In Praise of That Place

I feel alive here. As the poem says, let me count the ways…

I feel alive when walking through your stones. Through, you say? Yes, through. Your stones aren’t hard and barriers for me. They are but a sparkly, fuzzy mist, tepid, icy, loofahs. Unassertive, firm, loyal to the windy legends and the water, to the years behind and ahead.

Your stones are saintly masks that never fool me. They have ears for you, ears that turn away or stare. Your deafness belongs in part to Roi Xordo, a man or a king who refused to listen.

You are stolid and hard-faced. You say nothing out loud and I might hate you for that. I run my fingers over surfaces and imagine the purring beneath them. I discover flakes of gneiss or mica or both - I’m no geologist - and they are forever winking at me. I like that.

Your faces can appear anywhere on stones and my three-legged cat Polly. You know, I don’t usually like gray; you, however, are amazing. Your ashen shades, your blinking quartz, your dull shale - all masterpieces of grayness. To paint you as a mere blend of black and white is to douse the flame within, drowning you in gray or another color. I’ve seen that happen and it makes me nauseous. 

I want my stones unadorned, starkly crystal, naked, nesting. Displaying themselves in all their natural beauty and glory. I want your beauty to talk to me like it was yesterday, because I am listening.

I am alive when paddling in one of your more than two hundred greens, maybe made of moss cloth, leafy fabric, grassy silk. I know you softly and sometimes with an itch. Sometimes you grow loudly, though, and I accept that. Other times you weep and bend. That is hard for me to understand; the way I feel, you just seem so sad then, or maybe just alone. Maybe you are waiting for the loved one who was forced to emigrate in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Don’t give up hope, green; your loved one may yet return. I know you are still alive, like I am alive and feel it’s supposed to be like this.

You are green in so many ways and places: below, in the middle, up high. You shake and embrace and I must run my fingers along your blades, unafraid of pain. You have none to give and I none to take. I feel alive in your tree greenness, from chestnut to oak. Your stories grew and you grew and I have grown with you. It should not seem strange.

You are green because you crave water and water answers. You laugh with poetry and everyone who sees you wants to write poems back to you. Or novels or something similar.

Sometimes you hide things from me, but then you share your rabbit, vole, or stray cat. You drape yourself along bushes and branches; you hug hills until they can never come home, happy where they are. Then you comfort them.

You are green and make me feel alive so we can grow together. If you are, I am, and I’m certain of that because you clutch at everything that approaches you. Clutch them to your green center, when the growing happens. I understand how rain’s transparency paints you with your natural color. You need no acrylics or oils to be what you are. You are like the stones, which is why I like being with you and feel very alive.

When it’s just me, an Albariño, and any loves who might happen by, the same things happen. And they usually do happen by. I never plan to spend time alone with my Albariño. It’s a nice wine, often quite sparkly when held to the light, but it’s all alcohol and no talk and I really am drawn more to that.

Still, when I’m with you, Alba (if I may call you that), I feel clean and whole and can’t explain it. Maybe it’s your simple smile - different from green’s - as you regard me from your perfectly-sized glass. It’s a kind smile, in sync with the kindness of stones and slinking green, all of you intimating that you have an inner glow I need to have too. I won’t take yours; I just want you to teach me how, to have an inner glow of my own.

This is not religious musing, but you have that insideness - I call it that - and it keeps inviting me in. That’s why I find myself walking through stones, wandering through emerald fields, with a sun the color of you, Alba-Albariño. Living in your medieval corner was never in my plans, but now you are my thirst. I can never drink enough of your name.

When I know that I was going to be buried in the gargoyle on Fonseca Square, I felt alive. Albariño didn’t tell me. Let’s be clear: once interred, I won’t be dead, only eternal. I guess I’m intrigued by this particular gargoyle, which isn’t the only one in this place. It’s just the one I can get closest to. When I do that- get right up in its face and stare as hard as I can at its stone - then I really feel alive.

Really? No. What I meant to say is getting up close to gargoyle is unusual and the proximity makes it seem like we know each other intimately. That’s why I love you, Gargoyle. I call you that because I haven’t figured out a name for you yet, don’t know if you even need a name. Anonymity is your right, of course.

I’ll let you choose, although for now I’d like to shorten you to G. For Gargoyle. I feel like if I listen to you, you’re going to tell me things you’ve seen over the centuries and maybe I could learn from that. You seem wise, but perhaps a bit playful. Do you think are one or the other or maybe both? In what language should we speak? Might we need more than one?

I hope the part about my wanting to end my days “on” you wasn’t offensive. I was simply thinking of having my ashes thrown over you, not my corpse. It was my way of saying I’ve chosen you out of any other spot in the old city as my heart home. I need you forever.

I feel alive now, as I always do when walking with crowds, but also when I’m alone. But you streets all know I’m never alone because memories are people too. Memories are also a tiny spotted lizard with a pretty name, slipping through green. Or a golden cylinder of hay in Cabo, a hamlet few people can find but I can. Albariño won’t be at all offended if one memory includes Amandi, land of its sister. Monarchs both.

Happy and alive. That’s how I feel when I’m surrounded by sounds of the speech I need and must breathe: air I inhale with its syllables and syntax, trying to distribute it to the cells throughout my body, like a good translator. I want to be in the belly of it all, in the center of memories in skeins and knots and bursts of lightning that dampen streets and talking people.

Even if it never rained again, I would feel just as alive. I’ve lived here too long not to.