An Account of a Life in One Room in One Moment
Inspired by Juan Ramirez de Lucas, Lorca’s last lover
David Schmidt
I live in a room that is crumbling away
and I try to remember his last poem hidden
somewhere in the walls as a layer of paint
bubbles up and peels off, revealing the love-bitten
wounds blistering below, telescoping me back in
time, not sure if it is the room or my memory that
is collapsing in on itself, suffocating me like a coffin
and I scream poems of dark love to no-one.
I live in a room where the rats come out in the dark
through holes in the floor and eat the bread I leave
for them on the bookshelves because they have finished
off the volumes of verse that once fed them and I have
papered over the darkness of the walls with newsprint
to ease the years and a simple table sits in the centre
under a hanging light, an Underwood typewriter on it,
that I use to tap out articles on architecture for
cultural magazines that all start with a room because
a room is always changing with so many shifting
stories concertinaed into it, even as the building
that contains the room remains the same.
I live in a room with the walls black after the fire
with the sky of night above me, the moon waned
to a sliver and on one wall I have etched in the
charcoaled paint with my finger his words
only mystery makes us live, only mystery that somehow
express my grief for I cannot explain what drove me
to rampage across the Russian steppe or why
bleeding out gladly in the snow with everything
burning down around me I found my way back.
I live in a room where I can still find small traces
of him, a strand of his long black hair in the dust
under the bed or a clipping of a fingernail caught
between carpet and wall and I have painted the walls
blood red to represent my family’s shame in me
and mine in them and his blood was spilled in an
olive grove, I leave one small corner unpainted where
he had written in tiny letters even I was not supposed
to find Ay, the pain it costs me to love you as I love you!
I live in a room where he paints wild horses galloping
across the Andalusian plain on one wall, spring blossoms
against blue sky, the free air of Harlem, on another
day of the dead processions from Mexico, land of
our dreams and in the middle of the fourth wall is a
teak door from the Amazon carved with fertility icons
and my father bolts it from the outside so I cannot escape
with him to Acapulco even as we hear the banging hammers
of the steel being sharpened in the Granada armoury.
I live in a room of painted scenes from Shakespeare plays
and Spanish operas, I was born to be a performer, beautiful
and desired as a boy, ready to take the world, I draw a straight
black line tight around the room and tell my mother it signifies
my fealty to art and I lie on my bed looking up at the full moon
on hot nights with water pouring over me for the line is
the tightrope I am walking and it is there that he found me.
I live in a room in a cot with white walls under an embroidered
boy-blue blanket full of the smell of eucalyptus oil that my nanny
rubs into my chest and my father is making cooing sounds and
I look up at him, he looks like Federico until I see the brush-metal
moustache, I can hear the fountain, I understand perfectly as my
mother’s smile comes into focus and then everything is light.
Featured at the Red Wheelbarrow on 24 February 2022