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.

For ere our biggest sin against God ’twas getting up every morn after they hanged us, and gathering flowers and eating blackberries.

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.

There is no pain if the pain is shared. There is no pain if the pain is memory and knowledge and life. There is no pain if you’re a mushroom!

The forest would be my home. Filled with good things and edible things and protective things and beautiful things. And I would search out other roe-deer so I would be a little less scared.

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. On its way to France. Or not. Or wherever it wants to go.

I sing like someone plowing a garden, Like someone carving a table, Like someone raising a house, Like someone climbing a hill, Like someone eating a walnut, Like someone lighting a fire. Like God creating animals and plants. When I sing, mountains dance.

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.

I will be the fertilizer in your garden, The tomato plant, the earwig, The endive, the ornery weeds. My heart, Mia, it is a stone. I will dissolve slowly, Like butter; with a hand rake, You will comb me into the earth. My heart, Mia, is a stone. A smooth stone like a longing, A small fist like love dawning. That doesn’t dampen, that doesn’t break, My heart, Mia, it is a stone. The house, women and men, our mother, The car, the dog, the TV, Sundays, All of it slides like a river, over my back. My heart, Mia, it is a stone. I have a weight on my chest, the memory of a quarry, Hard grief, sad poem. Sister-bonded to your own, My heart, Mia, it is a stone.

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.

Now leave me be, let me sleep in peace, rootless broods, rambling weeds, piddling storms, sad trees. More of you came, more always come. To make nests and to make dens and to stomp your hooves. To make green shoots grow from split trees. And my rock faces and my peaks and my crests were new lairs for you, my poor, miserable wretches.

Don’t make me tell you what will happen then, once you have all sunk your roots deep down into me, when your burrow is nice and comfy, loyal, and good to you, when you’ve guzzled my fresh water, when you’ve closed your little eyes, and you’ve named your offspring. Then a boom of blind violence will thunder down, much older than I, much more infinite than I, much less merciful than I. And it will exert new forces.

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.

kiss on the lips, and she kisses me back, and she holds me, and sometimes I’m like I was before. And other times it’s like that other me never existed, as if everything escaped through that hole in my skull.

And sometimes, when I get there, panting, she gently touches my forehead, and my back, and tells me I did good, and tells me sweet things I don’t understand but I do understand. And all her love is in that touch, and all my love is in my running to save her.

I won’t eat you, you trembling thing. Not even if I were dying of hunger and sadness. Not even if I’d just woken up from the longest winter and there was nothing left to eat in the world, no, I wouldn’t eat you even then. I just want your fear. Scream. Louder. Scream! We roll along the ground and shots ring out. I’m blind with savagery. Blind with spleen. Blind with hunger after sleeping so long. Blind from the blows to the head, blinded to violence. Blind from my savage awakening.

A lush and deadly spring that will reclaim what is due, allied with the bears, and reconquer the plowed fields and the stacked rocks. The weeds will undo your works. The green will undo your works. The trees allied with time, the grass allied with death.

You’ve hooked up with half the boys in this town and never felt a single spark. No interest in anything anybody here has to offer you. And this place weighing on you like a boulder, like a cow in your arms. Everything’s so small, everything’s all the same. I just wanted to be somewhere else.

you eat. If you can’t choose that, your life is half a dog’s. That’s why I don’t have a dog, and I do like animals, but a dog is a prisoner of his owner and can’t choose when he eats or when he shits. And on top of it all he’s forced to love him.

can just imagine them, in the car, all laughing and smoking and joking around, all that blood in those veins that’d never really known suffering, all that fun, and so alive. I think about the last thing they must’ve said before the car went all swervy and then, bam. A few moments of pain, a few moments of fear, maybe, and then that was it.

I know that already, that you’re sorry, but I don’t say anything, because it’s good that you’re sorry. Because you should be sorry about a number of things.

And now he’ll say some things. Things that lead steadily from one to the next, like beads on a string. The ones he remembers, the ones that light up like firecrackers when it’s time to say them and you’re able to say them. The ones that have to be pulled out, like onions. The ones that have to be said softly and the ones that have to be said little by little. The ones that burn. The ones that have to be said looking at the trees, and the ones that have to be said looking at the grass, the ones that have to be said looking at our hands, one on top of the other, and then looking at me. And I will listen. Then I’ll say some things. The ones I can. And then the day will break. First gray, then blue, and then yellow.