Sunlight ricochets off the blanco bell tower
of Iglesia de la Asunción, landing as a spectral
ball lodged in the iron-barred windows across
the narrow lane. Light splays its rays onto
an outdoor café, which bustles with excitement
at the arrival of perfect weather for the perfect
pueblo blanco of Spain, a grand fiesta of white.

Priego de Cordoba revels in its inheritance
of white, the picture-perfect, pristine village
elevated above abundant olive groves and
the crackling, undulating earth. Here, you
gaze upon the arid land with the all-seeing eye
of God, never bloodshot, never blurred,
crisp as a hawk's flight to prune its prey.

Approaching the village, giant, arthritic roots
of ancient trees sprawl atop the shallow
soil like crooked claws. Farther ahead,
a 19th-century goatherd leans on his long,
weathered stick, whistling beneath his
beret, as his garrison of goats clatters
down the massive, twisting row of rocks.

Serenity seeps into your bones as you stroll
among the potted flowers, bursting with red
and white into the Barrio de la Villa. My
wanderings reach from door to tiny door,
touching nothing but the spotless white paint
that bathes the tall, stucco walls. I fly above
the strictured street, wide enough for a donkey's

passage, laden with burdens of the quiet life.
Like a condor, my broad wingspan brushes
the facades of these run-on homes, whose close
proximity propels the principle of shared
existence. Now we must live face-to-face,
mano a mano, shadow-boxing the hanging pots
as they lovingly labor to sprout laurels of victory.

I narrow to the lane's end, where lies buried the
barrio's secret map to the alleyways of Paradise.
I spy an aged senora sweeping with a stumpy
straw broom to gather up the beaming bits
of white and sprinkle them into the faded folds
of her patterned apron. She stares at me, just
another incorrigible source of refuse, bearing

the crudely unwrapped gift of a devotee of beauty,
breathing in the barrio's florid scent of security,
blanco a blanco, endless white on white. I turn,
incapable of tracing my steps, of tripping right
or left, traipsing to the fringe of the barrio,
where streaming waters wash away all colors
save the nakedness of white. Neptune towers

over the concrete pools of Fuente del Rey,
a king's ransom of swirling waves that imprint
the reflecting cradles of sky, wrapped in cotton-
thin clouds shredding the afternoon into white,
rose-tinted white. An unfinished canvas of
monochromatic color fields blends into
the blinding white. I cool my feet in bubbling

ponds, peering out at the outlying jungle of
bushes, dwarf trees and twisted vines. I need
rest, the rejuvenating powers of Neptune's trident
hanging above my head, ready to knight me as
the Quixote of Cordoba's rippling region. He
splashes me into intimidating fountains of
life, of light streaming its tranquil rays into

basins of sheer delight. Here, I lay my burden
down, dip my feet into the cool, white flow of
Epsom baths sans the salt. Renewed, I use
my flatfoot tools of travel to trigger my trek,
my pilgrimage into the white belly of Spain.
Still in the barrio, I ogle the outdoor café, then
take the first step to tread all sin underground.

Before the Euro, you were -- swirling light, sitting pretty.
We kicked it at night along the grungy lanes of Ile de la Cité.
Notre Dame loomed large and long, a battleship on the Seine.
An exoskeleton of Gothic bones, what could it ever do but win?

Hunger hung out among us, an unwanted dog on a wayward walk.
Frenchmen directed us au centre. In those days, I could talk the talk.
Still can, still do, but who needs "J'adore vos diamants de luxe,
calme et beauté" when you must bow down in a row sans your ducks?

Serendipity, man, that's what la Cité seeped. Evening an ermine
blanket tossed effortlessly over the spires of the medieval vermin
that Haussmann hacked into Euclidean lines of parallel charms:
more ordre, beauté et calme. Organic geometry. What's the harm?

Dusk draped us in l'amour du mystère. Cafe awnings as exotic
as Flaubert's Egyptian tours, plump with mistresses for the neurotic
novelist who poisoned Normandy with naturalistic despair. He's
no Parisian, no architect, no monk. We absorb le mot juste; a star flees.

