In the Shadow of the Alhambra

I promised no more poems of that night at the Alhambra,
holding hands beneath the moon Lorca once adored,
for to dwell on love’s sleight of hand is to risk breaking
its spell. It was decades ago, in gentler times,
as the past is always more gentle, tender even, like a knot
in your back you can’t massage, so you lay on a baseball,
re-position until the seams touch your pain and you think
This is what we mean when we say it hurts so good.
Yet here I go again, re-winding the tape to see how
Copperfield made Lady Liberty disappear: each time
I learn the truth, I become young and naïve again,
disappointed to lose what was never mine to begin with.
Once, we sat outside La Estacíon de Granada from dawn
to dusk, passing notes, drawings, glances, watching trains
come and go and believing we alone could remain there forever,
the fair youth of Keats’ Grecian Urn, our bodies like two embers
falling, falling. That night I could not sleep, I stood
on the balcony of my Andalusian apartment certain this was
the end of time, and perhaps it was: trains led me away,
my cheeks wet with her tears of goodbye, oceans separated
me from myself, and somehow there I’ve remained, on a bench
in the shadow of the Alhambra, chewing on bread and honey.