O the savage munching of the long dark train
crunching up the miles
crunching up the long slopes and the hills
that crouch and sprawl through the night
like animals asleep,
gulping the winking towns
and the shadow-brimmed valleys
where lone trees twist their thorny arms.

The smoke flares red and yellow;
the smoke curls like a long dragon's tongue
over the broken lands.

The train with teeth flashing
gnaws through the piecrust of hills and plains
greedy of horizons.

Alcazar de San Juan

I invite all the gods to dine
on the hard benches of my third class coach
that joggles over brown uplands
dragged at the end of a rattling train.

I invite all the gods to dine,
great gods and small gods, gods of air
and earth and sea, and of the grey land
where among ghostly rubbish heaps and cast-out things
linger the strengthless dead.

I invite all the gods to dine,
Jehovah and Crepitus and Sebek,
the slimy crocodile ... But no;
wait ... I revoke the invitation.

For I have seen you, crowding gods,
hungry gods. You have a drab official look.
You have your pockets full of bills,
claims for indemnity, for incense unsniffed
since men first jumped up in their sleep
and drove you out of doors.

Let me instead, O djinn that sows the stars
and tunes the strings of the violin,
have fifty lyric poets,
not pale parson folk, occasional sonneteers,
but sturdy fellows who ride dolphins,
who need no wine to make them drunk,
who do not fear to meet red death at the meanads' hands
or to have their heads at last
float vine-crowned on the Thracian sea.

Anacreon, a partridge-wing?
A sip of wine, Simonides?
Algy has gobbled all the pastry
and left none for the Elizabethans
who come arm in arm, singing bawdy songs,
smelling of sack, from the Mermaid. Ronsard,
will you eat nothing, only sniff roses?
Those Anthologists have husky appetites!
There's nothing left but a green banana
unless that galleon comes from Venily
with Hillyer breakfasts wrapped in sonnet-paper.

But they've all brought gods with them!
Avaunt! Take them away, O djinn
that paints the clouds and brings in the night
in the rumble and clatter of the train
cadences out of the past ... Did you not see
how each saved a bit out of the banquet
to take home and burn in quiet to his god?

Madrid, Caceres, Portugal

Three little harlots
with artificial roses in their hair
each at a window of a third-class coach
on the train from Zafra to the fair.

Too much powder and too much paint
shining black hair.
One sings to the clatter of wheels
a swaying unending song
that trails across the crimson slopes
and the blue ranks of olives
and the green ranks of vines.
Three little harlots
on the train from Zafra to the fair.

The plowman drops the traces
on the shambling oxen's backs
turns his head and stares
wistfully after the train.

The mule-boy stops his mules
shows his white teeth and shouts
a word, then urges dejectedly
the mules to the road again.

The stout farmer on his horse
straightens his broad felt hat,
makes the horse leap, and waves
grandiosely after the train.

Is it that the queen Astarte
strides across the fallow lands
to fertilize the swelling grapes
amid shrieking of her corybants?

Too much powder and too much paint
shining black hair.
Three little harlots
on the train from Zafra to the fair.

Sevilla——Merida

My desires have gone a-hunting,
circle through the fields and sniff along the hedges,
hounds that have lost the scent.

Outside, behind the white swirling patterns of coalsmoke,
hunched fruit-trees slide by
slowly pirouetting,
and poplars and aspens on tiptoe
peer over each other's shoulders
at the long black rattling train;
colts sniff and fling their heels in air
across the dusty meadows,
and the sun now and then
looks with vague interest through the clouds
at the blonde harvest mottled with poppies,
and the Joseph's cloak of fields, neatly sewn together with hedges,
that hides the grisly skeleton
of the elemental earth.

My mad desires
circle through the fields and sniff along the hedges,
hounds that have lost the scent.

Misto

The street is full of drums
and shuffle of slow moving feet.
Above the roofs in the shaking towers
the bells yawn.

