I’d completely forgotten about the poem I’d written the day we arrived at lunch in San Polino after our hike there from L’Abbazia di Sant’Antimo in Montalcino (which, with the Gregorian chanting, the haze from incense and the swallows flitting, stone sill to altar, brought the movie Ladyhawke to mind). In future posts I’ll publish the photos of the abbey I took when I was living in the area – tempting as it is to do that now!

A part of me wishes I’d picked up my camera more often that day, though the imagery in the poem transports me into that sensory space as well as any photo I could have taken.*

One of the reasons I set my camera aside was this odd, new surging sense of living in the moment, observing “cleanly” without doing so the filter of a lens, “feeling” into it, and an attempt to capture it in writing as best I could. The landscape, though. The wine, the heat, the wind, all of it. The sense of being so completely contented in that moment. How do you encapsulate a dream in its entirety?

I’m drawn into memory through the poem, of the group being led by owner of San Polino, Gigi, through the cantina where he spoke of “whole libraries of yeast” used in the making of wine.
Libraries of yeast…
Our collective writerly toes curled in delight at that.
Afterward, we sat together at a table under a trellis of vines on a headland over the sand-hazed valley, eating local pecorino and prosciutto and drinking red wine in the sun with Gigi, his son, and our guide Christine. The Sirocco caught us up and cleared the table of bread and wine glasses. I still feel my neck burn in the sun.

I bought two bottles of San Polino Brunello, one of which I’d intended to cellar when I was back home. Instead, it would soon be opened in libation to the squiggle in my life’s trajectory.

*In the original post along with the poem I used the few photos I took that you’ll find below, together with images of our day that were taken by a fellow writer. Due to a technical glitch in crediting (something I wrote a whole post about about here, back in 2015) she later asked me to take them down.

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Il Sesto Giorno: LE CasaccE to La Banditaccia

First Published 15 June 2012

In these endless spaces
in between
i find a pied dog who sources amusement
from a stalk of wheat
and a willing hand

a chicken tastes
a sleeping toe

and the Sirocco’s
histrionics, her heated breath
smashing glass
whipping hair
can’t tear the laughter from our tongues

piles a windfall against my legs
some surfaces are bruised
and it is the dark of the bruise
where the fruit
is sweetest

In these endless places
into hidden places
church walls keep time
their geometry made steadfast
through the irregularities
of stones
that make the whole
a library of resonance
long after the chant
has left the lips

the pen poised
the page cringing beneath
there is the the self, there I lie
in the spaces in between

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