you in my eyes
every morning
every night

a greeting
a pinch of your days
and nights

you are the
salt of my
being

as the sun rises and sets
and the moon
changes

you are my water
in the morning
my drink at night

rain
in the drought
of day

—David-Clark Knowlton

Image taken from the door of a gallery in Porto, Portugal whose name I do not know, but whose art I liked.

(https://allbirdspecies.com/american-robin-bird/ )

Strange question. What would it be like to see a robin
on a lawn in early spring pull at a thick worm?
When they arrive you know it is really spring.

I read there are robins here in Spain though they
are smaller and tend to hide in bushes.

After two years, mostly not missing American things,
I do not know how I would feel or react.
Magpies are here as they also are at home.
Seagulls also ply the skies and prospect

in parking lots and parks. Since I live near
the port I seldom see them though I hear
their cries every morning. My first year

I regularly saw house sparrows around cafes
competing with pigeons for crumbs and tidbits.
They seem to be gone. I find that sad.

A robin, though, its head erect and turning, scanning
for food and threats would give me joy.

An unusually fierce July held us in its claws,
humid and fiery, but memories of Spring
in the valleys of Utah are equally fierce.

They demand my attention and pull me
from the sweat that stains my shirt and splashes
from my face. Here I could not tell when

spring had finally and really arrived since winter
is warm and also wet. Wild flowers in vacant lots—

intense and large as if planted, patches of bright
amidst dirt and trash—let me know. They
did not grow and flower in winter.

Now I wonder when will the heat end, when
will the mercury drop back into comfortable.

When will I have to start to wear long pants,
shirts, and closed shoes? I do not know, but I

wish it would happen tonight and the days
would become so much more comfortable
with the nights almost cool while I
dream of robins and deep bluegrass lawns.

David-Clark Knowlton

I do not know when I began perusing obituaries from the Salt Lake Tribune, one of two traditional papers from that city by a dying lake.

Salt Lake is my home town, I suppose, even though I was not born there, nor spent much of my childhood there other than as a visitor. My parents took us on regular pilgrimages to that mountain and basin city where their parents and siblings, as well as extended families lived.

After puberty had its way with me, we moved there. I went to high school in Salt Lake and then with a musical scholarship I won, haunted the University of Utah’s campus while looking to leave.

I did, and to my surprise, PH.D. from Texas in hand and, while working at Washington University as a visiting professor, a job in Utah came looking. It and family pulled so I went back and with a few breaks spent decades there—until I moved to Spain.

By looking at obituaries, at least the summary the digital paper emails regularly, I could see the people who lived in Utah while I did, almost none of whom I knew. They provide a greater breadth for understanding my own life and experience there. Occasionally, I learn of the death of someone I did know.

My grandmother used to study the obituaries and I hope I live at least as long as she did—into her 80s. Unfortunately, she died in the summer of my first year back in Utah.

If you wish to know about the controversies I was part of during my first four years there, you can read Bryan Waterman and Brian Kagels’ book and you can read my essay “Once Upon July”. Both are referenced below.

I was extraordinarily lucky to find, after that explosion and after a brief interlude ar Colorado College and then other work, a new tenure-track job at what became Utah Valley University from which I retired twenty two years later.

Despite my rather heavy duty academics, I became more and more engaged with poetry. I found out that, though conceived in solitude, poetry is not about the writing alone. It is also a set of communities to which you belong and among which you share your work and their’s.

An obituary, of all things, brought this home to me yesterday. I did not find it in the paper, but in my email from a poetry friend.

It announced the passing of Gay Blanchard, 100 yrs old.

She was just slightly younger than my mother and was from my father’s suburb / still rural town becoming an upscale neighborhood, Holladay. I met her initially among the group of Mormon intellectuals where her warmth and her precise questions drew me.

Later, I re-met her when I joined the Utah State Poetry association and began attending the biweekly Valley Winds group where poets would bring their poems to be workshopped by the group.

Their webpage defines them as follows: “New poets and old hands are welcome to join us on the third Tuesday of each month […] for gentle, encouraging critiquing of our in-progress poems.”

At the time, the group contained a number of older women who wrote. In fact one of my younger friends called them the “old ladies poetry society”.

Though not an old lady, I found benefit in sitting at the table month after month with them, hearing and thinking about their poems as well as discussing them.

I also just enjoyed having women and an occasional man or two, of my parent’s generation to interact with. After my parents’ deaths, I lost contact with that part of life and this poetry group provided it to me. They filled a void.

And, they shared lots of thought and wisdom on craft, poems, and life.

Besides her poems and wise comments, Gay would bring intellectual and political issues to discuss with me. We would sit in the before and after of the workshops and talk.

To my surprise, while walking on de Soto street here in Alicante a few weeks ago, I was thinking about her and realizing it had been a while since I had last seen her. I think it was before the pandemic, that moment that broke apart so many of our networks.

When I saw her obituary, I was not surprised though I was saddened.

Gay was one of the people who made my life better and more complete during my decades in Utah.

Her obituary says the following:

“While managing a household with 6 curious and spirited children [… , Gay] managed to co-write and compose the music for 2 musicals. She wrote hundreds of Poems […]

“She was a deep thinker and constantly yearned for further light and knowledge which she acquired through persistence and long suffering. She rejoiced in sharing her insights and Love Energy with all who would open their heart and listen.”

Thank you, Gay, for sharing it with me. While the content always mattered, it was the person and the sharing that mattered more.

References:

Bryan Waterman and Brian Kegel, The Lord’s University: Freedom and Authority at BYU (Signature Press, 1998)

David Clark Knowlton, Once Upon July, Dialogue, A Journal of Mormon Thought. 40(2):108-125, 2007. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358371985_Once_upon_July

Fotos of Gay are from her obituary: https://jenkins-soffe.com/obituaries/lila-blanchard-2026

the world was bleak, I lived mostly inside myself and inside my house. Besides reading, I took to writing poetry and especially haikus.

Though they were bright with sunshine, in those days there was fear and distrust all around. People were dying.

At first we did not really know why, though the experts, as mediated through the press, decided it must be something communicable and probably a bacterium or a virus. They quickly settled on virus.

Many people went into seclusion, while others resisted to show a political lack of fear. In any case, people in my world became distant from each other.

Though we now have treatments for the relatively new disease, the experience was so intense, it feels like it came to the world with Eve and Adam.

It is based on an ever mutating corona virus, a family that already assaulted us in one or another of its related forms. It caused a realm of sickness that hid in the general categories of cold of flu.

The virus family was well named, with its new Covid form, it became a crown for our times, something that organized them and symbolized them, even if our societies divided into the royalists and anti-royalists.

Time now is divide not antebellum or postbellum, but pre or post pandemic.

This zeit change, took place when I had already been in isolation for quite a while.

My treatments for a different illness, a cancer, acute myeloid leukemia, due to a mutation, knocked out my immune system and made me extremely susceptible to all kinds of invisible creepy crawlies.

It meant I had to live in a very reduced social space for self protection and had already been living that way for three years when the crown appeared.

Here is a poem from those days that shows some of why haiku came to interest me.

Dusk

Light drips slowly from the scene before my windows
a leisurely tumble of oranges and reds prepping for gray.

It’s not the countryside where birds chatter before settling
while night oozes inkiness across hills and spiky trees.

It’s not the tropics where night falls impetuously, suddenly
within the space of minutes as frogs start to whistle and cry.

Reds have drained out. Blues and grays take precedence. 
Neighbor’s windows illuminate once light has almost left.  

My room darkens into shades of black mixed with black
though the light from my screen still makes me visible

to those outside, merely a haunted face focused on flickers.
Soon I'll turn off the screen, draw the blinds, be seen no more, 

take residence inside where rain falls in sheets and rivers
off a tiled roof while we drink, talk, and play music.

Even blue abandons the sky. My neighbor’s windows
don’t shine so much as rest, fat gold on night’s wall. 

It’s time to lock the outside out.

—David-Clark Knowlton

Being isolated from others did not mean the absence of inputs or of belonging to society.

As the poem shows, I still was influenced by people around me, my neighbors, even if I kept my distance.

