We meet in April, white April, in spring
in the old bookstore. Luminous in hell.
¡Qué buen caballero! He wears a ring
of gold and poppy red for his Miguel
Hernández and Lorca killed in Franco’s realm
of blue religion. No smile like his lips

invented for the Feria. In his book,
Sombra del Paradiso, fish move ships
of evening foam like bubbles in a brook
holding up mountains on their open eyes
that see even asleep as they float down
to breed in freedom. Vicente wrote on

the fly leaf, En el primer día de amistad,
‘On the first day of friendship.’ So I come
each year for three decades. The Nobel prize
caused his street name to change from Calle
Velentonia to Calle de Vicente Aleixandre.
Vicente was luminously one. He
suffers from an herpetic eye. It cannot see,
is always in pain and so he writes no more.
‘Vicente, don’t you dream up poems?’ ‘Of course,
but when I wake I don’t remember.’ ‘Then
write a volume called, ‘Unremembered Poems.’
‘Did you’, next year my first words. ‘I tried, but no.’

He was the last person to speak to Federico
in Madrid—before he boarded the fatal train
to Granada where he was arrested and shot.
He gave Miguel a birthday watch, his first,
but Hernández jumped in a pond. Gone its tick.
This childhood goatherd dispersed new light

of Golden Age verse in his surreal sonnets.
I see Miguel in prison, dying of TB.
I see Vicente mornings and in his night.
One afternoon in Fascist Spain I drove
my motorcycle from ourfinca south of
Granada to our bookshop rendezvous

in Sevilla. In our Phoenician village on
the Moor and Roman coast, Guardias paraded
los rojos, the reds, they caught in the hills,
strapped dead on mules down la calle. Lessons.
Guns kill but don’t erase the Spanish poets.
Vicente and all those golden birds glow.