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By Root 397 0

we would walk through El Retiro at dusk. I imagined people visiting from the U.S., imagined their amazement and envy at the life I had made for myself. How long would I stay beyond the fellowship, I wondered. Maybe another year; I would make myself really learn Spanish, which seemed dimly possible now, and I would also begin to translate Teresa’s poems into English. I would publish a book of poems and then a book of translations and I would come home, perhaps with Teresa, as a celebrated author imbued with Iberian mystery. Or would I never go home, except to visit? I finished my drink and went to the bar for another and there was the man who had argued with Abel after my reading, the man who believed the disjunction of my poetry was a radical political gesture.

He recognized me, but he misremembered our conversation. “Do you still believe that poetry can change the world?” he asked me.

I paused. “It can exacerbate the world’s contradictions,” I said, mumbling the verb I didn’t really know.

“Well, it’s not poetry that makes things happen,” he said.

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” I said in English. He blinked at me. “What made all of this,” I said in Spanish, waving my hand to include the party in the events of the last few days, “happen?”

“Bodies in the streets,” he said. At first I thought he meant dead bodies; then I realized he meant the bodies of protestors. I tried to describe that confusion, the two ways one could understand his answer, but I garbled the Spanish and abandoned the thought.

I went back outside and sat in the same chair and drank my drink. Teresa was no longer in the pool and I looked around for her but couldn’t see her. When my drink was finished I fixed another, this time at the little outside bar, and then I walked beyond the pool toward the softly lit garden where I had once heard Rafa sing. When I encountered Teresa sitting on the stone bench kissing Carlos, my jealousy and rage felt like solid things, things formed over many years, so it seemed like they preceded their cause, were detached from the scene. It was a while before I noticed two of the other swimmers nearby, maybe five feet from the bench, faint glow of white towels, sharing a joint. I sat down beside them and one of them passed me the joint, saying something like, “Here is the poet.” Teresa had stopped kissing or letting herself be kissed by the man who I now saw was not Carlos, was another handsome man I didn’t know; she had noticed me, entirely without concern. I considered getting up and storming off to the edge of the property overlooking the hill where I had told Teresa my mother was dead. I imagined striking the man, who was walking back to the party now, repeatedly in the face. The joint was before me again and the woman who passed it began to speak to me and either because I was high or upset I couldn’t understand her Spanish, but that’s not really right. Her Spanish, like Teresa’s poem, became a repository for whatever meaning I assigned it, and I felt I understood, although I knew I was talking to myself. It was as if she said: Think about the necklace. Think about the making of the necklace. About Isabel’s brother’s notebook. I could hear what she was actually saying beneath this and I heard myself respond but all of that was very distant. It was as if she said: Imagine her brother writing. Think of the little scrap of paper Teresa tore from her novel and put into your notebook. Think of the hash transported inside one body as a solid and expelled and sold and then drawn into your body as vapor and gas. Think of the bombers purchasing the backpacks. Always think of the objects. Think of the necklaces and novels and bodies torn apart by the blast. Think of the making of the necklaces and the novels and the bodies and Isabel’s brother in the crushed red car. But then think of a poster of Michael Jordan on the wall of Isabel’s brother’s room while he wrote the years down in the notebook. Where is that poster now. And think of the field opposite the telephone pole her brother wrapped the car around. How you can turn your