Instead of ordinary interactions, I could pay close attention to colors, to shifts in light, and to reflections; and to them through my windows.

In the light from inside my house, also through my window, I became visible to them as a ghostly face.

Besides the thinness of reflected light, I was haunted and pale because of leukemia

Inside me, where those observations and relationships still lived, “rain falls in sheets and rivers off a tile roof where we drink, talk, and play music.”

In that rich inner space, where I was not overwhelmed by stimuli from the world outside, I became fascinated with the power of the small form of haiku: five syllables, seven syllables, and five syllable; three, small lines.

Nonetheless, those lines had a twist, a turn between two and one. What you saw and reduced to precious few sounds changes into something more.

Though haikus should engage with nature and show seasonality, that interested me less than the precision in the reduced space and the logical structure of a relationship between one observation in 12 syllables and the turn that follows expressed in only five syllables.

A pandemic exchange by two other poets, Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Nair, set me down this path.

They called their separate but together poems written in response to each other a renga, a set of haikus and tankas (a haiku with two additional, seven syllable lines.)

One would send a haiku, perhaps followed by two additional seven syllable lines. The second person would then respond in kind using the one sent her as a jumping off point.

They published their letters in poems in a book entitled A Different Distance, a renga.

Their verse set me off down this secluded artistic path where I also ran into Jane Hirshfield and her masterful little book / essay called The Heart of Haiku.

At its beginning, Hirshfield quotes the very famous poet Basho.

“In this mortal frame of mine … there is something … called a wind-swept spirit … This something in me took to writing poetry … Indeed ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another … The fact is it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry … ” (p 2)

Instead of writing more, I shall let my “wind-swept-spirit” be seen by sharing some of what it gave me to put down on a page in my own isolation.

The first set is a series of three tankas written about the same place and given a title (I know, I know, the tradition is just to entitle each of them “tanka” or “haiku” although writing sequences of them is not new.)

The second is a set of five haikus under a seasonal title.

Unlike Basho, writing haikus and tankas, as well as other poems, brought me peace and purpose. Through the discipline of small forms, I engaged something beyond myself, a kind of transcendence. It kept me from feeling lonely or bored.

Please enjoy your days as September creeps up on us with fall. There is so much to notice and pay attention to in the world within you and around you.

Afternoon

A lone goose cries out
among clouds and blowing wind.
Greenish pond, cars honk.
Boys jump benches on skateboards.
Weed smoke hovers in the air. 

A saxophone wails
in the island’s gazebo
A duck beats its wings. 
Children roll down a grassed hill.
Wind-felled trees left naked ground.

Shirtless runners jog.
on a track rimming the park
Dogs race after balls.
Geese in couples graze the lawn.
I walk, mask on, paring thoughts.

—David-Clark Knowlton

Before Easter

Sun on my window.
Crows caw from high, bare branches.
Strangers stroll my street. 

Green leaves of parsley 
already stand from the ground
though covered in frost.

Why are the edges
of tulips’ impending bloom
the rouge of your face?

Chill paints your cheeks red.
Buds hold spring color inside.
It’s cold. No bloom yet.

Pellets of snow shine
among sprouting daffodils.
Still no word from you.

David-Clark Knowlton

P.S. A chapbook of my poems about my leukemia was published by Moon in the Rye press in 2025 entitled: From Flowers to Paper.

References:

Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Nair, A Different Distance, a renga (Milkweed Editions, 2021).

Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku (Kindle Single, 2011)

Thank Jupiter, dawn came with rain. My patio is wet and I could hear rain’s pitter patter on my awnings before daylight.

It also came with cooler temperatures which is an immediately feel-able relief.

We have just come out of the furnace of July and a blistering August, at least before this week.

As I looked at the news with the background of light rain falling, I read that the numbers of people who did not survive the heat almost doubled this July over last year.

2026 people in this country did not make it to cooler days and gentle rain the news proclaimed.

Three regions were hit the hardest. The worst was Cataluña; it owned a bit more than a quarter of the total deaths for Spain, 544. Very hot Andalulcía followed it with 262 (13%) deaths,

Where I live, the Valencian Community, was third with 235, 12% of the whole number of deaths from heat for Spain.

Together, these three account for half of the deaths from heat for this large country.

It would be valuable to look into this distribution more closely, such as where in the three regions were the death rates highest. Which age groups were most likely to have excess deaths this July in each?

In Valencia, the numbers break down this way: women were at greatest risk with 1,208 deaths compared with 817 men.

62% of the deaths due to heat in Valencia were in persons older than 85.

Valencia is a region with humid heat on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. There is less of a change between high temperatures and low temperatures because of that than there is in the place that comes in fourth, Madrid—121 deaths.

I know a bit about how these deaths are distributed across the length and breadth of Valencia. Basically, the province of Alicante has suffered the largest portion of deaths in Valencia.

For the two highest weeks, one in July and one in August: 104 people and 96. For the week in July, more than half of all deaths in Valencia took place in Alicante, and for August it is lower, 40 of the 96.

Alicante has the lion’s share of deaths throughout the summer for Valencia, according to J. Hernandez writing for Información.

I do not have information about how many were in the city of Alicante as opposed to other parts of the Province.

Alicante is simply hot, and very humid.

From my perspective here on the coast, this narrow band is cooler than the inner province and than most of Spain. But, beyond the coastal hills, and occasionally even on the coast, it can become an inferno.

Most people do not have air conditioning, from what I have been told and, if they do have it, they try not to use it because of the cost of electricity given how low most incomes are in Spain.

This can be especially critical for older people as we shall talk about below.

If we move our gaze out to a larger level, Europe, the MOMO Bulletin from the Statens Serum Institut in Denmark—which aggregates information on deaths from “27 countries and subnational regions”—“elevated mortality is … observed among persons aged 85 years and older.”

It is important to note that deaths in Spain this season are comparatively greater than those in nearby France, Italy, and Portugal.

Such things are measured in Z Scores, which is how many times the number of deaths is greater or lesser (in standard deviations) than the baseline number.

This statistical gyration enables comparing the apples and oranges that different countries are.

By the way, week 27 was June 29th through July 5th. and so on … The last week in this chart, 33, embraced August 10th through the 16th.

Its very large number suggests something happened beyond the scope of what I have been looking at. Due to the lag in pulling data together, this number has yet to appear in most of my sources outside of MOMO.

The intensity of the various heat waves in Spain is one reason for its larger numbers, as are probably differences in the social and cultural fabric of the country.

The elderly are particularly vulnerable to heat and they are not distributed evenly across the space of regions and countries.

In my neighborhood, an older part of the city of Alicante, I see many elderly people. Those who look near 80 or above are generally accompanied by assistants, especially younger Latin American women. This is one of the better off neighborhoods of the city.

Nonetheless, I have seen older women shopping alone in the Mercadona grocery store and walking with canes and walkers on the street.

I would not be surprised given the relatively recent migration from the Region’s rural areas to its cities and to other cities, such as Barcelona and Madrid, that many elderly women, mostly widows, still live in their smaller cities and towns where they do not have as much assistance nor good access to electric fans or air conditioning.

As a result, I would argue isolation of the elderly women, their remaining in towns—or cities when their children and grandchildren now live elsewhere, and their lower socioeconomic levels are contributors to this higher number of deaths.

Another, very important factor that magnifies this, is that older bodies simply respond less well to heat.

An evaluative overview of articles relating numerous studies published last year in the journal HealthCare points out that evidence shows that older adults have reduced sweating and dilation of capillaries and vessels under their skin to regulate heat. Their ability to perceive dangerous heat declines, and they tend to be under hydrated. They also suffer cardiovascular changes that put them at risk.

Older people tend to store more heat in their bodies and show more rapid increases in their core body temperatures.

The authors of the study conclude:

“Heat exposure and climatic conditions—particularly high ambient temperatures, humidity, and poor air quality—reduce thermoregulatory efficiency and increase[…] risks of dehydration, cardiovascular strain, and mortality in older adults.”

As a result, older adults are at much greater risk of fatigue and death in times of high humidity and high temperature.

