Nineteen
thirty eight,
 blue bay.
Seen
from beneath
 the umbrella shaded
hotel terrace,
the black hulled
ocean liner's late
monthly arrival
sets sea gulls floating high
to eye and eat.
Her low red
waterline seems
close enough to touch today.
From the grey
smoke stacks
a horn blast wavers across the heat
rising from the bay.
The teak decks,
tan above the white bulkheads,
hold an inviting escape.
Morocco,
the rocky coast
line harboring
a statuesque
twenty story
plaster arabesque
entrance to the city
at the waters edge,
painted
in the wash of the sand
and desert,
sends
scent faint chants
of Muslim prayer overheard
above the crashing waves
and spray.

A caravan
of covered cabin cruisers
and small boats
ferry the crowd
to and from the anchored sway.
The salt air
that time has bent,
like a Dalí painting
in a fractured frame across the beach
and the crowded marketplace
slows into the smell of camphor,
but I don't care.

The world will go mad.
it is its fate.
Little humans
coach nationalism
into an inferno
that war birds
in the sky will help
this orb to quake,
and I let
the banded
cut Cuban cigar
from Montreal deserve
the solace of humanity
in my grateful hand.

Leather boots,
in parts flamed blue, 
tell of the footsteps
leading to the sweet poppy
fields that will soon
flood the world
with its oriental
potentate.

Wide brimmed hat
sees the ice cubes clink
inside the think
of the cocktail glass
within reach of my hand
from where I sat,
and leaves all prurient thoughts
distill into the drops
descending in the condensation
that leave rings,
wet interwoven rings,
inside Gardel's
tango song,
Volver.
The song is everywhere.