Cauliflower (84?)

I.

A boy exorcises morning with a cauliflower,
swinging it baton-like, lashing air as with a whip.
I watch the exorcism from a bus, the motor idling,
the windows bottle-green. I’ve had my fill.

The drooping, dusty underblades of leaf
guard off-white convolutions afternoon will blacken
when it brings me to Seville’s Moorish limits.
His flower falls like a careless judgement on the town:

walls of swank marinas spooled with razor wire
behind which the coast glitters fitfully
contaminated by a German joint concern,
then dusty corner shopfronts, their comestible signs

tilted over mottled picture windows, in back some tapas,
seafruits, exorbitant beside undusted nectarine cartons,
peach, pear, pina, the winds from Africa.

II.

Wanderlust led them to Andalus
where aqueducts totter by orange mounds.
The Roman concrete is turning into sand.

Unmoved when advertisements peel from walls
or whitewash from imitation Moorish arches
gypsies mob the train station

in which a fretwork of schedules
wrinkle like seersucker fabric under glass --
dismissed by a single hand, a wrist-flick,
the flower-head, rolling like a planet -- benedicite.

III.

Rosettes in cathedral limestone
flowers that last, like stained glass

petals tracking limestone floors
regime upon regime,

unlike a cauliflower
in the hand of thief or farmer--

blacker convolutions
framing off-white effulgence.

IV.

It must be a beauty then -- why otherwise whistle
at world's-end, off-season Malaga, the apex
of this hotspot a park where black swans float
through reflections of public flora, coarse, orange,

beyond which hotels lean into the Costa del Sol
like stacks of beige cafeteria dinnerplates--
as if reflected by trick mirrors, or mirrors
in hotel lobbies, reclining from Torremolinos,
a coastline of drab, overpriced clipjoints,
tattoists, false oracles.

He leaps above
the virgin's sidewalk portrait
Euro-hippies chalk in, her lids marbly arcs
ephemeral as greasepaint. Her mantle's azure
fills the grid in. No one's invited to follow.