The plane ratchets a twinge in my intestines.
I’m reading during takeoff. Why trust the sympathetic?
Lorca demands sympathy precede lyric expression.
In the same lecture, he says Jews own the blacks.
So there’s that. Still, people forgive an anti-fascist
with a vision of humanity as a loud meal,
various and full, a table wobbling from gossip.
He changes little in 80 years: animistic zeal,
open categories, speech of mismatched
knives wrinkling the drawer—it all survives the road
where he was shot, his gaping head pillowed
in blood and black curls, the future italics of duende.
Below me, Houston falls into swampy January.
White hair is torn across the wing. The difficulty,
the lyric, is choosing where to distinguish sympathy.