These are things that I, as an older man (in the second year of my seventies) need to take into account for my own protection. However as someone relatively well off, I am at less risk than many older men and certainly many older women, given the social inequalities.

Now that it has cooled a bit, thanks to a big storm pummeling the coast of Portugal, giving us some brief and delightful showers, we can look back and see how difficult and dangerous this summer has been.

We are also warned at this time of warming climates about the future.

References:

Santiago Riesco Pérez, España supera los 3.000 fallecidos por el calor extremo en 2026 tras un mes de julio letal, RTVE, 03.08.2026 https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20260803/espana-supera-3000-fallecidos-por-calor-extremo-2026-tras-mes-julio-letal/17178519.shtml

EP Radio Valencia, La Comunitat Valenciana registra 235 muertes en julio atribuibles al calor, 03/08/2026. https://cadenaser.com/comunitat-valenciana/2026/08/03/la-comunitat-valenciana-registra-235-muertes-en-julio-debido-al-calor-radio-valencia/

EuroMOMO Bulletin, Week 33, 2026, https://euromomo.eu/bulletins/2026-33

J. Hernández, Ascienden a 40 las muertes atribuibles al calor la semana pasada en la provincia de Alicante, Información. 24-8-2026. https://www.informacion.es/alicante/2026/08/24/muertes-atribuibles-calor-alicante-sanidad-133618402.html

Sandra Núñez Rodríquez, Carla Collazo-Riobó, Javier Sedano, Ana Isabel Sánchez-Iglesias, and Josefa González-Santos, Heat Tolerance in Older Adults: A Systematic Review of Thermoregulation, Vulnerability, Environmental Change, and Health Outcomes. Healthcare 2025 Nov 3;13(21):2785. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12609229/#sec2-healthcare-13-02785

I like to photograph odd and eerie things I see that yet have an esthetic sense.

The above was painted on a temporary wall in an area that looks like the next two or three photos. It struck me as a representation of their basic forms with its own esthetic force.

As I walk in this city, I enjoy seeing these things which inevitably take form in me since my mind is also informed by Picasso’s cubism based on his experiences in an earlier Spain as well as those of his cohort Dalí.

It tickles me that I do not need to just go to museums or gallery showings, but that in the streets I find ordinary reduction of forms to their minimum as well as recombination, I see things restated, stretched and stilted, I see, in short, a surrealism inherent in reality that can only be surreal because that real is defined to exclude it. We are trained not to see it or not to take it seriously.

Such as reflections that are a shifting and changing commentary on what is around them or even on the self.

Many viewers look at photos like these, or even at their presentations in the street that I photographed and ask what is the “reality”? They can seem troubled unless they can find a “real”.

Let me argue we move through our spaces transitioning through multiple realities, some we pay attention to and others we do not, but the definition of the real is one of an ideology, a culture and not of something external per se that we take to be ultimately real.

At least, this is the case without strong arguments dependent on some generally implicit notions of a hierarchy of realities that may, in themselves be problematic.

Yes, I know what it feels like when I stub my toe and a reflection generally does not stop my forward motion enough to stub my toe.

But that physical experience is not enough to justify declaring one real and the other not or without declaring the hierarchy of realities and the justification for it as well as observing the boundaries between them that may fade and drop at any given moment.

And so, I love to walk, stubbed toe and all, while seeing even being that which most would think is not worth seeing.

Ideas of value saturate our landscape both within us and in other people, as well as in the landscapes creation. I think it worth while to see all that too.

Bye-dy-bye

I reclaimed my habit of going out walking. The heat has broken and the air was cool, at least in comparison to the hot nights earlier in the week. It felt invigorating.

Having hurt my knee almost three months ago now, walking became more difficult and I did not do go walking so often. My desire to write also declined, both motivated not just by physical difficulty but by a bit of depression.

Extreme heat and depression fit like hand and glove. Nothing makes indolence so much as sticky hot days.

It is so uncomfortable to go out and soon have your shirt drenched with sweat, that divine liquid that is supposed to cool you as it evaporates.

When it is very humid, as it often is here on the Mediterranean Coast of Spain, with any heat, you walk around so wet it feels you should be wearing. a bathing suit. Even then your balls drip.

Add to that the delight in drawing shut the blinds—those marvelous Spanish Persianas and you move into the in between world of the penumbra.

In summers like this, its boundaries become less clear, there is no distinct night or day anymore, unless you open them—which in Classic Spanish culture you do around dawn only to close them midmorning as the heat rises.

When it is so hot and humid there seems little sense in opening them.

While that perennial dusk inside—at moments darker than others—seems it should be magical, a dream-like space for creativity, a kind of independent cinema for the self, it is easily not.

Times in that murk are perfect for endless games of solitaire, preferably with stacks of cards rather than on something backlit.

I never cease to be amazed at how tempting and even temporarily satisfying it is to just do mechanical and repetitious things over and over while letting time pass.

Solitaire and such, doom-scrolling, and reading fiction with little mental engagement—a new novel a day, are not the same as the repetitive movement of your feet on paving stones, or the ground—both much better than cement or asphalt, or the churning of your legs.

Exercising those bones and muscles as you move at a human pace through the city literally makes your blood flow more vigorously and your mind starts to lose the various fogs in can inhabit.

Such was this morning. The city glowed as the sun came in with beauty. The early sun was not like an old fashioned stove top, glaring and burning before you. It had softer colors and less warning of extreme heat soon to be shot down on you.

The sun became less like an armed drone sent by enemies of our bodies and our lives with missiles and … even a science fiction style death ray from that rotating mass of compressed, burning gas at the center of our universe.

With cooler air, our atmosphere seems more effective at moderating the terrors of the sun and making it productive of fertility.

My walking is better. I have less limp and my head feels clearer.

Fresher and cooler air is here

.

My own feet longed to kick back and feel the hint of breeze play between my toes.

At first, I wondered who those bright feet belonged to, though that was none of my business. Yet if the feet were there, I could imagine a person sitting up at some point into the sunshine and making themselves known.

Something did not quite work in this scenario besides the possible voyeurism. As I thought about it, I realized the feet had no life.

Despite their perfect colors and the kiss of the sun, they seemed to have no blood circulating in them. They were still far longer than I could imagine.

Then I almost fell on the ground with giggles at the probable whimsy of feet you could buy to put in your window. Preferably a third floor one (second floor in Europe) like this one.

Whimsy makes me happy.

It makes visible some of the absurdities of our existence but in ways without the pulpit thumping of preachers, professors, or politicians.

I have no idea whose feet these are, or really that they are not living.

I just know, for that little bit of time that I was there on the sidewalk, across from this window, the feet were there, brilliant in the sun with the lavish idea of freedom.

They are, after all bare, naked, and this in a city where, near here—in the world-famous and much touristed red-light district—life-like phalluses abound separated from bodies and out in windows and stores; the very image of what the inimitable Derrida called phallogocentrism.

Yet feet are somehow more compelling and more liberating than the overexposed phallus, even if theorists have not engaged them, at least that I know of.

Feet are a fundament of our Anglo measurement system, after inches said to be based on the thumb, from tip to first joint. We ambulate on them—ha ha, fancy way to say walk but if I am going to toss in Derrida’s word (pun intended deliberately or not), then I damn well am going to use other ones both Latin, like this, and Greek through Latin in Jacques’ word.

He’s passed away so I take the liberty of pretending intimacy, just as those phalluses in Amsterdam’s windows and shops.

In either case, they are faulty intimacies. Even if molded in the best silicone or even thermoplastic rubbers (thank you Google for this along with the horrible pun) caressing them is distant from running your hands along the arch of your lover’s feet and across their sole while they arch their back from the sensation.

Neither can reproduce how it feels to put your bare feet on cool marble during a scorching hot day. Or even how wrenchingly intense it is to walk barefoot through scorching dust in an El Paso summer.

They also cannot do mimesis (another one of those damn words, referring to imitate in this case) the pleasure of dipping your feet in the sea while the waves wash over them at the end of their journey, or the chill of dipping them into a cold pool first thing in the morning on what will be an oven of a day to get your self used to the temperature.

You plan to soon slip your whole body into that primeval liquid and swim like mad to keep warm while getting used to the cold all around you.