On the sidewalk, a 50-franc note calls out beneath the weeds.
We look for an owner, see nothing, feel nothing but the need to feed
on crepes, chocolat et confiture de fraise. I imagine Camus and Sartre
at Les Deux Magots, nursing black café, pouring noir into your heart.

(After Anne Sexton's "The Starry Night")

Van Gogh's "Starry Night"
illumines a damaged heart.
Poetry remains therapy
until the patient is cured.

Pulitzer Prize, parties, men
and accolades galore.
Anne Sexton, the poets' darling,
dances to the darkening sky.
This is how you want to die.

This is how the world ends:
without swirling stars,
without a crescent moon,
stuck alone inside your garage,
door closed, car running.
Inhale the aroma of the blackened night.

The genome tilts on its axis, spilling memes of shame,
mutation and death, tattooed on plasma walls.

Coronavirus latches onto a lowly cell, clamps down,
spews pellets of bubonic plague as fleas flee disaster.

1666. Eyam Village barricades its boundaries: No going in.
No going out. The population dies like convulsing rats,

bodies stacked high in the street: cords of firewood. No one dares
light the flame. Pestilence obeys the border's blockade, contained

behind thick, golden stones. Tiny cottages mutate to infirmaries.
Judgment seeps through window panes. Mercy aligns with death.

We build no blockades, boundaries shift in the wind. Virus obeys
no one's laws, vandalizes the body, sets fire to the human touch.

Eyam beams prettiness now. Neat, manicured lawns, well-swept streets,
no trace of plague save on the village entry sign. Tourists flock like fleas,

soaking up history's survival, sobering on its showcase of blight.
Who deserves to die from nature's aberrations? *Who goes in, who out?

Unamuno wrings his hands, frets over
the Tragic Sense of Life in which we
all die inevitably, inexorably, unwillingly.
And death is simply non-being to him,
and non-being looks a lot like pure
nothingness, which means we can't
even think "non-being" or "death"
when we're dead. It's all one, big,
fat zero. Add it to or subtract it from
itself, and it's still nada, the sum
of all fears. O the woe of being human.

I read him as a teenager in love with
philosophy, and thought him the most
profound thinker Europe had conjured up
in the 20th century. Continental philosophy
was the only philosophy for me, heavily
Germanic. Even Sartre was a closet
Heideggerian, teething on Sein und Zeit.
But Unamuno leapt over the Teutonic depths,
plunged into Dante's circle of death, scratched
out a mirror image of the human face. I took
it and ran, Kierkegaard stuffed in my back pocket.

Philosophy is eros is love is an incomplete connection.
Reality rises like a daffodil in the green grass
of spring. Wordsworth pens an ode; the rest of us
stare and blindly think we know what we see. But
the eye doesn't conceive, it doesn't relieve anything
save a surface tension. The eye can't speak, can't say
that the daffodil is real. Nobody sees reality in the
flesh. Nothing meshes with sensation but sensation.
That's the Latin way, the Mediterranean way, says
Jose Ortega y Gasset, another Spanish wizard of
wisdom, wishing for intellectual love, dancing at Delphi.

Philosophia. You can't see it, you can say it, but it's
all yearning, no release, no peace until the mind
settles on the bottom of the stream, feeds on
jetsam, maybe flotsam, then thinks "Being" and
gushes *******. This is Plato's territory, a long way
from Spain. But there's geometry in the bullring. There's
life and death and nada and sol y sombra in the stands.
Ideas don quixotic cloaks. Cervantes turns them into
literature, the Ur-story of Spain and its millions of minions.
The common man squirms for comedy. Tragic senses
squire hard work, and if life is so short, why not eat, dream

and be merry? Unamuno deserves his fate. Thinking
about death still adds up to nothing. Thought dies, too;
it's not accustomed to rue the end of infinity. It has no
affinity with hard limits. It rises, stays aloof, looks down
on the world, which has only one side visible, and pronounces
it good for nothing. But can't the thinker take a joke?
Incompletion competes with vast yearning like the tortoise
with the hare. No one gains on the other: Zeno's Paradox.
We might still ride Mediterranean Vespas, but the Greeks
kick-started this thing into motion. There's no reason

