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Capriccio with Ruins

Author: 
Alan Hollinghurst

Any day finds me gingerly climbing

over the moist tilting stones,

looking up at the broken architrave

and banderols of weed.

 

From the accidental pulpit

of slipped — and slipping — masonry

my view is surely Rome

of 1750, birch and elder

 

sinking their roots like nostalgia

into the crumbling vaults,

country types at business

sketched in the grassy squares.

 

Autumn: the cattle shelter

by this improbable arch,

their rough, mauve tongues

graze the strung-up salt-block.

 

I am scratching the name

and date on this rock

week by week; it looks

as if just dashed off.

From Poetry Review, January 1984