The street is full of drums
and shuffle of slow moving feet.
The flanks of the houses glow
with the warm glow of candles,
and above the upturned faces,
crowned, robed in a cone-shaped robe
of vast dark folds glittering with gold,
swaying on the necks of men, swaying
with the strong throb of drums,
haltingly she advances.

What manner of woman are you,
borne in triumph on the necks of men,
you who look bitterly
at the dead man on your knees,
while your foot in an embroidered slipper
tramples the new moon?

Haltingly she advances,
swaying above the upturned faces
and the shuffling feet.

In the dark unthought-of years
men carried you thus
down streets where drums throbbed
and torches flared,
bore you triumphantly,
mourner and queen,
followed you with shuffling feet
and upturned faces.
You it was who sat
in the swirl of your robes
at the granary door,
and brought the orange maize
black with mildew
or fat with milk, to the harvest:
and made the ewes
to swell with twin lambs,
or bleating, to sicken among the nibbling flock.
You wept the dead youth
laid lank and white in the empty hut,
sat scarring your cheeks with the dark-cowled women.
You brought the women safe
through the shrieks and the shuddering pain
of the birth of a child;
and, when the sprouting spring
poured fire in the blood of the young men,
and made the he-goats dance stiff-legged
in the sloping thyme-scented pastures,
you were the full-lipped wanton enchantress
who led on moonless nights,
when it was very dark in the high valleys,
the boys from the villages
to find the herd-girls among the munching sweet-breathed cattle
beside their fires of thyme-sticks,
on their soft beds of sweet-fern.

Many names have they called you,
Lady of laughing and weeping,
shuffling after you, borne
on the necks of men down town streets
with drums and red torches:
dolorous one, weeping the dead
youth of the year ever dying,
or full-breasted empress of summer,
Lady of the Corybants
and the headlong routs
that maddened with cymbals and shouting
the hot nights of amorous languor
when the gardens swooned under the scent
of jessamine and nard.
You were the slim-waisted Lady of Doves,
you were Ishtar and Ashtaroth,
for whom the Canaanite girls
gave up their earrings and anklets and their own slender bodies,
you were the dolorous Isis,
and Aphrodite.
It was you who on the Syrian shore
mourned the brown limbs of the boy Adonis.
You were the queen of the crescent moon,
the Lady of Ephesus,
giver of riches,
for whom the great temple
reeked with burning and spices.
And now in the late bitter years,
your head is bowed with bitterness;
across your knees lies the lank body
of the Crucified.

Rockets shriek and roar and burst
against the velvet sky;
the wind flutters the candle-flames
above the long white slanting candles.

Swaying above the upturned faces
to the strong throb of drums,
borne in triumph on the necks of men,
crowned, robed in a cone-shaped robe
of vast dark folds glittering with gold
haltingly, through the pulsing streets,
advances Mary, Virgin of Pain.

Granada

It would be fun, you said,
sitting two years ago at this same table,
at this same white marble cafÉ table,
if people only knew what fun it would be
to laugh the hatred out of soldiers' eyes ...

—If I drink beer with my enemy,
you said, and put your lips to the long glass,
and give him what he wants, if he wants it so hard
that he would kill me for it,
I rather think he'd give it back to me—
You laughed, and stretched your long legs out across the floor.

I wonder in what mood you died,
out there in that great muddy butcher-shop,
on that meaningless dicing-table of death.

Did you laugh aloud at the futility,
and drink death down in a long draught,
as you drank your beer two years ago
at this same white marble cafÉ table?
Or had the darkness drowned you?

CafÉ Oro del Rhin
Plaza de Santa Ana

Down the road
against the blue haze
that hangs before the great ribbed forms of the mountains
people come home from the fields;
they pass a moment in relief
against the amber frieze of the sunset
before turning the bend
towards the twinkling smoke-breathing village.

A boy in sandals with brown dusty legs
and brown cheeks where the flush of evening
has left its stain of wine.
A donkey with a jingling bell
and ears askew.
Old women with water jars
of red burnt earth.
Men bent double under burdens of faggots
that trail behind them the fragrance
of scorched uplands.
A child tugging at the end of a string
a much inflated sow.
A slender girl who presses to her breast
big bluefrilled cabbages.
And a shepherd in the clinging rags of his cloak
who walks with lithe unhurried stride
behind the crowded backs of his flock.

