Summer

Chamisso-Platz 39 x 29 cm

FINALE LIGURE*

Guess what comes from this place? Here follows the Birth of Pesto:

fresh basil and olive oil plus garlic crushed with a pestle

in a deep narrow bowl and

mixed with pasta then sprinkled with old parmesan,

on the table a fiasco of Vino Rosso di Toscana,

not a fine wine but a very robust one, yes, a muscular robust

wine of the earth rather than of the air—which is

doggerel a semi-poetic wine dealer might recite—

the stucco façade of the ancient farm house 

peeled back in places

to reveal

its original brick sub-structure,

decay does wonders for some buildings,

fireflies bobbing and weaving above the lawn

on hot summer evenings, sun-drunk boxers, the thickness of trees

and ivy hanging

heavily as if held there  

by the dark yellow and purpling light. Sometimes 

it’s hard to believe that we are a part of all this gorgeous stuff,

we sit back and try to be satisfied

with our good fortune but it feels like

television somehow, a story

belonging to someone else,

though in a way similar to us,

an actor mired in middle-age, say, walking 

through a cool, high ceilinged room

forgetting his lines, tripped up by a carpet,

knocking over an expensive vase, spooking the cat, and thinking perhaps

that decay doesn’t do wonders for most people, not in this life.

*Finale Ligure is a small town on the Italian Riviera.

 

 Vivaldi's Concerto No.2 in G minor "Summer" 3rd Movement
 Nigel Kennedy performs "a la Citadelle", 2005, France
with the Polish Chamber Orchestra