2 extracts from The City of Flowers by Milner Place
with images by David Pitt
The street is quiet and dignified.
There is a woman standing on a doorstep.
When she turns her head, I’ll step
into her future for a short distance of time.She is wearing a black dress
and stands very still.
The doorstep has been newly swept;
what lies beyond the threshold
is what lies beyond the threshold.No doubt she is as young as she feels.
Time may tell.
It has been a long road up here to Cordoba.
Who knows the start of it? Perhaps
when my father was sawing wood he looked
to a face in a window, or entered
cold sheets on a Spring night. Maybe
it was the trip out of the womb
on a January morning. Whatever,
it’s been a long haul and I’m thirsty
and hungry and the dark woman,
who I now remember has very small hands,
is unlikely to be disturbed by me
or anyone I know.There is a bar at the corner.
It advertises food and drink and rooms.
I’m ready for all of them.This may or may not be history; or geography.
* * * * * *
In the fifth century AD the Vandals fell on the city from the hills to the North, but were moved on when the Visigoths came tumbling after and Leovigild ruled the roost in 572. These Goths were a fractious lot, addicted to civil wars and sundry mayhem.
The shouting and the tumult dies. Pepe
steps out from behind the bar, sweeps
up the broken glass and tufts of hair,
mops up spilled beer and desecrated wine.Pepe is lunar, his face moon-shaped,
eyes moonlets, and when he smiles
he opens his round mouth and lights up
the curious recesses of the bar.Juan re-enters, wearing a green shirt,
black trousers. One-fingered Maria
returns to play a machine called SPLASH.
Thin Evita takes up station again.A very elegant lady, towing a spaniel
and wearing a strict tweed outfit,
not young, the lady that is, crooks
her little finger in front of Juan’s flies.There is considerable badinage, crude
innuendos exchanged with elegance
and measured aplomb. The brown and white
spaniel has it off with the lady’s left leg.There is a drifting in and out of persons,
greetings and adioses and hasta luegos.
There is a slap of pesetas on the bar.
Pepe’s face gleams like a harvest moon.
The barrio of San Pedro is bounded to the
South by the Puerto de la Ribera and the Ronda de Los Martires; that is to say by
an almost constant stream of raging
drivers of trucks, buses, mopeds, cars, etc,
etc, and occasional and sedate horse-
drawn diligences with their freight of
incongruous strangers.Beyond the road the steep parapetted walls
fall to the river. Beyond the river more
walls, more town. Beyond the more town
the chequered fields of vines and
olives, the bodegas of Montilla, the gorges
of El Chorro, the coast with its arrogance
of tourists, the sea, Africa, more sea, ice
and the southern PoleThe river slouches by between
great stone embankments, hung with figs
and bougainvillea, lined with silvery
alders, glistening sycamores, shaping
its colours to sky lights, its deeps
the swims of barbel and great carp.
Below steep steps down the wall
is moored a ship, a raft of planks,
triangular, a wooden arrowhead,
made buoyant by six plastic drums
under a carefully crafted deck.Its captain bearded, long haired
with that ancient face adopted
by the Christians for their boss,
shoeless and shirtless, wearing
ragged jeans, casts off
and poles it quietly down
the stream. He says that every
piece and part to make his raft
was brought by the river, all
except the nails.I call him Jesus Crusoe, hope
he has no further problems
with sharp spikes.Under its negligée of light
the river runs a sickly green,
mottled by empty bottles and condoms,
a breathless dog, a plastic doll,
fag packets and a bloated fish.
A terrapin emerges from the murk,
sucks in some air, then dives again.
Maybe it’s as Eduardo says, not
dirty but just not been cleaned.
