by Charlie Baylis

¿Dónde está, … dónde está tu niña amarga?

– Federico Garcia Lorca [Romance Somnámbulo]

Somewhere the soft wind slows, somewhere the soft wind stops
Where an old man sits under the light of the stars

And remembers the frogs singing of the apple births,
Or the virgins sequinning their backs with nettles

The copper bells are dreaming up her footsteps, still

Though the railings she caressed are not the green
Of flakes peeling away with the wane of the moon

If the sun tumbles from the tangles of his hair
To an open book of poetry, who will answer?

Who else has polished the trunk of the dying oak?
Who else has straightened the bodies of the seabed?
And kept a flame lit in the wax of her candle?

He is crying, the flesh of the watermelon
Tastes no sweeter than the blood of an extinct rose
That pours through the love in her mother’s name

Now he sleeps on a couch of cold steel, where her arms
Are torn linen streaming from an opal staircase

And a black butterfly floats from the bannister
Offering its residue of petrol and flames

Under gravestones she is calling, she is dancing
The oleanders sprout wild through her eyes

When a thief taps the window of the old man’s dreams
And slits the throat of the dawn

---

Charlie Baylis lives and works in Nottingham. His poetry and short stories have most recently appeared in SAW magazine and The Delinquent. He spends most of his spare time slightly adrift of reality He blogs, sporadically, here: theimportanceofbeingaloof.tumblr.com.