Water is a Cat.

cookie! cookie!
I'm down here!
Karl Malden looks down
the long empty shaft,
a blind man.

No one knew the daring George Washington in Granada
in 1763, but he spoke fluent Spanish, and had arranged to meet an emissary of the disgruntled Bourbon court of France through a series of coded notes sent through a courier which were disguised to look like poetry. With the Seven Years War now concluded, and the French on the short end of the colonial stick as per the Treaty of Paris, the time was ripe for the young nation to make its way into the politics of the old world.

Dressed completely in black, and shadowed silently by his faithful Berber manservant, friend, weapons expert and confidant, Idir, he had arranged to meet the French emissary in one of the larger ramshackle thieves' taverns which parasitically inhabited the aging ruins of the Alhambra.

Bats.

standing silently under a stony outcrop
Idir was left unseen near the open doorway
of a disused tower

this lone spot
was the only one
not thick with guano
from the tier upon tier of bats
which rose above
their rustling bodies
deep in sleep

with keen eye Idir
watched George Washington
cross the square
to hold the first meeting
with the emissary of the French court

but to his surpise
Washington was being approached
by two little boys dressed as beggars

the older boy
was none other than the 8 year old
Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac
and the 5 year old
Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy

cookie! cookie!
I'm down here!
Karl Malden looks down
the long empty shaft,
a blind man.

Karl Malden
is
George Washington.

I cannot tell a lie:

Water is
a cat of nine tales
of the Alhambra.


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