Seeing

Thomas Coryate-17th century English wit, writer,

eccentric and courageous traveller; poor, solo, and on

foot, he journeyed Europe and the near East, often where

only handfulls of his countrymen had preceded him

If it was water, Poseidon

presided, with his trident the flashing

axis of the picture plane, and water nymphs

symmetrically disposing their ambrosia-anchovy

charms from the lips of conchshell carriages-this of course

was Art in the 17th century. If

it was mountains, nobody noticed, or

thought to mention them, anyway-this

was 17th century travel. Mountains:

those "ugly obstructions." Coryate, that

irrepressible commentator on seemingly everything,

beheading blocks, the ostrich, "things that minister shadow"

(umbrellas), courtesans' veils, gondolas, formal gardens, wheat

wind wrote gold esses through . . . he

crossed the Alps by foot and horse and hired chair, and later

climbed Milan's cathedral towers with that jagged lavender

majesty just north, and never mentions them. So

seeing isn't constant. It takes 130 years

before the Alps are swelling "pregnant

with religion and poetry" -Thomas Gray (and later Turner

paints a roiling light-striated study of that very

Alps pass Coryate crossed with unresponding eyes) or

Gainsborough's thoroughly gentled-over mountains come

to look like landscape we could lose ourselves in

comfortably. Here's a tarp-sized pool

the midges grosgrain in landing. We swivel

our litre into its equally valpolicella-dark soil,

unfoil the chicken, lazy back and breathe

this air so light it rides all other

air's thermals. Cream air, cork air, air on top, this tissue

giftwrap air the world's in. Oh

but even as the mustard furze of lichen

and the sky-serrating backdrop run of scarps

supplies us context for a closeness, there's

divorcetalk in the air, not

large, not still and observable, no, but,

like the midges, hovering endlessly at the edges and

drunk on our sweat. You were this way and this way,

you say. No, that way, I tell you. The couple we both

agreed was so "political" that evening at the Morrises-you

meant "engaged in the public arena" and good, I

meant "relying on clout and gladhanding"-bad. What

isn't bad by now? Some capillaries pinch my cells

like raptor talons, I leave to go dangle

my legs off a ledge all alone, unpleat

these fists and calm the crazy threat of embolism

out of each stutter of breath. I want to calm

and do calm, see exactly mountains that I need to see

to calm: a deeply gray-and-magenta enduring of crests

the late sun lavishes over like yolk. In the shadow

of such, in the touch of this magnificent upthrusting

for the first time, Coryate saw and described

in amazement-it's their first description

in English-little tridents he'd found,

"a custom in all Italian Townes, they

doe alwaies use at their meales and call it a forke."

He tried fried frogs with it, and happily, but

for their blanket of cheese,

"which I love not so well as the Welchmen doe."