CONCIERTO DE ARANJUEZ

One day, people will line up to say:
I’m sorry about your father, unable to say dying
& so it’ll sound like they lament his life,
their condolences for the being of him, my father
whom I knew very little about. Easy answer:
he loves Spanish guitar,
bife & berro from his Buenos Aires days,
—our father already bedridden,
toothless, down to 100 pounds.
Before this, I looked for him in the mornings
when his head was still clear
& we drank coffee on the porch, his chile plants unwatered,
leaves buckling into themselves. It seemed there wasn’t much
he wanted me to know about him.

Tonight, at the Aranjuez concert a young guitarist
plays the quiet regret of the adagio, his foot propped up on a little cot,
& his fingers curl around the neck of the guitar
& he plucks out sounds that tear chunks from my chest,
the cellos sawing deeper, the musicians holding their violins
like infants after a feeding.
I squeeze my husband’s shoulder, this music also
playing through his own father’s cancer.
The lives of these men &, in the mirror of us, their love rendered imprecise.
How memory sings in those empty spaces.

Earlier today we got news
my uncle died, my father’s one friend at the end of the game.
The call came in as we walked through a garden of daffodils
& I quoted Wordsworth’s lonely as a cloud
to my son, who then asked how a body becomes ashes.
We are both the living & the dead. How much
in the world & in our lives we have yet to notice. We kept walking
to the narcissus beds, & I told him
about a man who leaned over a pool
& could not tear himself away from his blooming,
or lose his reflection and disappear.
And yet, there are men who know how to humbly endure small deaths.

At the concert, the young guitarist makes a big show
between each movement; he gets up, bows
& exits stage left, but from my angle I can still see him
listening to the roar of the audience & each time—
three times—he repeats the same drama.
We all want him to return.
Even my son is transfixed, leaning over the balcony to see
the guitarist moving his fingers, but by the third time
I am tired of his grand exit & re-entry—how he salutes
the rest of the symphony & shakes hands
with the first-chair violin, then returns to his leather bench,
cradles the guitar, & props his foot on the little sling.
I am ready
to never see him again & just live in the quiet
of the music that fills the room.
It is time
for the lights to come on, for the audience to file out
& for the hall to hold only silence.
What I know of my father, I’ve forgiven.

Audio Block

Double-click here to upload or link to a .mp3. Learn more

Alexandra Lytton Regalado’s second poetry collection, Relinquenda, winner of the National Poetry Series, is forthcoming from Beacon Press in October 2022. She is also the author of Matria, winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). Alexandra is a CantoMundo fellow, winner of the Coniston Prize, and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets, Narrative, Gulf Coast, and Creative Nonfiction among others. Her translations of contemporary Salvadoran poetry will soon appear in Poetry International and FENCE. Co-founder of Kalina press, Alexandra is author, editor, and/or translator of more than fifteen Central American-themed books. www.alexandralyttonregalado.com