Soft soft: listening to birds in Baiso

We arrived in the closing dark. Far from check-ins and QR codes, a yellow moon waxed over the hills, lacy cloud edges lit up with a glow made all the more supernatural by cicadas whirring in the fields.

In the rosemary-scented kitchen, I was very much inside someone else’s big house. An almond cake in a red, ribbon-trimmed box sat on the island. The label read morbida morbida, meaning soft soft. It was a kind of Easter cake named after a dove. Strange synergy, given my New Year’s intention to be softer with myself and my purpose in Italy being to eat well and write more elegies about birds.

There were boundaries, of course. Chicken wire and stone walls were peppered with succulents and cacti. The pool’s inviting edge. Sheer drops into the valley. The tips of the Apennine mountains. I found myself rising ungodly early, standing in fields to watch deer cross-step the ploughed earth, moving uphill. I got on with writing, my first words: this is, after all, what I am here for.

Back in my room, I noticed the desk was carved with a zigzag and a small but typographically pleasing capital G in black biro. For Gypsy, for Grief. G for silly Goose. Who did that? Between there and the garden, I spent most of my time with pages of Bewick and Brontë.

I packed the wrong type of charger and my phone died, so home felt further away, which was a kind of blessing. I spent hours listening to the birds’ familiar melodies, cuckooings and chirps. Some were squeaky-clean plates. Others chattered endlessly or made tuneful, flutey bellows. One beeped like central locking, but no car ever pulled in or followed it; just a plasticky chu chu, chu chu. David Morley would have known the bird, I was sure of that.

The first week flew by in lengths of the pool and hours on the lounger, watching blue jays. For once, my nail polish dried properly. Nicole-Rachelle showed me a photograph of Dominican ti kais and I wrote a poem about Garfield Tea. Poems about more things that weren’t birds started to appear. Monopoly. Bee stings. When the heat wore out my northern blood, I leaned into prose.

Morley’s new book Passion opens with a ghazal. I read ‘Ringing Swallows’, in which the birds clip the lake for a sip of water and a swallow swooped in to scoop up bugs from the pool. As ever, the lyric and the lived blurred.

‘Ringing Swallows’ by David Morley, read by Jo Clement

The whole place fluttered in cycles of which I was a temporary part: warm chestnut honey at breakfast, turns around the grounds, showered-off naps, lines of poetry, washing and swims. I couldn’t take everything in. On days we were served watermelon, the carved capital ‘G’ shouted Gaza, Genocide. Guilt. I distracted myself with new people and tennis, never all that good at either.

We drove to Parma for interviews with poet Wallis Wilde-Menozzi at the Ilaria Alpi Library. The petrol stations took a six-legged, fire-breathing black dog as their logo. I thought about my press, Butcher’s Dog, and how taking good care of things often looks after us in return.

The ceilings at Saint Paul’s monastery were grand umbrellas decorated with chubby putti clutching hounds’ necks. Araldi’s surreal fresco showed two bare lower legs, severed across the shins. Down a city alleyway, Fuck Palestine was spray-painted on the wall. I gritted my teeth. The velvety church took my breath, though its electric pay-per-prayer candles were much too kitsch for me. I sat on the steps, the pistachio ice cream cool and delicious. We missed the morning’s protest at the cobbled square.

Back in Baiso, the bird beeped more at night. I borrowed enough charge to juice up my phone. The Merlin app told me it was a Scops owl. I started to stay up later and later, listening for wing beats, words that chimed in the dark. A storm pulled through the mountains, lightning filling the trees and my thin nets in flashes. I imagined the owl hauled up on a branch, waiting for a break in the weather. It thundered right through. I wrote about small boats, Dover’s chalky teeth gnashing under the plane.

Once home, I started back up slowly, deciphering my handwriting, then re-drafting. The dog needed the park, where we all lay on the grass. The photographs on my phone were aides-mémoire. I showed him a Persian speedwell, blue and flowering. Told him about the poodle in the perfume shop wearing fancy leather shoes. Pizzas on the veranda. Syrupy drunk pears. The fish print on my bedroom wall. Street shrines to protect travellers. Everyone together, by the pool. The owl sat somewhere in the trees, listening back.

Jo Clement

Jo Clement teaches Creative Writing at Northumbria University.