I suppose those feet on a windowsill could lead me into a discussion of semiotics and meaning, or a cultural history of peering at other’s feet or representing them in worlds where standing is a fundamental image of social position as well as being upright and moving.

(After all, my friend Scott Abbott is writing a whole book on standing in literature and culture).

Or after I finish my giggle, they could just make me want to find some cool marble to put my feet on before I expose them in the windowsill.

Cheers.

A rat a tat tat of rain sounds in this place where it seldom rains. The drops strike my awning like drumbeats and a call to procession. Water leads the way, followed by a gust of wind.

The temperature is shifting.

For almost two months we have had extreme heat. People are on. the edge of exhaustion from it.

The temperature is said to drop some ten degrees celsius over the next few days and stay there for a while. Maybe this is the end of the hot season, or maybe its just a breather, but I welcome the rain and the breeze.

As someone with time, retired you know, I can enjoy the elements and their changes.

They are texts whose script I barely can decifer. Only a bit makes sense, but I love how it feels.

The joy of those first drops falling on my bare shoulders as I went to the terrace to retrieve my almost dry clothes. Small and chill pieces of wet.

Not enough to challenge the primacy of either a warm or cold shower.

Forceful enough to remind me of grace.

In. summer of intense heat, these droplets are not signs of grace, they are grace. They bring us the gift and promise of change and of renewed life.

Of course, in some parts of our province, on the other side of the coastal hills, the rain may be storming with rage.

To think of grace would be a stretch unless one finds a landscape being scoured an act of grace.

It could be, for nature in a broader sense, but not for me as part of nature.

On this side of the hills is is still gentle.

I to not know how long it will last and I would like to go for a walk.

For now the drumbeat of rain is a concert of grace. I love it.

Here is a poem about a storm that was strong and frightening.

A Storm 

of ferocious grace blows through.
Waves beat the piers, reorient ostensibly safe yachts, 
they rock and jump unable to hold their mooring. 
 
Lightning blows up the heavy sky. Sound is born. 
A scream, a tarantella against the rain’s rumble.

Wind, the musty, angry breath of Neptune, 
lances from the sea’s breadth, tridents of piercing 
air from Sicily or Tangiers join, whistle, and bellow.

Horny bulls breech Spain’s coast. Their snorts
and curses are hurricanes. Their angry, desirous heads
turn, cast spittle against mountains and valleys. 

In a book store, just south of their anger, a slight, 
dark-bearded guitarist caresses blond wood. 

A mazurka sounds, a dance of control, passion,
fury. His Sicilian accented voice, almost a whisper. 

He shifts to denser, dissonant chords, fingers
on both hands push and pull for sound.  

It muffles when they miss though he picks up
again with no pause, promise in his technique. 

Drenched mountains and valleys throw off rising 
arroyos then streams and rivers. They wrench
limbs away, they snatch trees, young or old. 

Their color darkens like adobe. They turn spiky. 
They tear away cars and washing machines, 
People struggle to stay afloat and find exit. They bob
until they lose force and are tossed against walls.

Swamps and bays fill with detritus and bodies: 
Cows, sheep, horses, birds, machines, people …
to create the evolutionary surreal on future cliffs.  
A new kind of trilobites for someday’s collectors.

Being exits the cave once waters settle.
Grass springs up again under men’s 

hands as soil makes tarantellas. Horny youths
dance, they save mazurkas for hoary heads. 

The storm is gone, life returns, the audience 
applauds. The dark-bearded youth bows.

David'Clark Knowlton

This poem is from my bilingual collection Zancadas, Poemas y zarcillas de una nueva vida which is under consideration for publication.

Here is the Spanish.

Una tormenta

de gracia feroz sopla con fuerza.
Las olas golpean los muelles, desvían yates aparentemente seguros,
que se balancean y saltan, incapaces de mantener su amarre.

Un rayo ilumina el cielo pesado. Nace el sonido.
Un grito, una tarantela contra el estruendo de la lluvia.

El viento, el aliento mohoso y furioso de Neptuno,
se lanza desde la inmensidad del mar; tridentes de aire punzante
procedentes de Sicilia o Tánger se unen, silban y rugen.

Toros en celo irrumpen en la costa de España. Sus resoplidos
y maldiciones son huracanes. Sus cabezas airadas y deseosas
se vuelven, escupiendo contra montañas y valles.

En una librería, justo al sur de su ira, un guitarrista delgado,
de barba oscura, acaricia la madera rubia.

Suena una mazurca, una danza de control, pasión,
furia. Su voz con acento siciliano, casi un susurro.

Pasa a acordes más densos y disonantes; los dedos
de ambas manos empujan y tiran para crear el sonido.

El sonido se amortigua cuando fallan, aunque él retoma
de nuevo sin pausa, con una promesa en su técnica.

Las montañas y los valles empapados desatan
arroyos crecientes, luego riachuelos y ríos. Arrancan
ramas, arrebatan árboles, jóvenes o viejos.

Su color se oscurece como el adobe. Se vuelven espinosos.
Arrastran autos y lavadoras;
la gente lucha por mantenerse a flote y encontrar una salida. Flotan
hasta que pierden fuerza y son lanzados contra las paredes.

Los pantanos y las bahías se llenan de detritos y cuerpos:
vacas, ovejas, caballos, aves, máquinas, personas…
para crear lo surrealista evolutivo en los acantilados del futuro.
Una nueva especie de trilobites para los coleccionistas del mañana.

El ser sale de la cueva una vez que las aguas se calman.
El pasto vuelve a brotar bajo las manos de ambos hombres

mientras la tierra baila tarantelas. Los jóvenes lujuriosos
bailan; dejan las mazurcas para las cabezas canosas.

La tormenta se ha ido, la vida regresa, el público
aplaude. El joven de barba oscura hace una reverencia.

David-Clark Knowlton

Like an enraged torch, the sun rose this morning, a few days after we had an almost complete solar eclipse here in this part of the Mediterranean coast of Spain.

Before 11 it was so hot that I pulled down my blinds and snuggled in a darker room near a fan. Still, the sun sneaked in and showed its fierce eye on my wall.

Alicante, where I live, is probably named after its Roman ancestor, and before that a Phoenician and Iberian one. The root of its name, across all those years is shining light, luz in the local modern Latin, Spanish.

The coastal hills are limestone and white marble and as a result, the area takes its marketing name, the Costa Blanca, the White Coast.

Our city fills with tourists, this time of year. To speak with many Europeans in their home country is to have them tell you how much they enjoyed Alicante, as if all it contains is beach, sun, and parties. It speaks of vacation to them.

After two years, its meaning is so much different to me.

I did not come here for parties or for sun and beaches. Sun was not new to me and I had the skin cancer to prove it—fortunately removed before seriously dangerous. Even last summer, here in Spain I had to have a small tumor removed from the the area where my nose and eyes come together. And, I will be visiting the dermatologist next early next month for a check up.

For me Alicante is about migration, especially of Colombians, though there are many Argentines and other migrants in my neighborhood. It is also about Algerians, Netherlanders, and people from the UK.

In addition, it is about Valenciá, the Valencian language, one in a different Romance family from Spanish, the one that contains French.

The city and region is about a history of violence, one where the Spanish civil war was hat fought and came to its end in the massacre of Republican partisans by the Italian fascists and the Franco forces. It remembers the horrendous, midday bombing of it market by Italian bombers that not only destroyed the historic place—now rebuilt—but also killed hundreds of people.

Though the Civil War generation has passed, mostly, people till remember. Their familial wounds are not far from the surface.

Yet, I enjoy it here. It is home, a place where I talk with people every day in the streets and local businesses.

My barber stopped me yesterday on a crowded walkway just to shake my hand and say hello.

Places take on meaning through the events of your life and those of people important to you, they are not neutral space nor the images of marketers per se.

An example is another city of light, though one in which the sun is not nearly as hot, Paris. It claims to be a beacon of beauty and culture, even though it—like almost anywhere these days—is filled with problems.

Still, it took on great meaning for me as it was represented by music that as a young man I took part in performing (bassoon player in symphony orchestras of my then city, Salt Lake). It also claimed resonance as I studies French language and literature in College (at least I have some background in that language I frequently hear in the streets and occasionally have to speak, even if badly).

