Macaroon 2 Poem by Morgan Michaels

Take, for example, this bit of tile from Toledo-
(not Ohio, silly, the original)
perfectly square, painted with laurels and glazed,
it, the side-line craft of the busy scion
of peasants who once tended tinkling sheep
on some out-of-the-way hillside,
for their wool, milk, cheese, or (horror!) mutton-
who shrugged off the war, braced for tourism
and with peasant savvy, entered production.
P'r'aps the blanks were boughten, p'r'aps not-.
the design- not exactly the makers-
but copied from one from Santa Maria de Talavera
where we intended to go but never did-
his (a mans' given name) scrawled
indelibly on the obverse: G, something, something, O,
something, something, O...'Sanchez'.
The hand is sure and deft, the design, apt;
the painter obviously having a near-Asian
veneration for tradition- not a bad thing, really.
Here it is, at, as it were, my elbow.
I look and seeing, taste the macaroon of Spain-
have in my greedy ear again the songs,
suck the salt from the almonds; my head
swims again with sparkling verse-
I feel the dithyramb of life
from just this chip.
It cheers me, these dark, sunless days
to think there is an 'other side of the world'
that can be summoned, in its glory
merely by setting a cup down on a trivet,
the power of memory to trigger human fancy,
the power of human fancy just so.