After-Music

Variations on Antonio Machado’s “Caminante”

1 V a r i a T i o n s o n a n T o n i o M a C H a D o ’ s “ C a M i n a n T e ” Caminante, son tus huellas el camino, y nada más; caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. al andar se hace camino, y al volver la vista atrás se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar. Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la mar. Traveler, your footprints are the only path. There is no road except the one you make by walking. Your steps create the road, and looking back you see the path you’ll never walk again. 1 For you there is no road except a brief wake in the sea. q Catching a sheet of wind, the catamaran tilts, lifts, loses the shore. With the taut line in your fist, you lean back against a wave, following twelve snow geese as they scrawl a path across the sky. You’re their sea shadow— wake of air, wake of water, trailing and gone. q Cow knows her way back to the barn. Feeling her udder bulge, she humps up from the river mud and heads for her stall. The mole digs with hands in front of his head. The long hole is home. q The Little Manistee is shallow but fast, with a path of rocks where kids jump their way downstream. Two frogs hang their chins on the surface. Listen—the stichery song 1 of the yellowthroat. Memory intact, those birds have flown the old road, the air-trail up from the Yucatan. q Thief, you want to lose those dogs? Get your feet in the river. When your smell’s washed down over the rocks, you’ll be an innocent mist somewhere upstream. q on the menu, you point to Long Feng Pei. The Chinese waitress checks with the Chinese chef. no one has ever ordered Long Feng Pei. rinse your palette, lift vowels to the roof of your mouth, leave no footprints in the Long Feng Pei. q You’ve wandered through parking lots and airports, tunnels, fields of winter wheat and rape, wetlands, shifting breasts of sand. Finally, your hand-woven roads narrow to a cliff where every walker stands 1 to watch the midnight moon gather itself on the sea, breaking, coming whole, shattering again. q Caminante, you can’t go roadless. You’re following a woodchuck to a tangled leg of swamp, but look there where you’re heading: footprints, fireholes, broken shoes, a splash of afterbirth in the weeds. ...