More important, it took on the meaning of personal resurrection during one of the darkest times of my life.

In the poem below I describe how that city means to me. Now that I live in Europe, I shall have to return.

On Paris

While I was mincing ginger and garlic,
an American in Paris popped up
on my system. I almost cut myself
from saucy jazz and squeezed, bleating car horns.

Gershwin sailed to France, a New York pilgrim
enchanted with Ravel and French music,
returned and composed his meditation.
I too traveled to the City of Light.

Mine was not an artistic pilgrimage.
Death had cut close. I could not find my soul.
No bounce graced my steps nor sparkle my eyes.
I roamed listlessly, without any goal.

It was early April, sun kissed tree buds.
Bright lime green. I felt joy. And hope. And life.

David-Clark Knowlton

Something mysterious and magical appears in the summer when all quiets down.

It stems, in part, from the heat, but also from the slowness of life and from how many people are away on vacation.

In Spain, many stores are closed and people are away. Your WhatsApp, and even your other social media slow to a snail’s pace.

But there is grace and beauty as plants grow lush, so long as there is water. Without water, it all becomes tragic.

This poem is more about late spring, but it makes me think of summer and the joy I take in a good salad.

I have been enjoying making ones from recipes in the New York Times, such as a plum and fresh mozzarella salad, or a green peach salad. Today was a good American coleslaw with a vinegar and oil dressing.

This is a time of gazpachos and salmorejos—cold soups—to be sure, but it is also a season of good lettuce and other fresh fruits and vegetables in abundance.

The poem below appears in a chapbook with poems from a collective of four writers: me, Lisa Gustavson, Paul Ford, and Shawn Stradley (Moon in the Rye Press, 2025). You can read the chap book for free here: When Cupboards Open. Open the link and search on my name or that of any of the other authors.

Wonder

Quiet, like a force,

takes over the neighborhood.

No finches are heard.

Not even the train

vibrates and squeals on its rails.

Lettuce grew last night.

—David Knowlton

Friday morning, after an all too short night, I arrived in Schiphol airport. It was more than a simple trip.

You could say entering Netherlands was a return. Not because I had been there before, which I have, but because it is so much more than a physical place.

My grandfather, whose family hailed from Friesland, though he was born in South Holland reminded us over and over we were Friesian.

As a result, that door out of the airplane from Spain, marked a return to a place I was always taught I belonged. It was a window into a past and present of my family while also into a absence.

I carry a US passport, grew up and lived most of my life in that massive country, much of it near where my grandfather’s family settled when they came from Friesland.

Still, I lack documents granting me any belonging to Friesland—Fryslân, in its language, or to Netherlands, the country in which it is found.

I also lack the language, Frisk, or Frisian, as well as what my Grandfather called Hollands or Nederlands, what in English is called Dutch, though these are not completely absent in me nor in my world.

And, Netherlands has changed since my family left it. One very brief example: symbolic foods now—Frites and pancakes, not pea soup or parsley soup, as I would have thought from growing up in my family.

Once we de-planed, none of this was relevant to us getting to our hotel ad checked in, or even to finding food.

A round headed man with a shiny pate and gentle smile from Myanmar drove us in his Uber into the city of Amsterdam while telling us about his life there in the decades since he left his country and its unfortunate circumstances, all in English.

Once we left his car, English surrounded us peppered with Dutch—as well as French and Italian. I shouldn’t have been surprised since we were in the international spaces of tourism, but English was the dominant taal—Dutch for language.

I was interjecting Hollands into my interactions, even if it was just to say thank you—dank je wel.

It seemed to surprise people a bit. They would say “alsjeblieft” and then continue in English or say “bye”.

Both the presence of shreds and patches of Dutch in me and the lack of most of it perplexes me, and even more so for Frisian.

My Grandfather made a point of teaching us to count in Dutch and Frisian and to pronounce the gutteral G sound, like in ninety nine, negenennegentig, which involves lots of throat clearing.

The one time I sounded that to a couple of people at a counter to show off my pronunciation, it got a warm chuckle and smile. I belonged even if only to that little bit.

Why do I know any Frisian, though?

It was my Grandfather’s native language even though, unlike his older siblings, he was born in Waddinxveen near Gouda in South Holland where the language of that name was almost all that was spoken.

Still, I imagine my Grandfather’s family spoke Frysk at home and Hollands in the streets and schools, but I do not know.

I just know how surprised I was his Hollands taal slipped off him when he aged, like water from the back of one of the ducks in the canals there. The English that he had spoken since he was a late teenager in America went first. Frysk stayed with him to the end.

Frisian embedded in our daily life, not unlike the celebrated Frisian character of stubborness and independence.

One example: I got to help my mother make soer dip which we kids would indelicately and ironically call sewer dip, though it was delicious.

It was a form of Hollandaise sauce though I did not know that then.

I thought the name was Dutch, but today when I was looking to confirm that, I found out it is Frisian. Similarly, snit as we called it, or snert, the name of pea soup—a Netherlandish classic, is from Frisian even though the name snert is widely spread now in Dutch.

Though I have these pieces, why did the languages themselves cease to be used other than a small bits in my family?

I thought I knew: my grandfather and his brothers married non Frisian women (my grandmother is from Yorkshire); my great grandfather banned Frisian saying we had come to the US to speak English, and so on.

Uncle Louis, or Lieuwes, married Aunt Louise, Lutske. I do not remember, other than perhaps very vaguely, meeting Uncle Louis, though he was prominent in my Grandparents’ life. He was an older brother my grandfather was close to and the two families lived for years in close proximity.

Aunt Louise who survived him for many years, was a constant in our family gatherings. Someone was always assigned to go to her house, pick her up, and bring her.

She was always warm and smiling, but she was said to not speak English, only Dutch. That was a mystery to me since she had lived in the US since she was a young woman.

She probably was the strongest representative of the Dutch language in my family, other than for my three uncles who had learned Dutch while performing as Mormon missionaries in Netherlands.

Or so I thought. When I looked at records online to confirm the story, I found out that she was born in Friesland.

That shook me, because it meant, I thought, she must have spoken Frisian even though I knew that many people in the province were already bilingual with Dutch.

I scratched deeper. Since there is no one to ask who is likely to have a memory, I turned to records online.

Her last name struck me as German, Starkenburg.

Evidently it originates in Hesse, but is common in parts of Friesland, especially the ones on the east side of the province next to two provinces where one of two varieties of Low Saxon are the dominant local languages: Drenthe and Gronings.

In Aunt Louises’ area, the last name may well originate from something local, a fortified house on an estate. It was called Starkenburg—strong castle—and hence the last name may have developed there independently when Napoleon in 1811, I believe, required all people to take last names for bureaucrat’s ease.

I could place the town my Aunt was born in and it was in a Low Saxon and probably Gronings speaking area.

That means that Lutske Starkenburg was not as Dutch as I had thought even if she represented Dutch to us Frisians as we were taught to think of ourselves. She probably learned that language somewhere and spoke it with my Uncle who had lived in South Holland though born in a Frisian speaking family in a Frisian speaking area of Friesland.

Still, there is truth in my family’s argument about Frisian. My Grandfather married an English woman he met in Utah. Many of his older siblings married Dutch speakers, and so a language divide was crossed and Frisian waned.

It was not just that they lived in the US, once they all immigrated, though they faced language pressureto lose their German sounding tongue once the US entered the First World War with Germany.

This happened to Frisian communities throughout the US, even where the language was used for generations. Its loss left shadows and echos, often embedded in customs and stray words.

As an aside, Friesland, like much of the broader Germanic world, felt economic and demographic pressure from the mid-nineteenth century and thousands of it young people left, migrating to other parts of their country and abroad. *

However, they disappeared from official records as Frisians. Despite having a strong identity as a kind of people, they are generally not considered an ethnic group by outsiders nor insiders. Curiously, that identity as Frisian still seems to have survived in many people, as it did in my case.

I have run into it in people from other parts of the US who were not from my immediate family and, to be honest, did not pay much attention to it until now.

