Don't listen
to what they tell you. My mother was

a snake charmer, she sang
me lullabies until I was thirty. I

only recall half the lyrics,
even those are half wrong. 

That moment when you search
for a name to match a face you

swear you've seen before?
That was my everyday. Mornings

were worst. I'd wake from a white
dream: flesh and the scent

of powdered milk, then languish until noon,
conjuring words to match it,

failing. Listen to me. I only
know of alley ways empty of goats,

of panic in the maggot lit dusk.
When friends asked me

to dinner, I ate in the doorway
just to fill it a while. 
 
You can wail all night,
your palms will still itch

in the morning.  If it’s lost
in translation, it appears in the milk

of my dream. Believe me,
you'll never find it.

__

"Lorca's Beliefs" came out of my reading the introduction to Lorca's "Poet in New York," written by the translator, who kept running on about Lorca "believing this, and believing that." It struck me as ridiculous. So I tried to define what Lorca might believe in, and got stuck on goats and powdered milk.