without Socrates, and he pronounced death a no-fear zone.
Unamuno forgot his Crito, Phaedo and Apology. Irony adds
up to something, not nothing. There's no surface irony here,
folks. This is Mycenean, not Mediterranean, Athenian not
Salamancian. Spain thinks it thinks new thoughts, taking
the bull by the ****** ear that's left behind the horn. No mas.
Only philosophy thinks itself, eternally. It never dies, man, even
if the cosmos explodes to a pinhead, then vanishes like
a magic trick. What's tragic about necessity, certainty? They
rave on in that dark night of the soul. Nada means nada,
but "means" isn't nada. It's todo on the human topos.

So climb it like a mountain in Dante's Purgatorio. Fret
no more, amigo. You are on the top of the world; it's a tricky
move to the summit. Ascend on the wings of meaning,
then see what you think, not think what you see. That's something.
And Socrates proclaimed it enough. Hey, Plato made him say so.

Liquid diamonds adorn the sea,
silver sunbursts of brilliance shine
through the waves, living, heaving,
violent jewels of seaweed and paste.

The sky bares its midriff of pale blue
skin, unmarred like a newborn, a marble
dome of sweetness and smoothness,
restless to immerse the nascent dawn in light.

Under the fierce Aegean sun, we saunter
toward Pireas' port, bags packed, supplies
secure, farewells sobbed, to set sail for Spain,
like Odysseus on his makeshift barque.

The journey demands a lifetime of searching
signs, of casting far and wide to escape
the Sirens' enervating songs, anchoring
the helm in darkened caves the size of yurts.

On the hunt for El Greco, the Greek painter
holed up in Toledo, his home away from home,
his haven of elongated, diaphanous figures,
who rise to the clouds, linking heaven and earth.

We owe the Greeks the fat seeds of culture:
philosophy, theater, sculpture for all, democracy
for the fortunate few, women and slaves stuck
in the kitchen pouring libations for ancient sins.

Shades haunt the past, mounting arsenals of guilt
and accusation. The Greek splashes linseed oil on
canvas, erases his debt, dabs an eerie white in the eyes
of threadbare saints, who elevate to everlasting heights.

Lorca leans into the bullring's skybox,
freshly painted red and green
like blood and grass beneath the Iberian sun,
where poetry composts into compositions
fit for a toreador, whose tights hug his thin hips,
tempting the huffing beast to hook his groin.

Spain's family jewels bulge behind the tattered
red cape, the one tool of the trade that can't
**** the bull, only blindly enrage it to charge
for its pride, its race, for the red light of glory,
as royalty wave their embroidered handkerchiefs,
awaiting the bull's ****** ear, still warm and steamy,

after so many twirls around the packed-sand dance floor.
Each step kicks up a black faux pas, first lunge
along the fatalistic journey to mortality: a pale thigh gored,
an artery gushes. Gangrene seeps in, drenched
in brandy, which disinfects only the guzzler's gullet.
No antidote to sepsis, no darning of the tights.

The toreador dies to fight another day, his banderillos
still stuck in the **** of muscularity, his eyes darting
among the crowds for a sign of good fortune, good
hunting, as in the old days of machismo and torture
and blind lust for the blood of brutes who threatened
no one but the cowardly prince on horseback, wobbly

beneath the weight of his armor. His ardor as fabricated
as his divine right to rule over the beasts of the field,
over the beaten-down brows of his subjects, toothlessly
grinning at the hope of dining on sacrifice, something
the truly chosen people could do only on the pain of death.
Lorca mourns the dying fighter with the duende of

flamenco, the wild, passionate cry of suffering, the blackest
black of Spain, the urge to create and destroy, to undress
the poet's soul, as naked as a newborn, as powerful as
a raging bull, charging without thinking, divining the forces
of nature like a hurricane, an earthquake. To shout down
death is to immortalize art, as long as human history endures.