What I remember about Spain is Morocco.
We could see it from the balcony,
and the mountains there, nebulous and surreal,

reminded me of grammar, peaking
and stumbling, stressed
on their antepenultimate syllable:

esdrújula.
Víbora Libélula Pícaro

There are things I am trying to work through:

mountains or words,
abandonment vs. abduction,
the difference between dust and sand.

Bifurcation: things divide, they branch
like rivers, vector fields, two eleven-year-old girls
on their first day of school.

There was no body, not in our mountains.

And the twenty miles between these ranges
hold multitudes of gorse,

the skulls of small mammals, the Straits of Gibraltar.
I don’t know where she is,
how could I?

Keep doing homework, choose
between past participle and the future conditional,
pretend she was never there.

The walk beneath the New Year fireworks,
between Calahonda and Riviera del Sol,
only takes fifteen minutes.

Where along the way did she crumble?
Where did she become rocks and soil to be scattered
by a burst of wind?

Pico tropezón ido
Peak stumble gone