"Ancient lake bottoms exposed in half-light.
The dash scratches a static, a flash of no snow
until nightfall.
Then news spotty as this light, fog caught, vague,
something about a satellite, incredible frictions.
And then you find love on the A.M. West Desert twilight,
but we're back in B.A. two elevator flights up then
a Victrola sobs a tango, cóctel y amor.
It is the first tango you sang to us at night.
Y todo a media luz / Que es un brujo el amor.
On the airwaves, long waves, racing in the atmosphere,
each basin and range.
The music is out there, though unheard.
Here song is different with air, so the air itself must change.
A medio luz los besos / A media luz los dos.
The air is a caress, a piropo is a stare.
Ignore it, still it has its way with you."
[HELLICOPTER]
Let me start that sentence again.
"The boys with flair always addressed to you.
I'll trade your daughter for my father.
I pledge, he's adept in love, and in decent shape.
A gigolo makes love with his eyes,
his words, shimmering the dim air that parts us until it
is itself a man going away, and circling around,
advancing a tango of transparency, a spiral stair.
Dancing imagined tango in crepúsculo interior,
and all this through the air.
Over seven lanes of traffic, tango
spilling from each corner, from each car, including
this one now, but seems light years away from B.A.
And here, tango flickers through the desert,
on the dash, in tango hay de todo, that city, these sands,
this snowless February first, high and dry,
and the snow that's been promised,
even the abrupt dead air seems a mere res.
Part of a song half in love with easeful death,
La Cumparsita, most beloved of all tangos,
makes of death a kind of love, a masked parade of misery,
a tango, a song.
How else to survive in Buenos Aires?
Sudden buzzing, dead air, crackling, winter snow,
warning for the entire state, freeze.
You shove the dial off, put your sunglasses in the glove box,
blink furiously in what's left of the light.
Rearview mirrors patch ovals of western light
in the black east, where they pool, lake-caught light burning
water between salts.
What little love I first had for this place,
some part of the love that left you sick for home.
Recordando el pasado que lo hace sufrir.
Memory, like snow, is a scattering of light,
dolor made crystal.
Snow itself the afterglow of a thing above it,
a thing risen, stilled a minute, then growing as it disperses,
falls.
The family scattered through Spain, Argentina, the States,
this desert, its quiet after the tango is over.
And home always a hemisphere away, though
in the same mountain range, the same rain
shadow as her childhood summers sped from Buenos Aires
to join your father, for a while to disappear,
in Miraflores, where we passed each new year in air not
unlike this, near Salt Lake, but there, no snow ever.
Here this winter is merely late, a full month
past the first of the year, half-light of spring well
on its way, bidden in the air, changed
and changing between flakes.
El amor es un brujo.
You were 19 on this shore, tango-mad, but bewitched
by a blizzard, your first snow."