Fading In The Spanish Sky Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Under the buffalo road,
Through the windy tunnels in Spain,
We lost ourselves and fell in love:
She had eyes lacquered with marriage,
And her paintings sold in Japan;
In Catalan, walking down from
Her second house, she showed me
Where Salvador Dali was born
Upside down from a tree of clocks
And he smiled at us before we walked away:
Then he was just a smile,
As the Spanish Armada watched
Jesus baptize Generalissimo Franco
In a sea of Neapolitan ice-cream,
Before they set out for England
In the fated storms that would sink the empire;
While we drank sangria in the bay
Where the wind tore the sash from
The lady in the rocks,
And the Roman ghosts marched through
The dry orange groves,
And spoke as the wind through the
Green leaves cradling the fruit
Of an ancient womb.
Now, nothing is as it was before,
For we lost her grandfather’s guitar
On a train that crossed the border
Into France on Christmas Day,
With nothing to do put to kiss in
The empty streets, and wait for the sun
To sanctify the clouds, as dawn
Married the world;
Now all of this has disappeared,
And she is a grandmother hanging
Her memories in a show in Madrid,
And the time passes slowly like the
Wind off the cliffs,
Where all the old ghosts gather like
The torn curtains rippling on the battlements,
Above the town where the virgins are all engaged,
And the little boys, in their
Summer truancies, don’t even see,
As they light off the stolen fireworks,
The beautiful things leaping in the sky,
Things that are for their brilliant seconds,
Fading in the sky,
And then no more.