The twisted, bare branches
of the vines in winter
have something of the sea
and a memory of centuries
healing their gnarled amputations.
To see a vineyard, thus,
spread out across the earth
in neat little rows
is to look at stillness.
Or maybe it is patience.
The quiet, passive waiting for the inevitable.
The lurch out of silence into life.
July now and, though the base is untouched,
though there’s still the sea and an age,
still the same crippled shape in the branches,
an outside has blasted across the fields,
so green with the sun shining through them.
And from this abundant foliage, order,
at least to an exterior eye
which sees only one thing or its opposite.
Earth and objects only cannot falsify alone.
How easy it is to be happy.
And how easy to compare with snow
those fallen poplar seeds that covered
the ground towards the end of spring,
and so dry that, seeing soldiers
lighting fast, impermanent fires
like fuses to some explosion,
I, too, had to try and so bent
and clumsily set fire to a huge pile
which scorched a path
a yard wide across the grass
and burnt the hairs from your arm.
Later to step into the river,
not knowing that the seeds had spread
even that far, making it seem
more like the earth than water.
How much there is to give,
to learn about each other.
So much seems solid for so long and isn’t,
seems forgetting and is waiting.
So, slowly and with many deaths,
like the building of a cathedral,
it all accumulates, then disperses,
leaving time like a stork nesting.
But for towns, for cities, there is
not this hording of experience,
just monuments of cement and stone.
Memories can be found, of course,
An old wall in Logroño,
an aqueduct in Segovia,
but these memories are a comfort,
not a weight to be carried forward.
The difference between a mother’s kiss
and that of a lover leaving.
Strange how things live towards a point
which, when arrived at, nullifies
that which has gone before,
becomes the point from which its life begins.
The name Guernica does not mean
for many an oak tree, distant lords
swearing to respect the law.
It means either war or Picasso.
Life can only be built on levels of reaction,
extremes of light and measured darkness,
what exists and what is invented,
love where silence matters
and the sleeping world given in
to our far from careful keeping
when what there is in the head is too large.
We cast off the unimaginable and sad
and the intrusion of fact narrows
all boundaries to the certain,
growth permitted in one way only.
Ah, the half-truths of poetry,
the evasion, the huge deceit.
Near my house there is a mountain.
People call it el León Dormido,
and when seen from one side,
looking out from the city,
you can believe it to be so,
this lumbering, wind-modelled rock
really is a lion asleep.
So long as you never see it
from any other direction.
To make the journey happily
out along the dust road
or maybe even by train,
gripping a bag of grapes,
is to allow the truth and fact
to step into your present.
From one side the mountain’s magical,
from the other three it’s nothing,
not even much of a mountain.
Too much examination can be bad
as we invent what it is we wish to see,
invent, distort and fabricate.
But when we find what lies behind,
the truth is there waiting for us
like an eagle high above the mountain
casting its shadow down across a fox.
