Ferrol to Santander

Meet FEVE: neat, trim, a little funky.

It takes twelve and a half hours for four or five hundred km, but it's a gem of a trip. Never far from the coastline--for several hours of blue dazzle on this sunny day we are right on the coast--this two-car, narrows guage special slips through diverse countryside, from mountains to coastal flats.

A random list of its delights: a ticket guy who pats the empty seat facing me, inviting me to place my feet there (unlike the later ticket guy, who tells me to get them the hell off), tunnels and fog, pine and eucalyptus forest (and the eucalyptus scent of the hand cream applied by the curly-haired woman behind me), farms and livestock, freshly tilled gardens, cemeteries (always with the best view of the sea), clotheslines and fencelines, spectacular highway overpasses and gorges, station chiefs in red hats and red batons, rooftops and courtyards, blossoms, and the Camino de Santiago (the famous pilgrimmage route west--maybe that's why the area appears so neat)--all of this directed by a day-long sun that rises as we leave Ferrol and has just set as we arrive in Santander, right on time. 

Moure Reading

        Could there be a more interesting book of poems than Erin Moure’s new O Resplandor? This afternoon on the Praza da Independencia, Estrella in hand (although I set it down once in a while), let’s say no.
        With all the translating (broadly speaking) going on, any fragment of text appears as a moment of stone about to submerge in some field again (or, as Vigo Bay might say on his nautical map, as “rock which covers and uncovers”).
        As if the text is already translating at the moment of its writing, as if if this book publishes simultaneously in multiple languages, without changing editions, as if any one word operates within multiple trajectories, intersecting neighbouring trajectories just for the moment of this line, each poem a fresh heave, as if the poems are translating themselves as they’re read.
        And that’s just Part One, which delivers serious elegy content, yet so lightly rendered.
        This is a book to learn from.

Writing Time

        “Some things cannot be repeated,” I read just now in a list of phrases from Saramago’s Journey to Portugal I use for starters once in a while. What mystery in Hillsdale might Saramago’s statement lead me to, I wondered, writing it down. Around what corner, after which thirty steps, above the manhole on what crossroads? How many times, I wrote, echoing something I’d written many years before, must I walk down the street, to see what’s in it for me?
        Such deliberations didn’t even last as long as it took to write them down, thanks to the man with the weed-whacker and its short, noisy bursts below my apartment window in Vigo.

        It’s a heavy-duty model, which he swings in slow arcs back and forth over the uneven terrain down there, as if divining for precious metal. Seems to me I heard him yesterday, and the day before. I threw my spoons into the sink.  Hasn’t he found anything yet?

        Last night it was the dog, so-and-so’s dog who lives downstairs. It’s a placid and silent creature all day until about the time the Spaniards sit down for the dinner and the Canadians settle into bed. Then little Viper lets loose with an hour and a half’s worth of vibrant yap that pings off the concrete and through open windows and back. Repeating, after me.
        Now silence. The man carries his whacker away—a bit sadly, if I’m not mistaken.

Vigo Bay

        I went to school with a writer and guitarist named Noel Hudson years ago in Nelson, B.C., near the Salmo-Creston highway.  I think it was Noel who named one of his characters Salmo Creston.  Likewise, someone named a woman Emma Lake, many years later, and I borrowed my mailing address for a character named Spence Street.
        Here in the Spanish city of Vigo, the body of water lying right now in the bright sun is called Ria de Vigo, or Vigo Bay.  ¨Hey, that´s not a bad name for a super-hero,¨ I remarked to my friend Belen a while ago.  Nothing in her reply suggested otherwise.
        Subsequent developments have diminished the super-hero notion.  Yesterday, for instance, Vigo Bay banged his knee against a scooter parked on the sidewalk of lingerie shop near Praza de España, which he thus translates as Plaza of Pain.

       

Anecdote of the Last Night in Guimaraes

     At 6:40 I asked the woman in the gallery shop to join me for a drink when her shop closed at 7.  Quickly she said, "No, that´s impossible.  I have two daughters."  5 and 8, I guessed, correctly.  Later she told me they stayed with her mother during the day at her parents´ land 5 minutes out of Guimaraes. "They have rabbits and chickens and other small creatures.  The girls love it."
     The bulk of our conversation was about love poetry.  The other day she´d translated, most enchantingly, a love poem painted in Portuguese on a cup.  But here she was tonight saying any love poem is specific to the "personal situation," as she called it, of the two lovers.  I proposed a more general application.  She said, "Well, maybe," leaning forward quickly to claim, as she did two or three other times, with a touch of her hand on my forearm, that she was "no expert."
     I´m sure that everything about me revealed that I was no expert either.
     Now I´m at the restaurant, at a table for four.  As is the custom here, the waiter inquires with a "Just yourself?" as, assuming so, he clears away the other three settings. 
     "Yes," I say, then decide to confide in him a little.  "I asked someone to join me but she said it was impossible."
     "Well, sometimes it´s better that way," he said, most helpfully.
     I had the steamed asparagus and a steak.

PS  Wouldn´t you know--a beautiful young woman picked tonight to sing some fado about six feet away from me.

Stone Still

I meant to think, in the previous entry, about stone at home (where home = the southern Canadian prairie). I'm sure any farmer could tell us where the stone is (although my old friend who farmed just SE of Regina until two years ago claimed there were no stones on his land). Shelley Sopher and her work with tipi rings knows where the stone is. Coteau Books published Legacy in Stone ("Now in Paperback!") last year, a book of stone houses in Saskatchewan--plenty of stone in that book.
In Hillsdale, not so much stone--mainly the small kind you can pick up and huck. Or the broken pavement kind.

Stone

My home for the past week, in Guimaraes, lies within a UNESCO World Heritage site.  Not because Gerry Hill slept here, I don't think.

And not because two packs of school children on some kind of school trip have clustered nearby and stared at me in the last few minutes. 

I saw the school children yesterday too, different ones, playing a ball game in the middle of the Placa de Santiago, the medieval centre of the city.  On the old stones, the ball bounced like crazy.  Also on the Placa: high-fashion shoppers, smokers in the doorways of cafes, city workers, university students, local residents out for a stroll, etc.--in short, everybody.

We're all within stone here in this old city.