New Year's Eve, in Hospital

You can hate the sea as it floods
the shingle, draws back, swims up
again; it goes on night and day
all your life, and when your life
is over it's still going. A young priest
sat by my bed and asked, did I know
what Cardinal Newman said
about the sea. This merry little chap
with his round pink hands entwined
told me I should change my life.
"I like my life," I said. "Holidays
are stressful in our line of work,"
he said. Within the week he was off
to Carmel to watch the sea come on
and on and on, as Newman wrote.
"I hate the sea," I said, and I did
at that moment, the way the waves
go on and on without a care.
In silence we watched the night
spread from the corners of the room.
"You should change your life,"
he repeated. I asked had he been
reading Rilke. The man in the next bed,
a retired landscaper from Chowchilla,
let out a great groan and rolled over
to face the blank wall. I felt bad
for the little priest: both of us
he called "my sons" were failing,
slipping gracelessly from our lives
to abandon him to face eternity
as it came on and on and on.

Alba

On bad springs bouncing and swaying down
the coast road south of the city to a spit
of land overlooking the sea, they trucked
the merchant princes and their courtiers
in their gunmetal suits and soured white shirts.
Portly, substantial men, manufacturers
of camshafts, holiday bunting, antacids,
dispensers of bifocals and mornings
of benzene mists, architects of newspapers and
cardboard communes stuttering up the slopes
of Montjuich. Prodded, they limped, shoeless,
over the rocky ground to where the land
stopped at last and the waves broke far below,
deafening the air, and waited, some hopeful,
smoking, some silent, some whispering, a few
kneeling alone, praying, while the militiamen
squatted facing them, their heads falling
in and out of sleep. The warm wind
—the one they call the Levante—that blew
in the first scraps of dawn from Africa
churned the waves below from black to cobalt.
All at once the men were herded
to the land's edge and shot dead. I'm told
on good authority there is a lesson here,
one I am in need of. For González Brilla,
twenty-five, the militia commandant,
his head wrapped in a red and black scarf,
the lesson was clear. Before the ragged volley
called in the day, he shouted it out,
but with the wind swirling, the waves breaking
and those about to die abusing their gods,
no one heard. (Within a year Brilla himself,
bound and gagged in a damp cellar
off Calle Montcado, was shot just once
above his unfurrowed nape, and left
no written record.) On the ride back
to Barcelona it is reported—and now in print—
he told the driver that the air of Spain
was clearer now, although both men stank
of cordite. Years later his comrade,
Ramón Puig, told the English historian
that the night before the executions—
while oiling his Astra 9mm
taken from the body of a Guardia officer—
Brilla had rehearsed his speech:
"You, the guilty, who are about to die,
to leave the stage of history, behold ...
behold ... something or other" was all
Puig could ever remember. The widow,
Mercedes Brilla Robles, swears he never spoke
that way in his whole life. White-haired, shrunk
to almost nothing, she lives on state welfare
plus foreign contributions in a village
south of Perpignan. Her Spanish
is ragged now, her Catalan and French
perfect as she speaks of her girlhood days
as an anarchist rebel, the urban communes,
the battle for the telephone exchange,
the government betrayals, the journey
of the defeated on foot across the mountains
in February of '39, the iron hunger
in the French camps, the terrible war
that followed, even her years as a hairdresser.
Unfortunately she can go on forever.
I know. When by accident I found Ramón Puig
three weeks ago in a ward of the tiny
public hospital in Santa Coloma
de Gramenet he remembered nothing,
not even the war, the people armed,
the glory days of '36, and what came after,
much less Brilla's words. Then by pure luck,
seventeen kilometers south of Castelldelfels,
this bright spring morning, we found the place
where the road—impossibly narrow and steep—
hugs the coastline as it twists and climbs
until a brief widening appears.
My wife and I stopped and parked the rental car.
Hand in hand we walked to the edge
of the continent. No gunfire echoed
from the past, or if it did, the sea
silenced it. To the south, Sitges
with its fake Irish pubs and swanky new hotels,
to the north Barcelona barely visible
in its familiar, rosy shroud, dead ahead
the ancient impossible sea moving
slowly toward us as it broods on itself.
Can we hear them now, the words of Brilla,
the elusive lesson worth all those lives?
Above the cries of seagulls, the message comes
translated into the language of water and wind,
decipherable, exact, unforgettable, the same
words we spoke before we spoke in words.

Two Voices

I heard a voice behind me in the street
calling my name. This was not years ago,
this was yesterday in Brooklyn, late spring
of the new year, the flowers—roses, tulips,
mock oranges, pansies—shouting their colors
along the promenade. I was on my way
to nothing, just ambling along, my head
altogether empty on a Saturday morning
in my seventy-third year. Not altogether empty,
for the flowers were in it, and the crowds
of kids in bright shirts and sweaters, young kids
with their parents in tow, and across the river
there was the city breaking through the haze
to call to the Heights, to belittle Brooklyn
as it always does. Then my name, "Philip,"
a huge voice, deep and resonant, unfamiliar
or if heard before heard on radio or TV,
too sonorous for daily life. So, of course,
I turned to behold more kids on Rollerblades,
kids on skateboards, kids on foot, no one
especially aware of me. Waiting, awake now
as I had not been, certain the morning meant
more than I'd come looking for. The crowds
passed, the sun grew stronger, the day passed
into afternoon and I gave up at last and turned
for home half-believing I'd missed something.
Let's say I phone you tonight and tell you
my little adventure which came to nothing.
What will you think? Not what will you say,
you'll say it was an illusion or you'll say
there was a deep need in me to hear
that particular voice, or sometimes the voices
of the air—all the separate voices in so
public a place—can unite for a moment
to produce "Philip" or "John" or "Robert"
or whatever we expect. I don't know
what you'll think, I've never known, even
when you and I were together, and I'd
waken in the false dawn to hear you
in the secret voice that was yours crying
out into the dark a name not mine.