The wild fruit forests of
the Ili Valley, where
a tangle of apples,
pears, plums, apricots and
other, berrying trees —
hawthorn, rowan, the like —
hang on high slopes I see
in that geography
of the mind as sunlit
uplands; Jerusalem
and its depths and layers,
sun and stones and belief
which go so deep nothing
may be disentangled,
and how that farewell called
over the dark lagoon
as Daniele’s boat sweeps
out and turns toward Venice,
“Ci vediamo a
Gerusalemme,” can
encompass an entire
shorthand of desire: That’s
what I’m trying to find
the words for. Neruda’s
escape through the Southern
Andes; travelling north up
California, mission
to mission on horseback
in the days before gold —
It’s desire which locates
these places I have not
seen, journeys I have not
taken, on the mind’s map
next to that long lift from
Florence to Rome, pillion
on a Vespa, when in
an eternal present
we wound along small roads
around olive-covered
hills, stopping only once
for a cappuccino.
The rosy-cheeked driver
came from Argentina,
long before I went there,
and met other people,
who talked books and took me
on a picnic into
the Andes outside of
Mendoza, which had air
like the Napa Valley,
not far thinking as crows
from that high place of light
and leaves and the clearest
water; the children swam
before we went on to
the mission, and picnicked
saying, Just look, that’s life,
the dedication: We
three met so many years
ago in Padua
where this St. Anthony
had his shrine. Now that friend
has died. Yet it doesn’t
seem so as the boys climb
higher in the branches
overhead and dancing
light filters the easy
chat, the laughter, Sukie
always had us laughing.
A postcard on my desk
shows a subdued farmyard
where a red tree blazes.
Curiously, this painting
makes me think of Sukie —
maybe the tree’s ardour
reminds me of her hair
when we first met; I had
never seen so rich, so
silky an auburn, and
in Padua’s stone streets
she blazed. With her one saw
paintings in a fresh way,
even Gauguin, never
a favourite, one suspects.
Now there’s a traveller who
made amazing journeys
which pull me not at all —
and just what is it that
pours all its energy
through you, and pulls, and there
you are in a high fruit
forest where light filters
through branches of apples,
apricots, plums, pears which
catch your hair and tangle?
What lays the ground for play
between a single mind
and the fertile moment?
The priest sets his torch on
the small table which seems
the only furniture
in what feels oddly like
a ballroom; cavernous
darkness presses all round.
Someone told me I’d find
accommodation here,
and I do: the priest gives
me permission to spread
my sleeping-bag, but first —
I take a seat, relieved
and grateful, if galled with
myself, God, how stupid —
“Tell me,” he says, “what you
are doing knocking at
a sailors’ hostel in
Buenos Aires?” He might
well add, “at midnight.” I
too have been wondering.
There isn’t much to say.
“I’m ashamed,” I begin,
“I shouldn’t let these things
happen, not anymore.”
His face in torchlight might
almost be a portrait,
a person you would like
talking to — and I try
to answer his questions
honestly. Headlights flash
by the huge plate windows.
Lying awake later
on the wooden floor, I
tell myself this is it,
no more just — following
the moment, the feeling,
no more dreaming. Wake up.
Sukie’s just spent four days
getting to Taranto
and back. “Why don’t I learn?
Yes, lovely.” She accepts
a glass of wine. “It was
far too far. Yet” — her face
lights up — “there’s a magic
in getting off the train
at dusk into that warmth
and breeze, the piazza
alive with light movements,
people coming and going...”
Her words spin us all back
to that world still stirring
in warm and transparent
currents beneath the skin,
this sea which stirs, and pulls,
and may sweep us elsewhere
and back, so suddenly...
Sukie is telling us
of Taranto before
I ever hear of wild
fruit forests, and a long
time after that strange chat
painted on the dark in
Buenos Aires, but they
are charted together
on the map which never
stops changing, the real map,
which first took bearings when
a child was climbing high
into walnut branches
those years before the groves
fell to developers,
and we all came to pick.
Idea, design & development: Xavier Badosa (1995–2018)
The Andes outside of Mendoza, Argentina