The View From The Hotel Il Nido

(This is one of my favourite poems. Some years ago not long after the death of my mother, I went to Sorrento and stayed in the hotel Il Nido - the nest - which was high above Sorrento looking across the bay to Naples. When we got there I rushed out to the balcony to photograph the view. I realised that part of the taking of images was to show my mother on my return as she had not travelled much. Of course she was no longer there and though I was at the hotel for a week I never could get the image I wanted because there was no-one who would see it. The picture above is of Vesuvius and Naples from the Hotel Il Nido taken at dawn.
This poem was published by the Blackmail Press in New Zealand along with a few others - www.blackmailpress.com/Index18.html.)

Looking from Sorrento, the bay
Flattens into a double-bladed axe
Astride my sight line to Naples;
Twin edges honed bright, shining in
The break of wave against distant beach.

Each morning the city emerges from the mist,
A grisaille: bleached and monotonous,
It is a model city;
Faking perspective and depth,
Cheating the taking and holding of a view,

Later in the sun shimmer,
An impressionist landscape,
it offers slabs of colour and shadow,
Stacked and angled defiantly against each other.
A new city appears for the day,
Teases, obscure and unknowable, before
Returning to the darkness spreading up the mountain.

And out of this art history my mother’s face suggests,
A shifting emulsion, rainbow oils on the water;
Five years dead she comes to me
In the makings of a face
Believers might con from cloud pattern to be comforted

At home I display photographs of her in rictus poses,
Suspicious, only the record of a moment in a landscape or room.
Held stiff, as if a lapse in concentration might discover her;
The picture and the person immiscible.

Each morning from the balcony
I have raised the camera and sought focus
I cannot fix these images.