Betwixt, Between

      There's an interspace that exists between one experience and another, or one place and another.  You're between two spheres of reality.  I left Spain and am back in Atlanta, but not quite yet.  Decades ago the trip across the Atlantic was long enough so that adjustment to time and space took place over a week or so.  Now you wake up in one country and go to sleep in another.
      Hence, I'm reading a day old Vanguardia newspaper with my head still buzzing with the noise of an airplane engine.  In the days when I lived in Spain and made the trip in reverse, the intensity of the change and the jetlag was even worse.  That's when I discovered the novels of William Gibson (I have to read his latest).  What I was experiencing- a help conscious, half exhausted place was reflected perfectly in the virtual darkness of his novels. 
      In just a short time, my trip will be a memory, fading fast, so for these last hours I can cling to the languages, flashes of places and people I saw.  In the same way we are leaving behind another year that we can't cling to but can  remember with joy. 


Here's a poem from my first chapbook:

 

What I´ve Lost  

                          Leaving Europe                  

 

Paths lead

from town to

medieval town,

cathedral bones

stick out,

bells toll centuries.

The solemnity

of a saint´s day

procession,

We crowd to touch

the body of christ

while drums

pound out

God´s arrival. 

 

Ocean jet buzz

brings me across

to America,

empire of things,

following the white

highway line

into deep deep sleep.