I was in Spain in the summer of my eighth year, 1953, with my family. One of my memories of that visit is of carts of cork bark trundling by. One of the cork harvesters stopped his cart near us and I went over to look at it. The man said something to me that I didn’t understand. I said something that he didn’t understand. We looked at each other uncertainly for a moment and then he broke off a chunk of cork and handed it to me. I still have it, and it’s part of the inspiration for this poem. The poem became the inspiration for my story “The Saddlemaker,” which I think of as not really a story but a framework for a series of implied stories.
Here’s the poem:
A misty warm soft rain falling
on a bright umbrella in the village
where a maker of leather goods
in his shop observes the woman
under the umbrella as she stops
to watch a cart full of cork bark
trundle by on its wooden wheels
over the shining wet cobblestones
and the young man leading the donkey
in the traces catches her eye
and then turns away and clucks
and strokes the donkey’s neck.