Sunday June 17th 2018
14.15 Wednesday June 17th 1998
Rosy rang to say that my father-in-law has blown a hole in his ventricle and it is unlikely that he will recover. He doesn’t know how serious things are, but the doctors were very grave.
He came round last Friday to wish my step-daughter a happy birthday and I took him to pick up my son with me. My father-in-law was very quiet and when he left at the end of the afternoon, I felt there was a strange finality in his leaving. He told me his car had only done 1200 miles. The exact details of his leaving blur in my memory. I remember saying something about the beauty of the flowers, or the weather, and thinking how life carries on, my step-daughter’s party, my son watching TV......
Friday June 17th 2022
Saturday June 17th 2000 [from The Guardian]
Casarola
Charles Tomlinson
For Attilio Bertolucci
Cliffs come sheering down into woodland here:
The trees - they are chestnuts - spread to a further drop
Where an arm of water rushes through unseen
Still lost in leaves: you can hear it
Squandering its way towards the mill
A path crossing a hillslope and a bridge
Leads to at last: the stones lie there
Idle beside it: they were cut from the cliff
And the same stone rises in wall and roof
Not of the mill alone, but of shed on shed
Whose mossed tiles like a city of the dead
Grow green in the wood. There are no dead here
And the living no longer come
In October to crop the trees: the chestnuts
Dropping, feed the roots they rose from:
A rough shrine sanctifies the purposes
These doors once opened to, a desolation
Of still-perfect masonry. There is a beauty
In this abandonment: there would be more
In the slow activity of smoke
Seeping at roof and lintel; out of each low
Unwindowed room rising to fill
Full with essences the winter wood
As the racked crop dried. Waste
Is our way. An old man
Has been gathering mushrooms. He pauses
To show his spoil, plumped by a soil
Whose sweet flour goes unmilled:
Rapid and unintelligible, he thinks we follow
As we feel for his invitations to yes and no:
Perhaps it’s the mushrooms he’s telling over
Or this place that shaped his dialect, and where nature
Daily takes the distinctness from that signature
Men had left there in stone and wood,
Among waning villages, above the cities of the plain.
• Attilio Bertolucci, the Italian poet, died this week aged 89.
Monday June 17th 2024
Saturday June 17th 2017
That's a cracking poem by Tomlinson (I haven't read him for years and thanks for the reminder of his work). Especially the ending,
"where nature
Daily takes the distinctness from that signature
Men had left there in stone and wood,
Among waning villages, above the cities of the plain."