Seville

SEVILLE

In golden hues, and byzantine blue, vidriado tiles
greet the lost and weary traveller in Seville.
Sunlight momentarily emolliates the new year’s winter

in a halo of light behind the orange trees.

In Tiempos pasados the bitterness softens
When Old Acquaintance should be forgot

And that’s what you’re doing: forgetting; as though the frigid air could make forgot

Make slick, like the world-weary cobblestones and tiles

To slip, unnoticed and unoppressed by the traffic of profane tourists, skeletons softened

By the drudgery of their cumbersome packs and manuals of facts: Seville

Cathedrals and Visigoths and orange trees

Enthralled by hues of pink in the halo of winter.

Your own passport is stamped with promise yet the winter

Cools within your entrails, not forgot

And the rotten muck of decomposing fruit beneath the Valencia trees

And the throbbing white of a hotel room encased in tiles;

Is your Seville

Dull in loneliness; the piquancy of sleeping pills softens

Until the new morning in a new year, breaks and softens

You sit in a bar eating deep fried phallic totems against the winter

One day to recover your social media felicity: in Seville!

You won’t let the world think you’ve forgot

Those Andalusian villas with their pink and apricot tiles

A myriad of selfie smiles digitally remastered against the dark silhouettes of trees

You post a golden canvas that fades towards darkness and fairy lights in the trees

Signal to the World-wide web that the tumult softens

Inside your head, the fragments might tessellate perfectly like tiles

Or crack you open in great ice-sheathes like winter

You have not forgot.

Even amidst the beauty of Seville

You are the lost and heartsick traveller, ambling through Seville

Sick to death of Rossini’s frantic overture curling through the trees

In days to come, you will have forgot

How byzantine blues and the verisimilitude of orange hues and dirt might have softened

Had only you given yourself to the history and winter

Depart now from winter in Seville; whose tiles crack under trees laden with bitter hopefulness; where memories soften but cannot be forgot