into the night, sleep long into the day,
and fade into the drowsy garden’s warmth.
Return to the Garden
(June 2018)
We planted many dreams here: seems like
years ago, when those first stabs of grief
were stilled by relics of volcanic force.
Some have strange shapes now: twisted, skulking low,
bursting into lurid flower when seeming dead.
Some – the jacaranda’s ghostly blue,
the bougainvillea’s blowsy painted tissue –
appear like unexpected smiles. And some
burst from the ground, startle into song,
and taunt us with their freedom.
The old blind cat faded in November.
She died at home, perhaps consoled by dreams
of cicadas’ summer noise, of warmth and shade,
and of the tempting, rising song of crested larks.
I marvel at the way you create images from what you see which reflect such depth of feeling which is so personal but at the same time speaks to me.