To Learn the Word for Cherries

Jimmy Bullis
September 2024

The following was initially written from the grounds of the castles at Duino. There are two castles alongside each other in Duino—the ruins of an eleventh century Roman outpost and the well preserved fourteenth century castle where Rainer Maria Rilke was living under the patronage of the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis when he began writing the Duino Elegies, one of the great works of 20th century literature. And so this half-essay, half-prose poem stems from the conflict of “the indescribable ‘being there’ of the poem,” as Rilke once wrote, with physically being in a place, connected by architecture and landscape, and separated only by time. To describe a place such as this directly would fall short. Nearer, maybe, is invocation, the poetic task of naming, and the invitation that words extend to conjure more than they denote. Architecture too can be an invitation. In the world building of the self there is a synchronicity possible through the creation of cultural touchstones.¹ And when those are superimposed upon the physical world or are themselves physical, our worlds can begin to merge.

1. This line of thinking stems from the work of Federico Campagna

Terrace View. Photo by the author.

To Learn The Word for Cherries

in all the world’s languages, one need only go to the terrace of the San Giusto in May and sit upon the western wall looking down towards the Adriatic, and while the beekeeper tends the apiary in the garden below, listen for the word’s ripe weight.

You know this story. And so you know what happens next. Tomorrow’s empty bus passes Miramare, glowing against the nautical twilight up the coast. The high strung lights of the ridge line, the stony beaches below passing out of time—broken rubble laden with figs, figs falling every other second, armfuls picked from the cracks by the waves, figs the size of nectarines, water clear enough beyond the sea wall to see the mass of them gathering and beating silently to life.

You follow them up the coast, pass through the gates to the double cove of the two castles that pries at this world from all others. The tower only half remaining in your own even as its stones collapse, soften and congeal, grow tentacled, swallow figs, gain the cloudy translucence of wax paper in water, assemble into a great clouded tapestry submerged from here to the edge of the world beneath this fortress that now stands only against time. On the return journey there is no gate.

In the turret, a square opening to the west where the water casts up a warm dancing light upon the lintel through the pine needles. To the east a circle framed by four equal, curved stones. A red ringed fresco, a harrowed face looking across the narrow cave to where once a companion sat and since has worn away. And the north open to the fishing village in the cliffs’ next nook, the billowing water lapping gently against the shore.

Farther, the ship building gantries beyond light a hazy warning. A ship the size of a city grows out of the trees. The nightmare of knowing gives unknowing its sails. You take after the birds. Take no note of the etchings of grief between land and water, watch in awe as the arrow survives the string and dawn cedes, once more, the day. 

***

Shallow water, rising tide, a bird borrows in you a lost page tucked in a scroll of leaves and lends this terrace of boughs. Two outcrops: elegy and reverie, the double meaning of your name, the tenor held briefly in the sea’s lungs, asking not what it means but what you will make of it. 

The wind from all directions likewise calls to you, when in the old tower swarmed with bees landing here even upon this page, hung gently in the air, gentle as the gull, for one moment and all eternity, only a name. 

Strange that in loss you first glimpse eternity. You cannot live without the dead, nor likewise the muted twilight in the mountains far afield. Nor a name in the absence of a stone fruit. Nor a voice where a grave won’t do. And so you stand where he stood, touch the stone still cool despite the sun, gaze into the empty distance beyond the sailboats and barges, shadows of fishing nets, and the failing arm of the coast, and you unlearn what you thought you knew about creation. 

You know this story. That which grows old grows new again: the fern from the stone steps, these countless wings burrowed in the nape of the cliff and the ancient castle, a millennium of death reborn in fields of jellyfish gleaming up and down the coastline, carved from the rock faces, and upon hitting the water sprouting limbs, growing milky and melding in a procession of clouds beneath the fisherman’s buoys, where from here is written every name. Where from here marks the coming of the blessèd isles. The sea of blood too has its god. But no distance and no time and no fracture ends this world. Only briefly words, and the strange hymn the waves make laden with cnidarians and cephalopods and the decaying implements of a past that yet here persists.

***

The nightingale approaches. You know better than to mistake what you cannot see as endlessness. The failing light veiled in clouds hides where ends turn over. A fig tree against the terracotta, a cherry tree against the sea, and the path between the outpost and the palace lined with flowers lit from a second sun. 

It rises downwind of the pine forests, notched between rock and water. Thistle and lichen, petal and anther. Aster hewn boulders, the whole face cloven by clover. A cursed rhyme to be of one mold irreparable and by another joined. What shades of this fresco are lost between us? What heap of broken images? Strange footholds, a nest in the mist—what must one be made of to be refined by fire? By time? None know, and still the nightingale approaches. 

It arrives. No measure has yet been taken that can mark the breadth of words. So what of endlessness. The pine bark scarred from last season’s rut, the riven stone settled, never to be reconstituted. These fragments on a shore of ruins remain fragments in this world. 

You’ll not be pulled together. You’ll not be reforged nor remade. You must become passerine, caducous, crepuscular... other entirely. Wade beyond the lunar shelf and float back to what you found here, in what was halved and half lost, the bony chapel cleaved in two, one half opening to the ocean where in these days languid swimmers reach for the outcrop with their voices skipping across the water and eventually decaying with you. The other half reaches from another world. And so you must have done, your words among the waves spilling beneath grasses and arid flowers, unwavering while the arched window to the south draws a pulsing wind in the radiant afterstorm of your arrival. 

***

It would take ten lifetimes to tire of tonight. The lights of the port rest against the final veil of haze to the north, the cargo ships ghosting the horizon, the crowds gathering in the wake of some other joy that does not belong to you. Who among them can know in that moment what they witness? It is no longer twilight when you reach the pier, but it has the feeling of endlessness. 

If ruin is a trope, we must go further to where worlds overlap. We scour the hills in search of something external upon which to place our most severe and unstructured longings. A tree or a tower, a thrush or a sound. And which for being placed on objects other than our own lives, may accompany rather than burden us who choose not to leave them entirely behind. At which point, you’ve achieved creation. At which point you’ve populated the dim path, which is no path until, gathering yourself upon it, you propel us somewhere—crumbled tower, the veiled lady of the castle, cnidarian, anthesis of ruin, and word after word after word in tow. 

This is the work of our artists and critics, and likewise our own work whether or not we intend it. We dredge our lives for ways of understanding what we see, but what we see dredges us in return. Streets and shop windows, one spinning the other through warm lights towards the water, the canal down to the pier, caravels ghosting up the coast. The mild distance flattened by time from the port of Monfalcone through Trieste and down the Istrian cape. Flattened in periplum circumscribing centuries about this coast. Forget the Cantos. They’ll not depart. The world doesn’t end. All the old masters gather upon your terrace expectantly, pleading only for you to ignore them—to finish your elegy and move on with your life. The soft pallor of your study, a dry and dusty comfort paved with books, from which you hear them laughing. Milling about the corners, gathering beneath the veranda, leaning on the wide stone railing out over the sea. The door to the underworld is not a door. It is a path lined with statues that leads to an arcade about a courtyard, a palladian stair, a warm drawing room cast with golden light beyond the piano from the terrace where one imagines endlessness while eternity passes.

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Jimmy Bullis studied poetry writing at the University of Virginia and architecture at Rice University. He was a touring musician for the better part of a decade and currently practices architecture in Los Angeles.

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