Charlbury, summer 2011.

What remains in the mind
is the spirit of the place,
like the memory of a face.
Made of a myriad
of rustlings, with rhymes,
like in the woodpigeons’ cooing.
How persistent they were
in their up-and-down calls
that seemed to say: “ What
are you looking for ?
It’s this the world.”
And the swollen, advancing
clouds like countenances,
the landscape’s enthusiastic
showing off.
Low and vast pervading sky
and land rising high
in neat outlines.
And the wind, the breath
of persistence,
that made the spiralling seeds
spill on the carpet by the bed
as if something of the living
land’s map
had to overlap.

The countryside a patchwork,
“rolling”, they call it
and what I felt was a hand
following a tune
and laying the land
as if breathing, from its palm.
The land then, but not her,
now she was not there,
she was the absence spacing in me
in the widespread green
like a sky in the wind,
while trees and leaves seemed
to hint at the under-thread
of all that was passing,
yes, nevertheless,
the woodpigeons’ coos like knitting,
in this longing, strewing
riddle of life.

Orbis 156

It arrived today. Found it as it happens on my doorstep like a windfall in the afternoon while going out and facing the tremendous heatwave of this late summer.
My poem "Commuter Digressing" is in it, once more edited by Carole Baldock. "Commuter Digressing" had started getting shape last year in this blog.
My work started appearing in Orbis in 2001.
A constancy of this kind, in difficult times, helps.

London.

Once more a connection with Dave King and his poem on London.
I was there last Monday, I visited The Globe.
Well, the brightness, the whiteness along The Thames by The Embankment.
The swollen clouds in their sky filling the view. Advancing and passing. Merry though slightly menacing.
Announcing and at once erasing rain.
Cheeks.
The wind.
The hundreds and hundreds sheets of poems filled by sunbeams constituting The Lion and The Unicorn.
A grey squirrel in St.James Park which seemed almost inclined on chattering.
The wobbling Millenium Bridge struck by sparks of sunlight and hands of running shadows.
The glass on glass on glass on glass in exuberant transparency on the ground floor of The Economist building.
And in a bar a fresh baguette with ham and tomato absorbing the light from the glass window.
While a woman was breastfeeding her child.
A queue of more than five hundred metres of people who were going to visit Westminster Abbey.
The ripples of The Thames, ever present. Like a mind.

The river inside us.

Bye

I'll be away from this blog for two weeks, I'll be in England actually much nearer, geographically, to several bloggers I think I've been in contact with...I was thinking about how much internet has diminished geographical distances...

On the other hand I am thinking now about the people I personally met in Venice and who I had previously known via email for a long time...how different after all they were from the image I had of them in my mind out of emails or websites even if I had seen their photos. Hearing their voices, looking at their live countenance and gestures...