In My Spanish Notebooks I Confessed Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

in my Spanish workbooks I confessed
in rose chalks and the blue
an illustration never viewed:

Quixote and his squire
and they are fading far from you
the farther that you go and nearer than

the siglo de oro ever could be

shimmering before you.
it's a sunset of marigolds on fire;
a reedy flourishing of windmill music.

and here's the spiral notebooks from
that beginning where you took notes
on: not variant spellings, but something else..

scribbled on narrow lines in pale green ink,
past telling and the secret kept close
like a letter to yourself, the preface to

a handbook on dreams, their aftermaths, the ghosts
half-traced and paperback abridged.
it's still the same quest, you guess

from the ridge where their horizons whirl
44 years spoked like a flash and vanishing,
no one else is listening in either language

when you close your eyes
and glistening, you'll sigh on the brink of it,
again

mary angela douglas 23 july 2015