The road is empty
only the swaying tufts of oliveboughs
against the fading sky.

Down on the steep hillside
a man still follows the yoke
of lumbering oxen
plowing the heavy crimson-stained soil
while the chill silver mists
steal up about him.

I stand in the empty road
and feel in my arms and thighs
the strain of his body
as he leans far to one side
and wrenches the plow from the furrow,
feel my blood throb in time to his slow careful steps
as he follows the plow in the furrow.

Red earth
giver of all things
of the yellow grain and the oil
and the wine to all gods sacred
of the fragrant sticks that crackle in the hearth
and the crisp swaying grass
that swells to dripping the udders of the cows,
of the jessamine the girls stick in their hair
when they walk in twos and threes in the moonlight,
and of the pallid autumnal crocuses ...
are there no fields yet to plow?

Are there no fields yet to plow
where with sweat and straining of muscles
good things may be wrung from the earth
and brown limbs going home tired through the evening?

Lanjaron

O such a night for scaling garden walls;
to push the rose shoots silently aside
and pause a moment where the water falls
into the fountain, softly troubling the wide
bridge of stars tremblingly mirrored there
terror-pale and shaking as the real stars shake
in crystal fear lest the rustle of silence break
with a watchdog's barking.

O to scale the garden wall and fling
my life into the bowl of an adventure,
stake on the silver dice the past and future
forget the odds and lying in the garden sing
in time to the flutter of the waiting stars
madness of love for the slender ivory white
of her body hidden among dark silks where
is languidest the attar weighted air.

To drink in one strong jessamine scented draught
sadness of flesh, twining madness of the night.

O such a night for scaling garden walls;
yet I lie alone in my narrow bed
and stare at the blank walls, forever afraid,
of a watchdog's barking.

Granada

Rain-swelled the clouds of winter
drag themselves like purple swine across the plain.
On the trees the leaves hang dripping
fast dripping away all the warm glamour
all the ceremonial paint of gorgeous bountiful autumn.

The black wet boles are vacant and dead.
Among the trampled leaves already mud
rot the husks of the rich nuts. On the hills
the snow has frozen the last pale crocuses
and the winds have robbed the smell of the thyme.

Down the wet streets of the town
from doors where the light spills out orange
over the shining irregular cobbles
and dances in ripples on gurgling gutters;
sounds the zambomba.

In the room beside the slanting street
round the tray of glowing coals
in their stained blue clothes, dusty
with the dust of workshops and factories,
the men and boys sit quiet;
their large hands dangle idly
or rest open on their knees
and they talk in soft tired voices.
Crosslegged in a corner a child with brown hands
sounds the zambomba.

Outside down the purple street
stopping sometimes at a door, breathing deep
the heady wine of sunset, stride with clattering steps
those to whom the time will never come
of work-stiffened unrestless hands.

The rain-swelled clouds of winter roam
like a herd of swine over the town and the dark plain.

The wineshops full of shuffling and talk, tanned faces
bright eyes, moist lips moulding desires
blow breaths of strong wine in the faces of passers-by.

There are guards in the storehouse doors
where are gathered the rich fruits of autumn, the grain
the sweet figs and raisins; sullen blood tingling to madness
they stride by who have not reaped.
Sounds the zambomba.

Albaicin

The train throbs doggedly
over the gleaming rails
fleeing the light-green flanks of hills
dappled with alternate shadow of clouds,
fleeing the white froth of orchards,
of clusters of apples and cherries in flower,
fleeing the wide lush meadows,
wealthy with cowslips,
and the tramping horses and backward-strained bodies of plowmen,
fleeing the gleam of the sky in puddles and glittering waters
the train throbs doggedly
over the ceaseless rails
spurning the verdant grace
of April's dainty apparel;
so do my desires
spurn those things which are behind
in hunger of horizons.

Rapido: Valencia——Barcelona
1919——1920