My Grandfather would insist he was not Dutch and hence we were not either, even though he hailed from South Holland and the Netherlands.

To him, the opposite of recent changes, Holland was the name of his country of Birth and Nederlands was its language, a tongue beyond the two provinces of Holland.

Returning to the Netherlands had a powerful impact on me, as if I had been in the presence of something transcendent at the same time very earthy, especially Amsterdam.

The man who picked us up in his Tesla to deliver us to the Airport, Sunday night, played Latin music non-stop on his sound system and could have passed for someone from Latin America. However, he was from Morocco, from the mythical city of Casablanca, more known from film that from ordinary interactions. Someday, I shall visit that part of the Arabic and Berber world. Tot ziens (Bye).

* Frisian Emigration: How Frisians Ended Up Everywhere (And Nobody Noticed). https colon slash slash learnfrisian.com/frisian-emigration-how-frisians-ended-up-everywhere-and-nobody-noticed/ (Consulted August 12, 2026).

Some words enchant with their sound.

Even if we do not know their meaning, they draw us in just because of how we hear them.

One such is lithe. It is fluid like a liquid that goes where it needs without the stresses and strains of us more rigid souls. Our bones and muscles enable our movement but they seem to get in the way when we need grace.

Even though one syllable, it automatically sounds elvish and enchanting.

That idea of something magical that can live in the in-between spaces of a society of avenues, monuments, plazas, and steel or stone buildings gives hope for liberty to just be.

It removes us from the ordinary straightjacket of our world of rules and laws, higher and lower status.

I find it intriguing that liquid sounds, like a running brook, suggest magic and liberty. They also suggest the labile—that which is not fixed and is in movement, as well as the liminal, that which inhabits the boundaries like the limin of a door, the threshold, the place that is neither inside nor outside.

In a way, that is all borders and lines of separation.

They are a “neither-this-nor-that” and abut all efforts to give something substance, physical and social reality.

Laughter is also a liquid word and is something that brings a surprising commentary into view of something else, where we see it is not all it is set up to be or is more than we think—it exceed the boundaries we set on it.

This makes laughter, like in the telling of jokes, an ice breaker and a danger in that it upends the ordinary.

I guess that is what water—the paragon of liquid—does. It breaks ice, by changing its temperature, or by pushing it against another surface, probably a harder one.

Water also floods sometimes, beginning as a trickle and and then becoming a roar which rearranges existence, the same as wind, something else in movement, nice when light and cool, horrid when strong.

These L words are running up against and with R words like river, rush, roar, water, air and so on. Another R word is migrant, people who do not stay put.

The roughness of the r separates them from the mobile, like those who change social class or move from one place to another within some larger entity.

The idea of elves, those with liquid language who live among us, usually unseen reminds me of this. Somehow, even if only in folklore or myth elves manage to evade our surveillance which disciplines social order. They do not show up in traffic cams or other recording devices—they do not follow ordinary rules—yet they are here we’re told or we hope.

Otherwise we may be screwed with the inflexibility of order.

Elves remind me of another word very meaningful in Spain and one with literary pretensions, duende.

This is a small person, in the Spanish world, who lives among us, under bridges, and so on. This figure occupies boundaries and can help us or harm us.

It can create mischief as well as solve problems.

García Lorca, the murdered, great Spanish poet, brought the word into poetics to describe strong feeling and emotion that can possess art (and life) to make it more than a simple human creation.

That act of possession is key. It heightens the art, changes the emotional register from strong to mighty from sad to devastating, and so on. It becomes more than.

The more-than-ness is key, like when a stream becomes a powerful flood, fertile or devastating, flip-sides of the same.

This reminds me of Pentecostalism when someone is “slain by the spirit” and begins speaking in tongues, that language the linguists call with an abundance of L sounds glossolalia. Part of this is that the language is different from ordinary speech though it is not completely unlike it.

Importantly, part is also the trance-like state of the speaker.

In Santería when the Santo comes down and rides a horse, a person, they also go into a trance while their body is taken over by something greater, a personage with greater insight and ability although they do not in themselves possess a body, this flesh and blood that ties us to the material and to the this-ness rather than letting us slide into the otherness of Spirit.

However, the Elvish marks something else. Elves are also supposed to be a race of people, a kind like us, maybe even an ethnicity.

This observation takes us to a place well worked by Michael Taussig, where marginal or lower classes of stratified society are seen as having magical powers and abilities, or even spiritual gifts. They may be poor and marginal but in state beyond polite society many of them carry a gift and, if nothing else, as a group they symbolize that gift; the freedom to be other than what ordinary middle or upper class society requires.

They are like the man in Lady Chatterly’s Lover, imagined by D.H. Lawrence, a paragon of working class virility and otherness. A stunning revelation in a beam of light.

This brings us right into the space of the great debates of today around the movement of people, the fear and the anxiety they mobilize in publics and in politician’s speech, as well as the attraction they might hold as people who can save our society from itself with their labor and their fecundity.

The bodies of all those men and some women who flooded into Ceuta this last weekend and who the European Community are trying to protect against are not just people. They are heightened with otherness, and not just because they are in movement.

They represent what we cannot be yet what we may need or even desire—shhhhh.

In the case of Ceuta they rose like mermaids or mermen from the waves, frightened and challenged the safe order of Europe where desire is supposed to be controlled by law and policies, the Freudian superego.

They suggest the ungovernability of the id and that frightens. Our selves, our societies, and especially our bodies are neither labile nor lithe. They are stuck in the sounds of other R words, reality, rigidity, and maybe even regrets when we think of people in elvish movement.

As you probably know, on Saturday, August 1—a day known in the Andes for honoring the Pachamama, the Mother Earth—the gates from Morocco opened and an avalanche of people—mostly young men—rushed into the Spanish city of Ceuta on a peninsula on the coast of mainland Africa.

An Ultra Right saliva-fest broke out almost equal to the masses of feet and heats that swam or ran to get into this Spanish enclave.

Since Spain forms part of the Shengen Zone and the European Community, panic and spit erupted from Denmark to Italy, even though none of these maybe-migrants ever set foot in Europe.

Ceuta has its own immigration status, I gather, in which people who enter it are not automatically allowed entry into the troubled but very sanctimonious and self protecting Shengen zone.

None stepped foot on Italy though it has its won problems with masses of African youth trying to sail anyway possible to Italy.

And Denmark? What the f….?

Though masses of Danes and other Scandinavians fill Alicante’s Streets, beaches, and bars, these days, giving the Dutch and English a run for space or beer in the supermarkets and bars, none of the youth who rushed into Ceuta will visit Denmark in any reasonable future.

We saw Scandinavian panic—in the mold of Trumpist panic, a nervous breakdown the Ultras hope will give them more hold in European and national elections.

The politics behind the fences grinding open—whether on the road to Ceuta from the nearby Moroccan city of Tetuan or of access to the sea to swim around barriers to reach Ceuta’s beaches—remain opaque as befits a time of an upcoming, complete, solar eclipse in Spain.

Whether calculated by smugglers of people, the Kingdom of Morocco to count coup in its wrestle with Algeria, or something else is rumored but not known publicly.

As is often the case, while noting that migrants are increasingly pawns of geopolitical struggles, reporting tends to go to why people would leave home to go, live, and work elsewhere.

Sorry guys, there is little mystery in that even though every story is personal and filled with hope, angst, and betrayal. Sociologists and anthropologists as well as political scientists have mined this vein for decades till there is little gold left.

Push factors + pull factors is the operative logic.

The Ultra Right floods the zone with criticisms of what they see as liberal or socialists giving more power to the pull, while ignoring the weight on people of the push, which other political actors manipulate for their gain.

My woke heart was pained seeing a father carrying his daughter through the waves to Ceuta, young men racing across the sand, people entering Ceuta in glory as if in the Olympics to say “we are here, we made it” only to find they didn’t,

Once in Ceuta, they took stock of their friends and family who did not make it but died in the waves. They also found themselves in the intense North African sun with little shade, no place to rest, no water, and no food.

Agencies of assistance were overwhelmed and the city’s residents pulled down their shutters.

