Plainwater by Anne Carson

Author:Anne Carson [Carson, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-101-91127-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-12-28T16:00:00+00:00

voice of wind in pines

makes the solitude familiar

who will do such waking for each dawn?

Sogi

Mountains: We have come over the mountains of León. It takes a whole day from light to light. The road goes winding, winding, winding up. The road goes plunging down. You understand these were words before: up, down. It is nearly my limit, nearly stupor, whereas he grows lighter and lighter as he walks. What is penance?

Up.

On top of the mountains of León is an iron cross. Here we stop. A wind whistles up one side of the mountains from early times, mornings, much too far away and still those mornings, down on the plain of León. “Somewhere down there we were hot,” he says. Somewhere down there we were drowning. I fall over on a flat rock and fall asleep, while he watches. Wolves come and go, browsing at my back. At sunset we get up and start down the other side of the mountains.

Down.

Gorge after gorge, turning, turning. Caverns of sunset, falling, falling away—just a single vast gold air breathed out by beings—they must have been marvelous beings, those gold-breathers. Down. Purple-and-green islands. Cleft and groined and gigantically pocked like something left behind after all the oceans vanished one huge night: the mountains. Their hills fold and fold again, fold away, down. Folded into the dens and rocks of the hills are ghost towns. Broken streets end in them, like a sound, nowhere. Shadow is inside. We walk (oh quietly) even so—breaking lines of force, someone’s. Houses stand in their stones. Each house an empty socket. Some streaked with red inside. Words once went on in there—no. I don’t believe that. Words never went on in there.

Down.

We circle, circle, circle again. Around each bend of the road, another, bending back. It is sunset. Look down: at the foot of the mountain something comes into view. Clustered on the water like wings, something shining. Something marveling at the float of its wings around it on the water—how they change and turn gold! That is what an evening was in the beginning, you once told me. Y la paloma volvió a él a la hora de la tarde. The photograph has been taken with the light behind it so that the two figures stand out clear against the mountains, which crush them from behind. They appear to be running—not because of the wolves who, as you see, are merely watching from this peak or that in mild curiosity. An effect of immediacy has been achieved by showing the figures close up and cut off at the knees. And the dove came into him in the evening.

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