Don Paterson: ‘Guadarrama’ and ‘To Emiliano Barral’

Guadarrama

Is this you, Guadarrama, the old friend
I’d look for in the blue indifferent eye
of all those lonely evenings in Madrid?
Through your gorges, corries, ragged peaks,
a thousand suns, a thousand Guadarramas
are riding with me to the heart of you.

To Emiliano Barral

Plane by plane,
corner by corner,
your chisel struck upon me
holding my breath
in the frozen dawn
of this porphyry block,
or at least the man I now
want in my mirror:
the Spanish Buddha, in all
his idle grandeur!
The dumb, slaked mouth,
the ears set to the wall
of silence, and under
the bare slope of the brow,
eyes scooped from the rock –
from rock, that I might not see.

from The Eyes: a version of Antonio Machado (1999)

*

Some thoughts on the poems

*

Bust of Antonio Machado, Emiliano Barral, 1920, pink sandstone, 54 x 33 cm