I look on the Ceuties, or the Moroccans, Algerians, Sudanese and others who entered this Peninsular city that has been part of Europe since before Columbus sailed in the fifteenth century, and see complexity.

Ceuta is Spain while Gibraltar, on the other side of the Straits by it that connect the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, is British. Such are the nuances of history which challenge the logical rigor of Right Wing desire for order and their logic.

When I look, I see young people like those I know here in Alicante from Morocco and Algeria, as well as sub-Saharan Africa.

Right Wing nationalism is an inhumane quest to disentangle the legacies of history to create some sort of pure nations.

Ain’t no such thing and there probably never will be.

The issues get snarled in policies and politics of deciding who can be and who cannot be in a given place, even though the rules and procedures are logically unable to ever actually create that ideal of the nation.

If such can be said about residence and citizenship, it can also be said about sovereignty—another herring lifted from cold books and hefted as if a petard into political struggles.

Yes, there is such a thing but it is like the desire to be a man or to be loved, in which the desires are almost always greater than what the facts allow. One learns to accept the getting close to love or manhood rather than holding out for the ideal.

So, yes, this flood was a challenge to Spanish sovereignty from a place that would love to see the map of Africa as one of clean lines.

It is a minor one and was quickly turned around as almost all the would-be migrants returned to Tetuan and southward.

I bet the phone lines and diplomatic meetings in Arabic, Spanish, and English (perhaps) almost burned with intense back and forth, as well as invitations to sit for tea.

Still, I cannot forget the two young men on the beach in Ceuta who set out as three in hope of getting to Spain for work. They have knowledge and could probably labor in the building trades for which there is a demand.

Who knows, they may still make it, but they spoke with tears in their voices, about their life-long friend Mohammad drowning as he reached Ceuta, They saw him struggle and sink under the waves. Iin the press of people they could not reach him though they were close.

Their hearts were heavy and they had no cell phones any more to call their families and let them know they were ok, or Mohammad’s family to express sorrow and perhaps even let them know he perished.

I do not know all the dramas, dilemmas, and hear breaks in my grandparents’ immigration to the United States but I sense them from learning about Mohammad and his life-long buddies trapped in sorrow on the edge of Europe.

While sipping my morning coffee, I read the news—and sometimes the anti-news of Instagram and TikTok online.

This morning El País, Spain’s great daily, wrote about Trump’s missile shake just off the coast of Venezuela—a baboon like display of reddened, macho missiles to dominate male challengers.

Of course this notice includes a mass of fictitious fantasy about some drug cartel led by Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela who continues in power even though he lost the last elections, something Trump dreams of.

Maduro also shakes; he flies his planes and organizes his military in a pounding-the-chest display of bravery against the combover-ed, spray-tanned Trump.

Neither could probably go a round or two against each other in a ring. Much better is playing each other’s enemy to strengthen Maduro and give Trump so called “penis-points”. The Urban Dictionary defines these as “bonus points given to someone of the male gender for being a person of male gender.”

Trump needs to prove that to himself given his Vietnam War draft dodging, his insults to purple heart holders, and his declaration now of a Department of War whose purpose is to win. To Trump the basis of masculinity is a person who never apologizes, often cheats, and always wins. By definition.

In any case, Trump spouts about drug shipments but seems to have destroyed a migrant boat. Many legal analysts are calling an act of simple murder. Meanwhile his minion, the red-eyed and wimpy voiced Hegseth declares that a Department of War, in its focus on winning cannot follow the law.

Sounds like the whine of losers to me.

Unfortunately, genital rattling of this sort can lead to accidental explosions even from the most experienced edger.

And then we end up with the messiness of death and mayhem which will require decades and a fleet of swift-boat, Hollywood writers and film makers to gain a narrative that is less one of lack of control.

As sadly pornographic as all that is, a different couple of article snagged my attention.

I read about a Danish man of Syrian origin who had spent three years in a Spanish prison, condemned as a terrorist for ostensibly fighting with ISIS in Syria, his parent’s homeland. It turns out that he did not do so but rather was in Syria as a Danish spy. The article notes how difficult it has been for Denmark’s spy agencies to come clean about this and how insulated justice officials, in Denmark and in Spain are from the machinations of their various spy agencies. In this case, it is amazing a couple of Danish spy-masters came clean in public.

This made me reflect on how intelligence officers, in the spheres of Trump, Maduro, or in this case Copenhagen and Madrid, poison ordinary social waters by creating double purpose in individuals.

You meet and interact with someone. They me be who they seem but they also may be agents of some other interested party and you might be compromised.

To many of you this might sound like a “yeah-sure, David” moment.

I get that. But you must remember my father’s graduate student at the University of Utah (who later became a Mexican congressman and met me at the airport in Mexico City when I flew through there on my way home from Bolivia after two years) was a KGB spy when a college student, something my father never knew. The congressman worked for the same agency that formed Vladimir Putin.

With that messiness of the world—and not being able to trust people to be who they say they are—in mind, I read another article about the mercenaries who fight for Russia in Ukraine. In this case, the article spoke of subsaharan Africans, but I was reminded of Colombians.

Next door to Venezuela and one of the countries liberated from Spain by Simon Bolivar in the early nineteenth century, Colombia is like a gorgeous person internally mangled by violence and poverty, as well as the interests of larger powers, such drugs.

While most Colombians are amazing and charming with accents that seduce, the country suffers from the disappearance of young men who are forcefully recruited into criminal gangs, military service in which young men fight against their own people, and the growth industry of working as an underage assassin, a sicario.

The country has produced a veritable army of men seared by violence without reasonable options for employment. Among many other paths to exit the country and get better wages is that of mercenary.

Many men are well trained from their military years but find closed doors at home. It is tempting for them to leave their country and swim the international waters of floating mercenaries.

One day, some months ago, a friend from Colombia brought someone to my home. He had met him among the mass of immigrants here in Alicante (where Colombians are the largest group of Latinos). When this guest and I talked he mentioned he had just come from fighting as a mercenary for Ukraine.

I now hear he has returned to the battlefields in Ukraine as a means of sending money home for his daughter who soon will be a teenager.

The war in Eastern Europe is not so far away nor is its reality. Alicante also has a large number of Ukrainians, Russian and Ukrainian speaking. They are all seared by that conflict. I talk with Ukrainians every day as I also do with Syrians, Palestinians, Venezuelans and more.

The pages of news, with Trump’s fantasies of defeating with his masculine energy the Tren de Aragua that he has fictionalized into something it is not, and now the made-up Cartel de los Soles; the massive missile attack on Ukraine this weekend, and the inhumane violence in the Middle East become very real ever time I step into the streets and go to a café.

I live on the White Coast of Spain without cataracts—they were surgically removed. It is peaceful here, but the fogginess of a violent world is in Alicante’s sunshine

The Spanish Bishops’ Conference publicly criticized the efforts of the Ultra party VOX in Murcia to ban Muslims from celebrating public prayers or ceremonies in order to protect the heritage and traditions of Spain.

VOX then criticized the Church for its position on immigrants and accused it of timidity given how mired it is in the latest reports on sex abuse in the Church.

Now, the Archbishop of Tarragona, and president of the important Tarraconense Bishops Council, Joan Planellas, is striving to build a nuanced wall between the Church and the claims of the Nationalists of VOX while also providing pastoral council to the Catholic base of VOX, a group opposed to abortion, gay marriage, and increasingly to the immigration of Muslims which VOX paints as antithetical to Spanish traditions.

“A Xenophobe cannot be a true Christian,” Planellas strongly asserted.  A true Christian must “love. To love deeply is the message of the gospel. To love your neighbor is to try to make others happy” in evident contrast with hatred of Muslim immigrants.

While he hoped to draw the distinction between ideas and the changes they take on when they become political slogans, the line between love and xenophobic hatred became the headline.

Within the Church the issue is not always so clear. El País reported that the Bishop of Asturias, for exsmple, called muslims “moritos”, a troubled and dismissive term. The Archbishop of Taragona insists this opinion is simply not in line with the majority of Spain’s Bishops. He asks political leaders to stop polarizing the issue of immigration lest it lead to problems such as in France.

