Black and white hunter in the tailored greens of Parque Retiro, my magpie, like you I mimic, thieve and borrow from your ditty:

I shed one for sorrow, the lost years, the last years, the Moore’s last sigh, the sob of the Zarzuela, Lorca.

Then two for joy, paso doble, Flamenco, la movida madrileña after Franco, Almadovar, tapas at eight.

Three for a girl, all those Madonnas, dueñas, meninas, Penelope Cruz, black lace and a fan.

Four for the boys, their windmills, Conquistadores, Antonia Banderas back in the day, los matadores.

Five for silver, six for gold, root of all evil, betrayal’s reward, plundered and pirated on the Spanish Main. It anchors the altars of Toledo, burnishes the armor of the Duke of Alba. Its bonuses are squandered on SUV’s shopping Corte Ingles in Salamanca.

Seven the secret never to be told  —

Eight for a wish, as Isabella wished Columbus Godspeed, and Montezuma volcanoes over Cortes’ head.  My wish as old as conquest, a nugget I’ve hoarded, never to share, until now…

Nine for a kiss from the one whom I missed – White slacks, black eyes, bare shoulders strumming his guitar by the glass palace, musical magpie of Parque Retiro, long ago. He chooses his song over my glances, my camera, the photo I covet every year as I regret the chance I did not dare, the hand I did not seek, the kiss I never tried before catching the night train to Barcelona in flight from our might-have-beens: a life in las calles of Chueca, the dancing, the drama, then retiring to a farm in Andalusia with dogs and olives and your body descending from the gods towards the grave, ever electric, yet still strumming, my magpie, in the golden October sun. You stole my heart and only gave part of it back.

Ten for the bird you must not miss.

Bruce E. Whitacre, “The Elk in the Glade,” Publishers Weekly Editors Pick, 2nd Place at TheBookFest 23, finalist for the American BookFest 2023 Best Book Award. Good Housekeeping in 2024 from Poets Wear Prada. Publications: The American Journal of Poetry, World Literature Today and more. Anthologies include I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention). http://www.brucewhitacre