The House at Olgiate

It was another time, your little Tonino

still with you, and you in the high house

by the overpass. I would pick it out often,

that house, from the freeway, knowing nothing

of him, or of you, nor did my heart miss a click,

as later, as now. In that not-knowing our future

hid its hand: just so far the wires thread back

from tomorrow, then rupture.

How many years on did you let me in?

Your boy had long died (whispering

“Mama, it’s for you that it hurts”),

but I knew then your gardener, your kitchen garden,

your stripped teenage den – on the wall

a just visible shadow where a mirror had reigned.

I was wordless: in those rooms the least

breathing trace of you thralled me.

Much later, your goldfinch has warbled its last

in the shade of the tiger-lily I nurtured and left here.

Starved of any breath of you I stall before

squares of cabbage, old clumps of dust-freckled dahlias,

the custodian shuffling after me, no less bereft,

through wan corridors to your converted loft

where only the old moan of the cars seeps up

impervious through the gummy air.

And so our destinies ravelled, my lioness,

while you peered through smoked lenses

at refractory clouds, or down at spilt swirls

of detergent in the scummy Olona.

And unravel: your house in Friuli, unseen,

looms huge in my longing, the barns

where your childhood once ran at the future

full-tilt (even then!), and took wing.

1963