Date: Fri, 22 Dec 1995 13:28:40 -0500
From: Jlor@aol.com

                           "La chica piconera"
In the Museo de Bellas Artes I first saw you,
Girl posing for her portrait, picaresque flirt,
I saw you first in the cool dark room where you
live, in your patron's old whitewashed house.
You were the essence of Cordoba: sad, sensual,
beautiful, cultivated and preserving your ancient
flavor.  You were the gypsy girl painted from the
heart of your artist's appreciation of femininity;
of You I have dreamt ever since that day:
You were a copper-skinned-dream-maiden, leaning forward,
In white silken stockings drawn most of the way up your
partly exposed legs. You had shining black hair tightly pulled
back on your head in the stylish fashion of the Gilded twenties.
Torrential passion raged from the black depths of your
melancholy eyes as you sat:  posing, playing, flirting,
In that red-and-gold turn-of-the-century drawing room;
Your lips offering fullness red as pomegranates.
You evoked in me a blossom's fragrance: gentle,
softly riding romantic spirit,  inhabiting the night breezes;
Your playful and serious beauty enraptured me: Your pout
seemed to be caressing, soothing, murmuring, hinting, hiding, suggesting
little, light nothings.  You refreshed me as rainwater
gurgling through Moorish acqueducts, incessantly whispering
to my moss-green soul; you distilled in me crystalline
fantasies of perfect feminine allure in your innocence.
You have slipped away from me now; I couldn't hold on
to you as you faded from memory, just as handfuls of golden
sunlight would run between helpless fingers. How could I be
enamoured of merely your image, you picaresque gypsy girl
in a thin black dress and white silken stockings? You were
to me the cool statuesque smoothness of polished marble mingled anoited with
olive-oil; You were the Arabian legacy left as a flower for Cordoba and you
have long since haunted me, "chica piconera".
You are merely a painted image of a woman who once-was; a
lover in her springtime  before even my Mother and Father were born.