For Attilio Bertolucci

Cliffs come sheering down into woodland here:
 The trees - they are chestnuts - spread to a further drop
Where an arm of water rushes through unseen
 Still lost in leaves: you can hear it
Squandering its way towards the mill
 A path crossing a hillslope and a bridge
Leads to at last: the stones lie there
 Idle beside it: they were cut from the cliff
And the same stone rises in wall and roof
 Not of the mill alone, but of shed on shed
Whose mossed tiles like a city of the dead
 Grow green in the wood. There are no dead here
And the living no longer come
 In October to crop the trees: the chestnuts
Dropping, feed the roots they rose from:
 A rough shrine sanctifies the purposes
These doors once opened to, a desolation
 Of still-perfect masonry. There is a beauty
In this abandonment: there would be more
 In the slow activity of smoke
Seeping at roof and lintel; out of each low
 Unwindowed room rising to fill
Full with essences the winter wood
 As the racked crop dried. Waste
Is our way. An old man
 Has been gathering mushrooms. He pauses
To show his spoil, plumped by a soil
 Whose sweet flour goes unmilled:
Rapid and unintelligible, he thinks we follow
 As we feel for his invitations to yes and no:
Perhaps it's the mushrooms he's telling over
 Or this place that shaped his dialect, and where nature
Daily takes the distinctness from that signature
 Men had left there in stone and wood,
Among waning villages, above the cities of the plain.

• Attilio Bertolucci, the Italian poet, died this week aged 89.