Ken Bolton / September Poems / 3.
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3 (The rooftop apartment) from Hvar Here I am on the balcony writing this line—the first page of a school exercise book. Am I ‘not very good at holidays’? Will I die not knowing—what a campanilé is for instance—not knowing ‘for sure’? I have got a considerable way so far without that knowledge. I think the would-be knowing term “campanilé envy” made the word no-go territory, for me. In Italy. But it comes back. Washing hangs between me & the church tower —the campanilé, in fact— the clothes 25 metres away (the tower a further seventy or so), the enormously tall palm curving just off true vertical makes an almost graphic dark line against the church—this last a pleasant, distempered cream. The palm stands a little closer —tho further back than the washing— # two dissecting lines , the bellying arc of the washing line, the swifter, more stable line of the dark- trunked palm. # Stains, of a ‘lobster-sauce’ orange-brown, mark the church’s features—a lobster sauce that has been sponged away that clings only in the delineations of carved & cut stone. The tower is beautiful. Each level, as it ascends, has more, & finer apertures & columns— an airier lightening effect while the overall square proportions hold: to describe it is too much bother, which is not what the church intends: holidays.
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