1.
Up close, last night’s beads of rain
cling to the underside of the railing
like berries to a vine.
2.
Is it still raining? How to be sure
this morning, if not for the tall
columnar cypress
so many plummeting
meters down, a solemn
sentry standing at attention
to everything that can’t be seen
by the human eye? Only
against such opacity
can we discern the soundless
drizzle, a mild
disturbance like midges.
3.
A blur of terra cotta
and ochre here and there:
while I describe it,
scratches a surface,
sidelines another heap of debris.
On a rooftop (so far from us
it’s a floor), a roofer
plants his boots on the tiles,
fixing the middle distance.
5.
From which the village climbs again,
receding from
the valley in switchbacks
(we can tell because
of that minuscule vehicle
ducking in and out of trees)
to scale the face of the first
cloud-haloed
mountain in a series
of mountains, each slipped
neatly behind the last:
ever-flatter and -duller
it comes out of sumi-e.
A Japanese- or Chinese-
Italian scroll, a vertiginous
landscape hung
in the empty niche
between the open French windows.
6.
When did the puddle
of rain on the balcony
chair disappear?
I thought I was looking.
Did it drip through the slats?
Evaporate? What?
7.
Sun picks out
the young olive trees
positioned widely in a field
with their new shadows,
as if gawkily waiting
to be tagged in a game.
And on the lake, finally,
all agitations, tremblings
longed-for are visible:
smoothed out on a counter,
cupped again, crumpled,
marveled at, lifted
to light; set aside.
8.
Behind the brooding,
regrouping humidity,
lightning
is assembling all our
slate-blue, shifting
late afternoons into one simple,
zigzagged, single-minded line:
not here yet, but
coming on schedule
like the ferry pushing
off from Varenna,
appointed to veer this way.