Nerves of darkness on hearts of strings,
that’s how you’ve described the state, the mind’s
clamber while the sun sinks into your swamp

of a backyard, and how you wished for rain
in Valencia where the July sun beat
hard on the drum-skin of your skull, like the thud

of the nightly fireworks. This Florida cold,
the land formerly of España, now a crimson woodland
of crumbling missions,

this swampland freeze preys on your nerves,
and you dream of soaring to Madrid and the Prado,
where you kinked your heart with Bosch and Goya,

and remember the bus ride back to baking Valencia,
the coastal breeze at least easing the lightning
of sweat on your forehead. Better yet, recall

a bridge spanning from one glass
building to another, and two mammoth-sized
lobsters reaching each to each across the half-mile

from the sky-scraping profundity of outsized
billboards. An aquarium by the sea in the dry
riverbed shaped like the sand crabs you catch that burrow

in the Gulf Coast’s shore break, your son digging
for them, bait shaped like the neurons
of the brain, each tied to the world’s

longest string that’s not string
but a nerve that reaches deep
into the darkness of your soaring.

Like you’ve imagined: a leap
from the skyscrapers of Valencia, through
the spidery trails of fireworks smoke.