Returning to Italy, summer 2011

1. This is like coming home:
harvesting the good memories
of sunlight filtered through green leaves
of sweet silence after rich conversation
of the kindly night, warm and soft
through which the crickets send their scratchy song
under the pale half-moon.

2. To paint an Italian landscape
High high on a Tuscan hilltop
before me the intricate landscape
spreads to the mauve horizon
midday stillness
the small lizards scuttle into private cracks
between hot bricks.
From an unlocated source,
softly into the full stone tank
the unimportant water falls and falls.
Birds are silent.
Silver-grey of the olive groves
bright green of the fig trees, dark green of the pointed cypresses,
and the distant vineyards thin hairs of purple-green
combed out across the slopes
curving above Poggibonsi, Cinciano, Val d’Elsa.
Square campanile, fingers of remembrance,
mark every distant peak.
Receding into purple haze, range upon range of hills
each fainter than the former. 
Such sturdy quietness, such golden radiance.

Everywhere the white dust penetrates
gently blowing, impertinently present
a dry powdering upon the greens and golds,
muting the sunflowers and the terracotta roofs,
a reminder…

3. To paint the memory
Words surge unfailing, process across my stage,
bow, turn cartwheels, grimace, giggle,
begging to be selected, in order to survive.
Some of them old, wobbly, raggèd and patched and worn:
will have to be dismissed.
But the old may be polished stones
can be fitted into new patterns
re-arranged and threaded into surprising forms.
Fallibility fades, reassurance remains.
Voices of those I love
the words forever remembered
on and on and on into the silence