Tango

Tango

1. Spain (Barcelona, 1888)

World Fair. Parakeets & mummers sipping fire.
A few gilded million ramble the streets,
weaving through statuary: L'Arc repeats
some Triomf; Columbus points across the water;

seraphim flood a square. Life-sized statues stir
to watch a human tower climb itself: fifteen flights
of flesh. Here, the body stops. Then reverses its
spell in the air; the climbers turn younger

each tier – how they grow down! A whole parade
follows, each harlequin climbing on an older child
until time runs backwards below, dawn made
to set over Aragon's morose feudal wild.
An adulteress erupts from oil, tears rising, is unbound.
A coronation wanders off; its queen has been uncrowned.

2. Argentina (Catamarca Province, Sierra Ancasti, 2003)

Oro. A nation you wandered, jade queen
in your pocket. Eighteen thousand feet above
the Atlantic, & there was the vein – every lucid noon
you've ever seen, shot through bedrock in a cave –

but you had not phoned about the gold.
A hemisphere away, you talked chess & fossils: a giant
wave of backbone, tucked into summit, each strange joint
like Ancasti in its range, or a fold

in your accordion, which this week fell silent,
& has been lost, along with the bones you found
years ago, climbing on a moving mountain,

stumbling on placers of gold, & beyond the earth's end,
sky-cast, the earth's own shadow – Tío, Tío, now that you're gone,
who will play chess with the dead? I can pretend –

3. United States (Manhattan, The Equitable Building, 1914)

Playing chess with the dead across an island's
grid, the architects replace old skyscrapers. They fell
the first. Capture its square. Erect a forty-storied spell
in tiers of steel – the highest yet – in tropospheric end –

game rapture. Thirtieth floor: bound cranes bend
to their landings, tying ton to ton, a mile
tricked back into its skeleton. Men rivet miracle
from foot-wide I-beams, a killing wind

blasting up from the Hudson. Lunch is a tight
rope with no net, skyline spiking like a crown.
Each worker from his shadow is dizzily split

across a vertical board – rank & file, in place of wall.
Ten men eat on a wire. Look down:
ten more tiers of men climbing nothing at all.

4. Spain (San Sadurní, Human Towers, 2001)

The ten-year-old Rubio is climbing nothing
on this street. Not for family, fanfare,
his friend's hashish, or equally dubious, village honor.
& Disneyland, though promised, is all wrong.

The troupe from his village will have to get along
without him. They can pull another
climber from somewhere, make a smaller
tower, whatever. But he is passing

out on his side, nose tucked to knees, rinsed
in chills, sinking in old fear of the human
tower collapsing, fifty bodies hitting the square,

plunging with him through brilliance condensed
& streaking cliffs of color, somewhere close to the sun,
lying on the ground, falling from there –

5. Argentina (Buenos Aires, Eva Perón, 1945)

Don't lie about abandoned ground. I come from there.
This veranda's better. In its vista, stricken with rain,
we can see our valenciennes copied by thunder-
heads over the city. Buenos Aires! Clear

evenings, I watch lovers stiffen & linger in the park,
tonguing each other, fingering the dark –
some quicken at curfew without going in.
Sometimes I drive from this city,

through the pampas, or the south.
I memorize the never-never of this terrain: cerulean
rise, blizzarding ravine. Laws, dictated, must be obeyed.

I walk among my people, counting off mouths
beneath the gallows tree. They won't come for me.
I'm no sham. I am not afraid.

6. United States (Lady Day's Hollywood Earthquakes, 1945)

Unafraid    no sham in white satin    that day you almost died
smoking away your toothache beneath the palm tree
that came thrashing down just after Mac pushed you aside
& you    songbird    flew as the quake crashed the...