Notes from the Camino de Santiago Compostela
Outside a bar in Santillana del Mar, I am drinking café con leche where
the bella donnas & bleeding hearts decant the eye with the same pitch
as your arms swelling Alberta. The Torture Museum only charges 3.50 Euro
to cruise iron maidens, punishing shoes. There’s rumor of human femurs
fashioned as ritual trumpets across the street & these cobblestones throb
with the eternal question: “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” (Clash fan?)
Pot-bellied pigs punctuate our days & sifra by starlight. Hawks & wind &
the rocking lemons of Cantabria! Weeks of foot after foot. We eat fish & mushrooms
at noon beneath cowbells & dowsing rods—a bit like sitting below your own divine
guide. You might wonder: Where’s that phial of Mary’s milk, the foreskin of Jesus,
splinters from Calvary? They elude me. I pick field flowers for you & Cooley
in Cigüenza on a day lost to construction: Bright tape & gravel, the blah blah blah
of hard hats obscuring this ancient way. Each morning, the cliffs of Finisterra
prepare themselves in blue. This costa del morte, this end of the world. We will burn
rough bread, an emery board; we will drink an earthy red to what will be.
by Lea Graham
from Four Poems From the End of the World
@ The Typescript