My grandmother's morning
glory vines
covered the porch of her
tenement.
We played there, summer
afternoons,
that girl and I, the play of
house,
with pots and pans set on
cement
the sun had fired. Once, tremulous,
she asked what color eyes I
liked the most.
At six I was no Don Juan, and
said,
“Morning glory blue.” Her
eyes
were black and teary. This is past—
except at times your eyes are
sad
and blue like the morning
glories were,
and I recall how she replied,
“O, blue,” and tried to hide
her tears.
"Don Juan" is a common metaphor for a "womanizer." Around 1630 Tirso de Molina published "El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra" (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest), though it may have been performed as early as 1616, however. It was the first fully developed presentation of the Don Juan legend. The play opens in Naples (giving rise to the main character's other well-known identity, "Don Giovanni") but is set mainly in fourteenth-century Spain. Don Juan, a young noble, relentlessly and serially seduced women of all ages and classes by promising to marry them or by falsely assuming the identities of their actual lovers, whom he then framed for his own misdeeds. He murdered Don Gonzalo, the father of one of his rape victims, but Gonzalo took the form of the statue on his tomb, invited Don Juan to dine with him in the cemetery,fed him vipers and scorpions, and then struck him dead. In a clap of thunder, Don Gonzalo, Don Juan, and the tomb all disappeared. The basic plot of the play and the character of the protagonist have survived in later works, including Molière's play "Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre," Lord Byron's epic poem "Don Juan," José de Espronceda's poem "El estudiante de Salamanca," José Zorrilla's play "Don Juan Tenorio" (which is performed every November 2, the day after A ll Saints' Day, throughout the Spanish-speaking world), and "Don Giovanni," the opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte (which, in turn, inspired works by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Alexander Pushkin, Søren Kierkegaard, George Bernard Shaw, and Albert Camus). In Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Phantom of the Opera," the protagonist wrote a fictional opera called "Don Juan Triumphant."
ReplyDeleteI really like this poem. I felt as if I were inside of it. It brings back so many memories.
ReplyDeleteI especially like these lines:
"Once, tremulous,
she asked what color eyes I liked the most."