Equinox 2021
You came to us on the solstice,
With love songs to bring
In the fall. Now you come to us
In spring, when nights equal
Days, as if the sorrow
In the world were normal,
Metered out in months,
Parallel with its woe.
Although once we felt
That life was more delight
Than pain, that time was spelt
In hours, not celestial hands;
Now those joys are
Buried in the earth, in
The working of the lands,
And the way we set our clocks
Back is measured by our fears,
And only heightened by the locks
Of time’s enormous gears.
April 10th, 2021
Kaiholu
Explanation
This is a poem about all of us, but especially about Aurea, García Abril’s wife, and García Abril himself, lost to us in 2016 and 2021.
Our lives are snowballs, set in motion by a chance lunch or a chord, which take on their own identity without any further direction from us, threading through the future in our minds and dragging along with them violins, pianos, and a bottle of wine.
They are buried together in the music, in the sky, the sculpture, in the gears of the world. Back then it was the solstice; now it’s the vernal equinox. Our lives, as were Aurea’s and Antón’s, are wrapped in celestial clockwork. Our time lives in galactic constants, balanced, measured out by meters in the music, in the poems we read together the summer of 2016 when García came to Montana. His son Antón’s structures, designed with Débora Mesa, Antón’s wife, bring the constellations down to earth; our lives send them up again.