Antonio Machado on a Bench Facing the Sea
                     in Collioure, 1939
When Don Antonio can hardly breathe,
he hobbles slowly to the crumbling sea in France
where now he is a refugee from Axis bombers
whose blasts make Spain seethe with death.
Machado is a memory poet. 1920. Segovia.
The honey-colored Roman aqueduct
snakes through this mountain town.
At one end the Alcazar castle guards the medieval city in the north.
Machado enjoys his gossipy tertulia in the stale casino,
sitting on a frayed horsehair couch with a few
local crony authors or his visiting brother Manolo.

His own pension room is too small to write in,
but his window looks onto a small monastery
where the bones of Saint John of the Cross are interred
in the mystic’s last dark night below the garden.
Machado composes poems in the freezing parlor,
a blanket on his lap, a cold brazier to warm his legs,
his cigarette ashes littering his shirt.
He writes draft after draft through the night.
By morning he is asleep, head lying on the table.

That was Segovia and now the civil war.
Lorca is executed in Granada in first days of the rebellion.
Machado barely escapes Franco’s blue troops
when frozen after sleepless days and nights he crosses
the snow border at Port Bou to exile in Collioure.
A month earlier Cambridge offered him a chair
but he preferred France where he studied with Henri Bergson
whose time theories undid and remade him too.

Almost a month goes by in this coastal village
where in 1909 Braque and Picasso invent cubism.
He recalls Sevilla and blue days of childhood sun.
He strolls a bit with friends. One morning he walks alone
unsteady to the shore. ‘I have time’, he says. I have time.’ 

Don Antonio is sitting on a bench facing the winter sea.
He leaves a thousand thoughts on the sand.
Then hobbles back, his chest on fire with disease,
to his Bougnol-Quintana room upstairs and his bed.
He changes to his one clean white shirt.
Madame Quintana the fine landlady attends him.
‘Bonne soirée, Monsieur.’ She readies him for supper,
a last supper. In his sleep Antonio murmurs,
‘‘¡Adios, madre, adiós, madre!’ And at three in
the afternoon, she covers him neatly on the bed.