Yet, Santiago Abascall, the head of VOX, sees an opening and is likely to continue to pick at it it for political advantage even if that means disagreeing with and challenging publicly Spain’s clerical hierarchy although with certain gentleness.

Behind this conflict is the old idea that Spain and Catholicism should fit together like hand and glove. In truth they never have, yet Spain has lived centuries of political and religious projects to make them so.

In the Franco period, the Church was one of the main props of the dictator’s state marginalizing the religious left from power in the Church and to innoculate Spanisard against cultural modernism.

After the coming of democracy. before the pederasty scandal, that alignment contributed to the Church’s loss of popular support. Within the Church, however, the political right and the support of the state have not always been accepted. The Church is a very complex and varied institution.

I am learning about Spain given my background as a Latin Americanist. Let me give some examples from there—especially since the contemporary nationalists, the Hispanists, insist that Spain’s American domains were never colonies but part of Spain and given that Spain and Latin America are historically interconnected over and over again.

In the sixteenth century, the Dominican Bishop of Chiapas, the Spaniard Bartolomé de las Casas, strongly and publicly criticized the colonial secular order and the exploitation of indigenous peoples. His suits ended up in the courts of Spain and have left a legacy, from within the Church of support for less privileged and non-Western people that still have an impact today.

Another more recent Dominican articulated the Theology of Liberation while a professor at Peru’s Catholic University, Gustavo Gutierrez. This movement took off, and not solely on the basis of his influential work, it gave a heart ache to the anti-Communist and hence anti-Left Pope John Paul and the Catholic right more generally including to Spain one of the major suppliers of clerics to Latin America.

Specifically, the Cardinal of Lima, Juan Luís Cipriani of the very powerful and very Spanish Opus Dei, saw Liberation Theology as a barbarism and attempted to destroy it. Father Gutierrez proved untouchable, in part because of the institutional separation of the Catholic University from the ordinary hierarchy of the Church.  Gutierez survived until age took him, while Cipriani suffered a less fortunate demise.

The much celebrated Cardenal of Opus Dei, Cipriani, supported a very right wing religious organization that caused his downfall, the Sodalitium of Christian Life. It grew up among privileged young people in Lima and spread to become very powerful and numerous.

It was created by Luís Fernando Figari. among others, in 1971. Figari, though Peruvian, leaned strongly toward the Spanish Falange, the Fascists, and over the decades came to be taken as a charismatic and almost untouchable religious hero and political influence.

In El País, sociologist Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio wrote last year  “My hypothesis is that the Sodlitium belongs to a political project. It is the resurrection of fascism in Latin America using the vertebral connections of the church.”

Figari’s power continued until the Vatican intervened and gave credit to reports of his sexual abuse of youths within the Sodalicio. Figari was not alone in this use of sexual power. Under Pope Francis, the Vatican did what had seemed impossible earlier. It closed Figari’s Sodalitium and excommunicated him. This was a double blow: both against pederasty and also against the powerful right wing of the Church.

While Opus Dei, founded in Spain by José María Escrivá may indeed maintain some untouchability, its first Cardinal, Cipriani, was undone by Sodalicio, and his years of creating enemies from his rabid capitalism and more general opposition to popular movements in society and in the Church.

Indeed Francis moved to bring Opus more directly under Vatican authority and reform it. Still, it and its related groups, is very strong among the American Catholic Right Wing, including the Supreme court and members of the Administration and congress. The US Catholic right has been a strong force of opposition to the reformist Francis as well as one of the most important supports for the regime of Donald Trump.

The Church, as led now by the Agustinian Pope Leo, faces this difficult political terrain of a still powerful Right Wing in the Church in the Americas and in Spain, while also containing a progressive Church.

VOX sees this and is, I believe, deliberately pounding crack lines in the Church it to see if it can splinter the left from the right and from Church legitimacy despite the Archbishop of Tarragona’s hasty denial of such a possibility. The hope for VOX would be for the right to gain ascendency within Spain and within the Church.

After all, Spain and Catholicism should go together, I expect he feels, like hand and glove which unity is supposed to be a key of Spanish tradition.

I promise, Mediterranean for lunch at home, ‘cause I’ll make it. lentil salad and merluza fish fillets.

As I was sipping my latté, six or so too-blond young women with perfect English and very pale skin sauntered in. If I heard right when they were speaking to each other, they were Scandinavian of some sort and looked for all the world like a set of coeds on the East sides of Salt Lake City or Provo, Utah.

Of course, I was as blond—now gray, and am very pale, although the sun has probably left me tinted with a distinct shade of shrimp-over-a-hot-fire.

Foreigners in someone else’s country at a time when immigration, rising rents and supermarket inflation is all a theme, as is Putin’s and Trump’s meeting in the former Russian colony of Alaska tomorrow. I hear the ultra nationalist right in Russia is all a twitter, demanding that state, with its oil and minerals be returned to the once Tsarist State with its onion domes restored.

Tourists and foreigners abound here. Alicante may well be the large city with the highest relative parentage of foreign born residents in Spain, although we are next to the beer-sun-and doom British enclave of Benidorm, as well as just south of Russian and Dutch colonies.

The conservative press reminds us that Franco, the brutal or great dictator of the mid twentieth century did all kinds of good things for Spain. In fact, according to them, everything good has its roots in Franco. In a fit of development he organized the Mediterranean coast for the massive building of hotels and beaches and then marketed it heavily to northern Europeans and the British for their holidays.

Of course, that created a demand for labor—while Spaniards were working and sneaking chocolate and beer in Switzerland and in many other countries.

To meet that new demand for hands, shoulders, and arms, Franco and then the later post-Franco governments coordinated the emptying of rural areas of men and women. In Alicante, they came from local areas, and then from La Mancha, Murcia and further away.

One can hear their varied accents and dialects still in workers bars where they have their morning café con leche and have a morning smoke while laughing and arguing loudly.

Immigrants from North Africa, Latin American and subSaharan Africa are now filling the need for workers while we expats (sigh--a rant for another time) increase prices and demand.

The city is tearing down Franco period public housing, which later government sold to people, since they are in desperate need of upkeep and modernization. Mid-rise towers are appearing like mushrooms in their place.

Spain is Spain and has its own ways. But it is also Europe and the rules of the European community have impacted urban design and government processes. Although not from the community’s governance per se, the European ultra right is also changing Spain while claiming to protect a vision of traditional Spain, you know bull fights and women in lace mantillas behind fans next to their adoring husband.

Without the bulls, lace, or mantillas similar things are appearing throughout Europe and even in the neo-Putin US. After all, the Russian Macho Maximus is a promoter of a Christian, nationalist, racist, Europe, and Euro-America. He has helped the existing, Ultra right, post WWII, groups of neo-Nazis, religious traditionalists and nationalists, anti feminists, and, God-knows, anti-Queers.

To that list, I should add, anti-asylum seekers, anti-immigrants, and anti-Muslims.

Why this rant? First of all, I am in a café which in Spain they can call a bar and people often rant in bars. Maybe i shall take up the habit.

Second, the Pumpkin clone who has become Maximus for a time—a painful multi-season reality show, has sent the Guard into the streets of Washington DC where they are using telescopes and sometimes magnifying glasses to find the relatively rare crime they are supposed to stop. Military guards, claiming to protect the people from enemies the right imagines and propagates wide and far on screens large and tiny, like Lex Luthors and Jokers.

There is more. The morning paper tells of Ultras in Iceland, many of them former criminals, who are patrolling their Island as vigilantes to stop a crime-wave by asylum seekers that no mainstream analyst can find, and to protect their social welfare system from the horrible drain these new-comers represent, though again, evidence of this must ride icebergs in the arctic sea. No one, outside of dreams of whaling or catching walruses and seals for the winter, can find it.

The article mentions that this is not simply an Icelandic phenomenon, but like Hollywood movies of super heroes (ok I added that), it is found throughout Europe including Spain. To that I add, including the US.

I wish I could just change the channel or even better cancel this survivalist nonsense, but alas, TikTok and X have not given me that super power.

Done with my breakfast and my rant—for now—I’m gonna go out walking and look at gulls and pigeons as the day’s heat grows.

Ciao.