Song of Almería

By JOHN POCH

Our bus downshifts cresting a hill,
and a partridge covey flushes into
the lit mist of the autumn noon, clouds
spilling over higher hills slow and white
like soft glaciers cut by massive stones
the size of fortresses, and just as cold.

But here, a goatherd in a great orange sweater
appears like a camouflaged god and staggers
through a rain-soft field while his lithe goats
leap to yet another terrace, headed to the hills,
and he sings. A horizontal pillar of smoke
tries to engulf him in its trash fire haze,
and he might sing a tragic song of the sea
as he climbs away from the brilliant sea.
He makes believe the mountains lift him.
He goes to prepare a kingdom for me.

 

 

John Poch‘s most recent book is Dolls (Orchises Press 2009).  He teaches literature and creative writing at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.  His poems have appeared recently in Yale Review, Poetry, Agni, and Cincinnati Review, among other journals. 

[Click here to purchase your copy of Issue 08]

Song of Almería

Related Posts

Glass: Five Sonnets

MONIKA CASSEL
In ’87 I see guardsmen walk their AK-47s / on the platforms. The trains slow down but never stop. I think, / my mother was born in such a different Germany, but this is true for everyone / —so why can’t I stop looking?

cover of "Civilians"

On Civilians: Victoria Kelly Interviews Jehanne Dubrow

JEHANNE DUBROW
Now we live in North Texas, hours away from the nearest shore. And yet, the massive amounts of open space—all the prairie, marsh, and plains that we have here—started to feel like another kind of vast water, another great expanse of distance and isolation.

Lizard perched on a piece of wood.

Poems in Tutunakú and Spanish by Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez

CRUZ ALEJANDRA LUCAS JUÁREZ
Before learning to walk / and before I’d fallen upon the wet earth / already my heart hummed in three tones. / Even when my steps were still clumsy, / I already held three consciousnesses. // Long before my baptism, / already my three nahuals were running