Mary Jane Ryals: Poet Laureate

Wishes at Seven p.m. in Valencia, Spain

                        --for Donna, Laura, Lynne and Melanie

You asked me to bring you back nothing
from the Mediterranean coast, where everything
is heavy with history, even dirt, but I wanted
to bring you el color of evening after a day
of scorching summer wind throwing thorns
into everybody’s eyes, the way the past can fling,
blister and blind. How we carry it heavy as
dirt on our backs, in our bellies, scarred
in our hearts. I want to bring you the horse
of late afternoon as it bridles the wind to breeze.
The azul deepens, grows silver-headed here.
Evening rides in, wearing a gauzy blue top
cool as Arabian tiles, and just as wistful.
Even the statues, cast like shadows, could
be dirt at this hour, sprayed salty wet from
the turquoise of ocean and palm breeze. Everything
feels so forever—back and forth in time, this
coast knows 71 BC; it remembers the eighth century,
while we meanwhile blast through our years, 2000,
and 01, two, five, soon 2010, our own quick, dirty swirl
of oil on the streets, and someone is shooting
off fireworks now, always a party in the Spanish dark,
sky fire, stars against inky night. Here’s what I’ll bring
you back: the thought of dirt, longing among electrified
blues, lavanda crushed fragrant in my palm, El Greco’s
elongated figures like stretched shadows, a flamenco
wail; a distillation of that water colored indigo sky in
a silver-carved djenn bottle, fragrance of our hard
working essential oils over all these centuries. So you
can whiff this elixir of the not so forever world.