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Fiesta de San Fermin
by E. Doyle-Gillespie

Reitberg whistle stop.
Deadlines gone to the back of my head
in a cold German rain.
Cross and uncross my legs.
Eat a peach from my backpack.
Look at my watch and tend to
the journal of my trip to Pamplona.
Wine label.
Two weeks' rants in runny red pen.
Cafe napkins.
Black and white photos of us.
Chuck-- head bandaged like 1776.
Me.
Maria and Chloe in their brilliant Gypsy scarves,
red scarves,
now drained gray by tri-x pan and pasted
into a hard-backed book of blank pages.
For the first time, I see that Maria's poet shirt is open
against her breasts.
Two buttons.
It hangs loose around her shoulders.
She has slipped off one shoe.
Her eyes are narrow and
she looks straight into my lens.
The train jolts angry on twisted trestles and I
see a farmhouse skeleton blur by in a sheet of swirling gray.
I conjure fresh-faced German virgins in steel helmets crossing its fields,
Americans walking in their wake with jazz, napalm and Palooka Joe.
Kilroy was here.
The young Serbian woman next to me drinks cold coffee from Styrofoam
and hums loud Dylan and Baez as if
she wants my flat Midwestern drone to chime in.
She smells of Turkish smoke and two days ride in this carriage.
She pulls coarse hair to one side,
reads over my shoulder and
tries not to smile as I dig into the backpack,
find the Minolta,
and frame her in black and white.




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Document last modified on: 08/20/1998

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