Soleá: from Lyon to Angers

Phoenix in front, dragon on your back; both soared in that dance of solitude.

A wingtip shattered the moon that night: shards illumed your dance of solitude.

Onyx, obsidia’n glacier for muscle, bone and blood: in which chasm

was he forged? Whose the arms that raised him, this necromancer of solitude?

Delhi, Detroit, Forbach, Sydney? No, by a sleeted airstrip in Annecy,

on an aquamarine noon was first blood drawn by the lance of solitude.

Look carefully and you can spy them everywhere: in bedrooms, on beaches

and battlefields. The time has come to globalise the brands of Solitude!

There were so many roads from Lyon to Angers—highways, bylanes, and some

seasonal tracks through dreams—but none detoured the greygreen strands of solitude.

Chiselled with the heartbeat of her dancers are Sevilla’s streets, her heavens

arched by a spine; days spiralling back to flamenco’s trance of solitude.

Another age, another sphere. In Gent, Tomorrow flared in high-octane

whirls: half-faun, half-unicorn, tethered by a ruthless glance of solitude.

Across latitudes and almanacs they have prospered—poets, peddlers, priests,

palmists, songsters, also publishers—on the high finance of solitude.

We might have met under Dhaka skies, beside a marché in Nantes, Marseille?

But the EU in Brussels had blueprinted our romance of solitude.

Shrek it was, at the Cigale, that spilt amber from laughing eyes on the path

of raven seekers: their alloyed gaze dashed the happenstance of solitude.

Once more morning, once more Montréal: the words were calligraphed, then branded

on memory’s skin, “There will be no stemming the advance of solitude.”

Daughter of the Pleiades, born nomad, whom fate leads far from hearth and kin:

stellar forces play sentinel as you embrace a France of solitude.