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Crossing to Tuscany - The Schools of Siena - Poem
Literary Review, Wntr, 2002 by Roderick Watson
Crossing to Tuscany Watching the cars go by the Motor-Chef --the white lights coming and the red lights going away--penetrated by my daughter's hair falling into her sleepy seven-year old eyes --penetrated by the instability of things.... Teachers charted atoms at school (like bricks in a builder's yard baked with dust on Helen's eye or weighted with trees and Wordsworth and all) they never told us we were the sky: bricks books yard school wall--all riddled with light or rocked on the airwaves passing through without a pause--like ripples from a stone dropped into the throat of the first well.... The motorway went to a place where Dante was waiting at the top of a round and rugged hill (everything so green) `Ah yes' he said `It is like that but later burns to umber under the sun. It comes close to us that star's face.' (So the symbols gather standing in the snow I keep to the back of my mind to make them out and know them as my own--like the children in a white garden beside a thin snow tower who wears a carrot for a nose and shares a coal-black ferocious grin with both of them and me and you.) Now we are south and into August. On the terrace above olive trees and fields of blackened sun flowers ants ferry crumbs across the files; at our feet they make a double chain as each one halts to check its fellow before it starts again: to and fro to and fro to and fro. Electric lamps burn at night memories wired to each gravestone outside the village walls. Rain spots fall from a clear blue sky. In the afternoon things stop. We try to sleep through waves of heat and thunder and lie apart in bed attentive to a cataleptic sky which talks only to itself in language of the purest force. Heavier and heavier we sweat and itch in the shade of old rooms with massive thwarted beams. We dream of reaching light and snow but tender dust drifts down to teach us after all how we go.
Roderick Watson is Professor of English Studies and Head of the Department at the University of Stirling and is also Director of the Stirling Centre for Scottish Studies. His poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, and he has published a book of verse, True History on the Walls. He has published extensively on modern Scottish literature and is editor of the essential anthology, The Poetry of Scotland: Gaelic, Scots and English. Watson also has been General Editor of the Canongate Classics series since it was established in 1987.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Fairleigh Dickinson University
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