“Invisible Afghan with the Apparition on the Beach of the Face of Garcia Lorca in the Form of a Fruit Dish with Three Figs” (Dali, 1938)
POETRY
by Paul Dickey
We have been up all night,
out in the coldest rain in Spain.
When they came for him,
he was being himself,
calm, his mind and voice
sexual, juicy, a pear.
A minute ago he was here.
I was offering him a fig.
Maybe he has only disappeared.
He is out walking the beach?
Collecting ourselves,
we have formed a party.
We have aimed flashlights
deep into the rocks and trees.
We have driven our trucks slowly
through the neighborhood
and dangerous parts of town.
The women’s faces hang
from the windows, calling
first in the soft voices we love,
and then louder ones
that have never known love.
We ask directions of strangers
who may have motives to lie.
We are minutes away
from giving up forever.
We have looked everywhere,
and have not found Lorca.
Paul Dickey is the author of two full-length collections of poetry. They Say This Is How Death Came Into the World was published by Mayapple Press in 2011, and Wires Over the Homeplace was published by Pinyon Publishing in 2013. In 2015, Dickey won the Master Poet award from the Nebraska Arts Council. His poetry and flash fiction have appeared in Verse Daily, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Southern Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Pleiades, 32Poems, Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, and other online and print publications.
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