The Lemon Trees

I just returned from a week in Florence. I am reeling. I am settled. Sometimes one must leave for a place the opposite of everything that is familiar to know what is real.

Florence is filled with art and poetry. Dante and Boccaccio, Bernini and Michelangelo. To see their work is to feel inadequate, is to feel inspired. To be drunk at 2AM in front of The Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna in the Loggia dei alters all your perceptions. The moon seemed full every night. I cannot write. I can do nothing but write.

To travel, to live in other countries, to speak with someone whose language is not your own, is to see the world from another chair. It is to learn how things smell differently, sometimes better, it is to relearn how to see and taste and think. Even if the experience is filtered through your own culture and biases. It changes you, not just for those few days, forever. You can’t help but carry something of the scent back with you.

For me, for me as a writer, going from place to place is crucial to my creative process. I know it is the same for others. Though not for everyone. Travel estranges everything, especially what you return to. When I returned from Italy, even wine and bread smelled differently. And lemons. I spoke with an Italian man about what I loved about Italian poetry. Most of all it is Eugenio Montale. Most of all it is his poem "The Lemon Trees." The man I spoke with knew very little English. I speak no Italian. But we both could say Montale. I pasted my favorite translation below in which the last stanza explains everything I’ve just said. Where the sight of a lemon tree can remind you of everything amazing in life, where the sight of a lemon tree can “blow your bones wide open.”

Listen, the prize poets stroll


only among the trees


with uncommon names:


boxwood, privet, acanthus.


Me, I love roads that run out


among grassy ditches into


mud-puddles where kids


hunt skinny eels; lanes


that follow field-banks down


through beds of reeds and


end up in back gardens


among the lemon trees.

Best if the birds' chatter-prattle


is hushed, swallowed up


by the blue: then you'll hear


- clearer in the still air – the whisper


- of companionable branches,


and catch a sense of that smell


that can't tear itself from earth,


drenching you in edgy pleasure.


Here, by some miracle, the battle


between one distracting passion


and another dies down, and here


even we who are poor
pick

up our share of wealth –


and it's the scent of lemons.

Look, in these silences


which things sink into


and seem on the verge of


opening their closest secret,


you'd expect once in a while


to uncover some mistake


in nature, the world's still point,


some weak link, the loose thread


that leads us at last


to the heart of truth. Eyes


rummage in every corner:


the mind seeks agrees argues


with itself in this perfume


that floats – as day fades –


over everything; a silence


in which, in every dwindling


human shadow, a troubled


divinity could be seen.

But the image fades, and time


takes us back to the din of cities


where you see the sky only


in bits and pieces, off up


among the chimneys. Rain then


wears the earth out, dreary winter


settles down around the houses,


light grows miserly, the soul bitter,


till one day, through a half-


shut gate, you see


among the trees in someone's yard


the yellows of lemons –


and the heart's ice melts,


and with their music


the golden trumpets of sunshine


blow your bones wide open.