Peter McDonald

San Domenico

My road from the bus-stop
takes me up twenty feet of steps
between high concrete walls
infested with scrubby dust and wasps,
graffiti, litter-falls,
and everywhere, from feet- to head-height,
gouged and scored, cut left and right
with bullet-holes

from fifty years ago
worn-in and weathered, that will stay so
for another fifty years,
where lizards scoot and insects go
forth, and back and forth
from shade to sun, while no one sees,
busy all afternoon for centuries
in the hot earth,

as I walk a few yards
down a line of stunned or basking cars
and the silent hospital,
then gates, and their stone eagle-guards
that look straight down the hill
as they take the longest of all long views
on walking men, just small enough to lose,
who hug the wall

as shelter from the sun
that burns straight down without reason
in the day's dead part,
and go home for the afternoon
to wait in shuttered light
half-reading books already half-read
with fruit and water and dry bread
and no appetite -

my destination too,
where I wait it out, as I have to,
with papers and ornaments
I can look over and look through,
a pile of cards unsent,
maps, glasses, and a handful of leaves
I cut this morning from three graves,
a kind of present

to myself, part souvenir
and part memento mori, laid out where
they wait to age and dry;
in the few hours till I appear
again on this last day
I open and close old books of lives,
smoothing their pages, to fill the first leaves
with leaves of bay.