You enter Lorca’s landscape almost without noticing. The moon is already there, the water dark beneath it, a guitar sounding somewhere beyond the edge of things, carrying a sadness that seems to have no particular owner.
The night is full of things that remain themselves and yet seem to have acquired another life. A road loses its destination. A horse passes through the darkness carrying something you cannot see. The colour green returns, luminous and strange, until it begins to feel less like a colour than a memory of one.
Nothing quite settles.
Perhaps this is why the poems can feel so close to dreaming. You recognise the world, but its arrangements have become uncertain. A courtyard, a river, a body, a flower, the moon above a roof. Everything is familiar enough to touch, yet something has moved while you were looking away.
Beauty is never far from disappearance. It lingers in the evening light, in the body, in water, in the voice of the guitar. Desire and loss seem to occupy the same room without needing to speak to one another.
You don’t necessarily ask what the images mean.
You stay with them.
The guitar continues somewhere in the darkness. The river moves through the night. Green appears again, impossibly vivid, and then seems to recede.
Perhaps there are places in poetry, as there are in dreams, where attention is enough. Nothing needs to be resolved. The image can remain open, carrying its small disturbance into the waking world.
And somewhere beyond the landscape, something is still awake.
Notitia
To attend is to remain close to what has not yet revealed itself.
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