When I Sing, Mountains Dance

by Irene Solà

It’s hard to come up with verses and contemplate the virtue hidden inside all things when the kids are crying with the shrillness of a flayed piglet, making your heart race despite your best efforts to keep calm.

And then she did tell of how she bound men so they could not lie with other women but only with their wives.

I bind you on behalf of God, Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and the whole heavenly court, and on behalf of Beelzebub and Tió and Cuxol, so that you cannot join carnally with any woman who be not your wife.

Some men’s tongues get stuck and just shrivel in their mouths, and they don’t know how to open up and say nice things to their children, or nice things to their grandchildren, and that’s how family stories get lost, and you no longer know anything more than the dry bread you eat today and the rain that falls today and the ache in your bones today.

But sometimes a woman feels like giving up on life. When lightning goes straight through a man like a rabbit. When a branch pokes a hole in her heart but doesn’t kill her. And then she’s forced to live.

She stops being the center of her own life, she’s no longer the sap and the blood, because they’ve forced her to renounce everything she ever wanted. Here, throw them all away, all the things you’ve ever desired, toss them into the road, into some ditch, the things you used to think. The things you loved. And look how paltry, how measly they were.

I don’t know what hurts more: thinking only of the good memories and giving in to the piercing longing that never lets up, that intoxicates the soul, or bathing in the streams of thought that lead me to sad memories, the dark and cloudy ones that choke my heart and leave me feeling even more orphaned at the thought that my husband was not at all the angel I held him up to be.

Up here even time has a different feel. It’s like the hours don’t have the same weight. Like the days aren’t the same length, don’t have the same color, or the same flavor. Time here is made of different stuff, and it has a different value.

Poetry has to be free like a nightingale. Like a morning. Like the thin air at dusk.

Poetry has it all. Poetry has beauty, it has purity, it has music, it has images, it has words, recited out loud. It’s got freedom and

the ability to move you, to let you glimpse the infinite. The great beyond. Infinity isn’t on Earth and it isn’t in heaven. The infinite dwells in each of us. Like a window on the top of our heads that we didn’t even know was there, and that the poet’s voice opens up little by little, and up there, through that crack, is the infinite.

It’s a melancholy poem. Because sometimes beauty leaves you gasping for air. I don’t suffer much, from sadness or melancholy, but melancholy, like beauty, is important for poetry.

Come here, Mama, we’ll talk to each other Of things that happen in the forest, at night, Of things that happen in the heart, at night.