Mas El Solanot

When you invited me to Mas El Solanot,

with its hydrangeas, hibiscus, vines,

you did not say that in the afternoon,

as light collected, pensive, in a haze

beyond the apple trees and fields of hay,

my eyes could go from fold to fold, along

the blue conceptions of the Pyrenees

until they turn to clouds, nor how the cliffs



of Castelfollit de la Roca hold

the houses on their shoulders, balancing

ideas of artefact and world—and how

the arches of the bridge at Besalú

dissolve against the evening sun, then form

again from shadows on the other side,

in Romanesque relief. And later, when

we had commended the paella, praised



your Catalan rosé, the darkness brought

the music of Albéniz, gathering

the high chromatic landscapes into sound;

And on an old Chilean disk we heard

Neruda in inimitable voice

declaim the soul of Machu Picchu, name

its stones, its hunger and its misery—

the glorious, enduring suffering



of man. I leaned over the window, felt

a stillness in the wind, the stirring rock,

as if the earth acknowledged our design.

You wove me in, a figure in your scene,

a word among your words. The evidence

is places in the mind—the painted mas

surprising me, the harmonies of line,

the mountains soughing in their leafy dream.