This photo was taken on April 10, 2009 in Arroyo Grande, California.

“Times at Bellosguardo” -Eugenio Montale

O how fain in the glowing stretch there
that arches towards the hills,
the hubbub of evening grows,
and the trees converse with the petty
murmuring of the sandbanks; how clear
this life finds its channel there
in fine setting of columns, flanked by
willows and great
leapings of wolves in gardens, between the
fonts brimming
to overrun,
this life of everyone no longer possesed
by our breath;
and how a sapphire light is born again
for the men
who live down there: it is too sad
that such peace should lighten by glints,
and everything turn then with rare flashes
on steaming bends, with crossings
of chimneys, with shouts from terraced
gardens, with shakings of the heart and
laughing, long,
on the roofs, sharp-traced, between
the wings
of massed branching and trailing end,
luminous, which passes to heaven, before
desire finds the words!

Desolate on the rise,
foliage of the magnolia
green-brown in the wind
carries from icy rooms
of ground floors a distorted
excitement of harmony
and every leaf that shakes
of twinkles in the bush
drinks at every fibre
that greeting, and still more
desolate the foliage
of the living who are lost
in the prism of the minute,
the feverish limbs devoted
to the motion that recurs
in the brief circle: sweat
that throbs, sweat of death,
acts minutes mirrored,
always the same, refracted
echoes of the striking which on high
cuts facets in the sun and rain,
fugitive swing between life
that passes and life that sways,
up here there is no escape: we die
knowingly or choose life
that changes and does not know: another
death.
And the cradle goes down between the
galleries”