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11 Pisa for Mary de Rachewiltz I found roses at the DTC, no DTC, heat and dusty sunlight, an asphalt road, another. Brown hills not too distant, companionable. A field of dusty light in a plain between Via Aurelia and the closed horizon. “GARDEN/ROSES/GARDEN” English under a striped awning, the cheerful horticulturalist or security guard knew no inglese and no one, nope, named Pound. I was young, though I did not know it, am sixty as I write this. No plaques, epigraphs, nothing but unstaked tomatoes plump on the ground, roses healthy, roses blasted, some bronzed at the edges. August, chiuso per ferie, ambiguous humid spaces tracked between book and map, guesses, hints, deliberate misdirections, between a Roman road and a geological wrinkle. Neat in a row: corrugated warehouses, whiff of rosemary, breeze whisper, one pink scar on a line of brown hills. Mountains, let’s say mountains. 12 Can you see the Campo dei Miracoli from there, off to the right? No, yes. Which is memory’s shimmer? Seeing and seeing. Something like ashes in the tilting air. ...

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