THE APPLE-TREE MEADOW The rise is steep, we don’t speak much walking up, it’s just a matter of breathing and sweat at one with the mud and the leaves’ mulch underfoot, on the winding ribcage of the path. Mud and stones and a relief for our bones when after the last brambles we emerge in the apple-tree meadow. The dogs, forced to stick, going up, to the narrowness of the path, are now dashing all over, a scattering of legs’ shots. Here in spring the apple-blossoms sprout like fists, like silent laughs. Here our skin breathes each gust of wind as if bathed in the prowling of a thousand eyes. You know how it would be great just to walk very slowly here and then stop, no need to go further, rest would be all in the grass where you can leave the shreds that you are and open up your tight cluster of dams and pour yourself over like a swarm into the earth’s veins, settled and unleashed under the sky’s palm. THE BIG LEAP Down the gravel path towards the big meadow where you for the first time saw a salamander- those blacks and yellows standing out while it slowly strove on its crossing- I throw the stick and think of my two dogs running after it, the younger, still very young, actually just running after her older friend, imitating her in everything like we all at a point have done, even before thinking- enjoying emulating an elder. I throw the stick and they rush down into the meadow. Soon it will be autumn, with less grass the meadow will look wider, open towards the mountain behind. So bare and wide then in winter. What I prefer. Wide like a long breath, that makes me think of more dogs in the future running after the stick, other dogs and another arm throwing it, not mine, painful and weak recently, a younger arm, stronger, not mine or not exactly mine, in this wider breath on the wide meadow, trying the right breathing to befriend the big leap. THE WIND IN THE LEAVES April storm, on the path downhill the gusts wind and weave into the beeches and hanging oaks. A light rain breathes, swarms of nimble drops, as if they were eyes, you feel the silver needles on the back of your neck, the touch and run of the sky’s skin. A single, vast cloud hangs, with a lightening in its dark palm. You know, walking downhill, the widespread shuffling, the busy breathing of this green that contains slivers of sunlight and a countenance so full of air and horizon that its seriousness is mellowed by its own trust. Here where your solitude has always been evident, in the waving maze of leaves, in the silence that sways. And you know that if you could choose the place to disappear it would be here. ROUTINE We are at the table and have just finished lunch, you are reading my poem. I stare outside, at the old huge banana leaves, at their slow waving, their vast green and their rust-like tips ending with a jagged black line. And behind, the yellow wall with stains whose shapes I’ve memorized, clouds that never change. You keep reading the poem, another possible asset sailing on foundations of silence. Then my stomach rumbles, as ever and you say: “What’s this?” and laugh, as ever. Time lingers with the banana leaves, while I am courting inside the words you are taking in, thin clouds’ strips over the silence.