There were warnings: he had, at forty, never <br />married; he was too close to his mother, <br />calling her by her given name, Manuela, <br />ah, Manuela — like a lover; even her face <br /> <br />had bled, even the walls, giving birth to him; <br />she still had saved all of his baby teeth <br />except the one he had yet to lose, a small <br />eyetooth embedded, stubborn in the gum. <br /> <br />I would eat an artichoke down to its heart, <br />then feed the heart to him. It was enough <br />that he was not you — and utterly foreign, <br />related to no one. So it was not love. <br /> <br />So it ended badly, but to some relief. <br />I was again alone in my bed, but not <br />invisible as I had been to you — <br />and I had learned that when I drank sherry <br /> <br />I was drinking a chalk-white landscape, a distant <br />poor soil; that such vines have to suffer; and that <br />champagne can be kept effervescent by putting <br />a knife in the open mouth of the bottle.<br /><br />Claudia Emerson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-spanish-lover/
