CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY
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The Music of Death & Heaven—Thousands of Miles from Spain
Jon Veinberg, 1947-2017
September, a light wind
fingers pepper trees and scrub oaks, takes me back
to grammar school,
responses sung out by rote, one abstraction after
another weighing down
our shoulders, our inarticulate fears—Death and Heaven
the most persistent,
most distant of them, as far off in those black & white days
as New York and
Yankee Stadium, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon
and scented precincts
of Mesopotamia in our Bible History books . . .
3:00, and time to run out
of the room to the fields . . . to listen to the rose leaves scuttle
across the patio, the dry
melody in lime and lemon trees . . . and I’m thinking of
café con leche, a snifter
of Carlos Primero that winter in Menorca where I’m again
walking along picking up
small twigs of light in the road, on our way to Bar Espana
or Cala Corb as
if I could take them to my heart again as easily as blood,
as sun brazing the beatific coast,
as if the days could rise re-ground in the celestial gears
and float across the hills
with Rodrigo’s Concierto De Aranjuez echoing undertones
of a life of fountains,
magnolias, the first mantilla of stars appearing over a lost
garden, an adagio of clouds
with scherzos of evening light spiking through the grey.
It takes little now
to see you compadre, sitting at that table in Es Castell by
the little post office where
the mail never arrived, with a cigarette, a glass of hierbas,
the peace of afternoon between us,
or in the wicker chair beneath your wisteria arbor in Fresno,
the ambered light falling
in your lap, on an eastern European novel, your glasses slipping
down as you drift a moment
around the rings of Saturn, having escaped the dithering
cacophony of our lives. . .