FEBRUARY BURNING

One Saturday in February we drove

from Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci airport

north up the valley of the Tiber

to Umbertide in Umbria,

a town bridging the river’s upper reaches,

and that had guarded the northern Marches

during the bloody and iconoclastic

turbulence of the Renaissance.

We passed Orvieto and Perugia.

The sun shone unseasonably unfettered,

emollient as a British day in late June.

Folk were sunbathing on the grassy banks

of the motorway service stations.

When we reached our hotel on the town’s outskirts

the air was soft as on a summer’s evening.

Next day, St Valentine’s, the cathedral’s bell

ringing for mattutino, the flat fields

of vines, where lovers and iconoclasts

might lie – between the curving river

and the long road south – were drowned in mists.

This month, that here always used to be bleak

and wet, has become a changeling. Years

after Umbertide, on another

Valentine’s, we sat on a council bench

beside the corniche in the lee of the Orme,

sunning ourselves like superannuated

terrapins. The uninhibited sun

burned through a haze of blushing coral

above Penmaenmawr over the bay.

Februarius from februum,

‘purification’ – perhaps like the heat

and the calm of love’s absolution.