When I Sing, Mountains Dance

by Irene Solà

The laughter unhitched me from the arms and legs and hands what’d been my loyal companions till then, and from the skin I’d covered and uncovered so many times, and it washed away the pain and grief over things that men can do to you.

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.

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.

Because it was my turn to be the blood and sap of all things. Because only joy lay ahead, down a wide and sunny path with thick-trunked trees on either side.

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.

The story of one is the story of us all.

There is no grief if there is no death. There is no pain if the pain is shared. There is no pain if the pain is memory and knowledge and life.

In the city we go through the motions with our watered-down lives. But here, here you really live each and every day.

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 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.

Mia has the equilibrium of embers, and it makes you calm, it makes you feel like laughing again, and drinking coffee, and makes you want the summer to arrive, and the autumn, or whatever it is that must arrive.

And all her love is in that touch, and all my love is in my running to save her.

And I’m sorry that sometimes being sorry’s not enough, like how sometimes loving’s not enough.”