Cambridge

Saying goodbye. She will come with me.

“Where were you before?”, says Robert MacFarlane.

It is November and we are walking in the gardens of Emmanuel College. He has said he must introduce me to a tree. Before feels like elsewhere.

“I was in Oxford.”

I think this is what he meant. Where did you live? Where has your scholarship brought you to and from and how do they compare? Before I was in the mountains, listening to a song you wrote that is very important to me. That is why I’m here with you really. That is why I’d like to meet the tree.

Emmanuel students are sitting around the lake wearing coats. Even just sitting, resting, they look the kind of studious I have never felt. Oxford is a brash town. Royal, gold, and musical. Cambridge is light blue like surveillance.

“I was in Oxford too once.” He says. “When I was very young like you. They’re different aren’t they? Although everyone expects they’ll be the same. Oxford had those big hunks of meat hanging in the butchers.”

I tell him I agree, I agree. Oxford is carnal. Oxford is a man. A clever man on earth for the first time. And Cambridge is his wife who loves him but lives in a different house. She is meticulous and quiet. Like all women, she has been on earth many times before and because of that she can be unnerving to be around.

Robert MacFarlane laughs at this. He looks willowy himself, and talks like an angel. I wonder if these are the kind of things I should be saying as we approach the tree.

The Great Oriental Plane Tree is like centuries. It has trunks and roots that wave out of the ground to the end of the lawn. Look at that. Isn’t that wonderful. The way everything is stitched together. The way the petals smell after the rain. And that noise? That’s a celebration in the nest. Their babies are ready to fly.

Thank you for letting me know.

“Who has been your greatest teacher this year?”

The river Cam. My supervisor Gavin, who wears stripey scarfs and calls me “precise.” And Fiona Green, who saw everything in everything, and treated language like the spirit. She was the North node, Fiona Green, quiet with electricity. Exactly what I want to be. Except an academic. She said a Gertrude Stein quote once. “A sentence is draws and draws full of drawings.” I will not be sentimental.

It has been seven months since Robert MacFarlane left with kindness. Now it is June and I am here again. Sitting in the roots. Trying to see.

Before I came to this city I had faith that time and I were in cahoots. That any troubles could be brushed away by the force of us two. Going on. Now, older, but by very little, the same troubles I arrived with show no signs of shifting. I get more precise and they do too. We scale down together, like fractals in nature, like trunks, and twigs, and leaves on a Great Oriental Tree. If everything gets bigger by getting smaller, I will need reading glasses by thirty. My troubles are hundreds of years old and contain everything in everything. Because they are earthly and small.

When he left in November he started to run. Across the lawns to the poetry class he had to teach and was late for because he had been teaching me. He waited till he thought he was out of sight, politeness, but I could still see.

Robert MacFarlane knew not to ask where I was going. I will not be sentimental, but I imagine that, in his angel brain, he knows where I will be for after.

“Spacelessness is less romantic when it will have to be tamed. Sequencing a new home —setting parts in relation —exhausts the attention. That is the tax on belonging.”

This blog. October.