Mother
and Son
For
thirty years
the
two returned to summer on the lakes.
The
road from Florence was the same,
and
the villages little changed.
Across
the old town to the shore,
views
from favourite rooms remained
true
to sunny postcard photographs.
August
warmed Isola Bella.
A
tulle of peacock terraces frilled the pink palazzo,
but
already the azaleas faded north to Switzerland.
On
the garden table, a book of English poems
reread
until the spine’s weave parted
and
the pages fell in random patterns,
metred
stanzas shuffled with vers libre;
they
spoke the poems aloud, from memory.
The
ritual of the weeks continued
with
languid lunches in the copper light,
the
letters to the friends they shared
offering
insights of their time away together,
but
the news they posted mirrored each to each
in
careful, looping signatures.
In
the last week they travelled to Milan,
window-shopping
in the Quadrilatero.
They
admired the triumph of Versace’s lines,
the
noise of colour tailored to the human form.
In
the courtyard of the Palazzo di Brera,
the
shadow lengthened from the sundial bronze
and
disappeared beneath the colonnade.
They
drifted through museum art
from
Baroque to the metaphysical.
At
closing, an attendant coughed discreetly.
They
left discussing Carlo Carrà,
his
figures and objects bathed in light
somehow
remote from the pictured room,
frozen
postures where faces should have been.
The
mannequin reticence empowered the canvas
with
a fuse of expectation, a sense of urgency
they
found difficult to describe.
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