Poet of the Week: Federico García Lorca
When I first started this blog, I did a weekly feature called “Dead Men I’d Like To Have Married.”
Then I ran out of old movie stars that weren’t gay, and I stopped. Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t have married them anyway.
Federico García Lorca is definitely a dead man I’d like to have married. He was also most definitely gay.
Never thee mind, Federico, my ovaries are calling to you. Can you hear their feeble yearning?
Anyway, Federico was born in 1898 to wealthy landowners in Spain, where he lived for most of his life. During the age of Surrealism (and Dada and flappers and champagne), he made friends with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. Together, they formed “the Generation of ‘27”, a collective that sounds like it must have been pretty fun times.
During his life, he wrote, and he wrote well, and he also did some other things.
In 1936, at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, he was arrested in his country home in Granada. A few days later, he was executed, fire squad style, by soldiers loyal to Francisco Franco. This happened because he was a leftist, and because he was gay, and because, let’s be honest, lots of people die during war.
All biographical facts aside, Federico really knew how to write love poems for women.
And hence, I give you The Unfaithful Houswife, which in my mind’s eye, is accompanied perfectly by stills All the Pretty Horses (2000), the cinematic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel that broke in Penelope Cruz’s English.
The Unfaithful Housewife
For Mary Peace
Then I led her to the river
certain she was still a virgin
though she had a husband.
The fourth Friday in July,
as good as on a promise.
The street lights were vanishing
and the crickets flaring up.
Last bend out of town
I brushed her sleepy breasts.
They blossomed of a sudden
like the tips of hyacinths
and the starch of her petticoat
bustled in my ear like silk
slit by a dozen blades.
The pines, minus their halo
of silver, grew huger
and the horizon of dogs
howled a long way from the river.
Past the blackberry bushes,
the rushes and whitethorn,
beneath her thatch of hair,
I made a dip in the sand.
I took off my neckerchief.
She unstrapped her dress.
Me my gun and holster,
she her layers of slips…
Not tuberose, not shell,
has skin as half as smooth
nor does mirror glass
have half the shimmer.
Her hips flitted from me
like a pair of startled tench:
the one full of fire,
the other full of cold.
That night I might
as well have ridden
the pick of the roads
on a mother-of-pearl mare
without bridle or stirrups.
Gentleman that I am,
I won’t say back the scraps
she whispered to me.
It dawned out there
to leave my lip bitten.
Filthy with soil and kisses,
I led her from the river
and the spears of lilies
battled in the air.
I behaved only the way
a blackguard like me behaves.
I offered her a big creel
of hay-colored satins.
I had no wish to fall for her.
She has a husband after all,
though she was still a virgin
when I led her to the river.
Now that I’ve read this a few times, I realize that it has to be a satire. Federico García Lorca, stop mocking me!
