At Christmas. Or perhaps those secret faces
Known to no one but me, slyly revealed
In repetitions of the wallpaper,
My tight network of agents in the field.
Well, yes. Any of these might somehow serve
As a departure point. But, perhaps, best
Would be those first precocious hints of hell,
Those intuitions of living desolation
That last a lifetime. These were never, for me,
Some desert place that humans had avoided
In which I could get lost, to which I might
In dreams condemn myself—a wilderness
Natural but alien and unpitying.
They were instead those derelict waste places
Abandoned by mankind as of no worth,
Frequented, if at all, by the dispossessed,
Nocturnal shapes, the crippled and the shamed.
Here in the haywire weeds, concealed by wilds
Of goldenrod and toadflax, lies a spur
With its one boxcar of brick-colored armor,
At noon, midsummer, fiercer than a kiln,
Rippling the thinness of the air around it
With visible distortions. Among the stones
Of the railbed, fragments of shattered amber
That held a pint of rye. The carapace
Of a dried beetle. A broken orange crate
Streaked with tobacco stains at the nailheads
In the gray, fractured slats. And over all
The dust of oblivion finer than milled flour
Where chips of brick, clinkers and old iron
Burn in their slow, invisible decay.
Or else it is late afternoon in autumn,
The sunlight rusting on the western fronts
Of a long block of Victorian brick houses,
Untenanted, presumably condemned,
Their brownstone grapes, their grand entablatures,
Their straining caryatid muscle-men
Rendered at once ridiculous and sad
By the black scars of zigzag fire escapes
That double themselves in isometric shadows.
And all their vacancy is given voice
By the endless flapping of one window-shade.
And then there is the rank, familiar smell
Of underpasses, the dark piers of bridges,
Where old men, the incontinent, urinate.
The acid smell of poverty, the jest
Of adolescent boys exchanging quips
About bedpans, the motorman’s comfort,
A hospital world of syphons and thick tubes
That they know nothing of. Nor do they know
The heatless burnings of the elderly
In memorized, imaginary lusts,
Visions of noontide infidelities,
Crude hallway gropings, cruel lubricities,
A fire as cold and slow as rusting metal.
It’s but a child’s step, it’s but an old man’s totter
From this to the appalling world of dreams.
Gray bottled babies in formaldehyde
As in their primal amniotic bath.
Pale dowagers hiding their liver-spots
In a fine chalk, confectionery dust.
And then the unbearable close-up of a wart
With a tough bristle of hair, like a small beast
With head and feet tucked under, playing possum.
A meat-hooked ham, hung like a traitor’s head
For the public’s notice in a butcher shop,
Faintly resembling the gartered thigh
Of an acrobatic, overweight soubrette.
And a scaled, crusted animal whose head
Fits in a Nazi helmet, whose webbed feet
Are cold on the white flanks of dreaming lovers,
While thorned and furry legs embrace each other
As black mandibles tick. Immature girls,
Naked but for the stockings they stretch tight
To tempt the mucid glitter of an eye.
And the truncated snout of a small bat,
Like one whose nose, undermined by the pox,
Falls back to the skull’s socket. Deepest of all,
Like the converging lines in diagrams
Of vanishing points, those underwater blades,
Those quills or sunburst spokes of marine light,
Flutings and gilded shafts in which one sees
In the drowned star of intersecting beams
Just at that final moment of suffocation
The terrifying and unmeaning rictus
Of the sandshark’s stretched, involuntary grin.
In the upstairs room, when somebody had died,
There were flowers, there were underwater globes,
After a long illness and long ago.
San Pantaleone, heavenly buffoon,
Patron of dotards and of gondolas,
Forgive us the obsessional daydream
Of our redemption at work in black and white,
The silent movie, the old Commedia,
Which for the sake of the children in the house
The projectionist has ventured to run backwards.
(The reels must be rewound in any case.)
It is because of jumped, elided frames
That people make their way by jigs and spasms,
Impetuous leapings, violent semaphores,
Side-slipping, drunk discontinuities,
Like the staggered, tossed career of butterflies.
Here, in pure satisfaction of our hunger,
The Keystone Cops sprint from hysteria,
From brisk, slaphappy bludgeonings of crime,
Faultlessly backwards into calm patrol;
And gallons of spilled paint, meekly obedient
As a domestic pet, home in and settle
Securely into casually offered pails,
Leaving the Persian rugs immaculate.
But best of all are the magically dry legs
Emerging from a sudden crater of water
That closes itself up like a healed wound
To plate-glass polish as the diver slides
Upwards, attaining with careless arrogance
His unsought footing on the highest board.
Something profoundly soiled, pointlessly hurt
And beyond cure in us yearns for this costless
Ablution, this impossible reprieve,
Unpurchased at a scaffold, free, bequeathed
As rain upon the just and the unjust,
As in the fall of mercy, unconstrained,
Upon the poor, infected place beneath.
II
Elsewhere the spirit is summoned back to life
By bells sifted through floating schools and splices
Of sun-splashed poplar leaves, a reverie
Of light chromatics (Monet and Debussy),
Or the intemperate storms and squalls of traffic,
The coarse, unanswered voice of a fog horn,
Or, best, the shy, experimental aubade
Of the first birds to sense that ashen cold
Grisaille from which the phoenix dawn arises.
Summoned, that is to say, to the world’s life
From Piranesian Carceri and rat holes
Of its own deep contriving. But here in Venice,
The world’s most louche and artificial city,
(In which my tale some time will peter out)
The summons comes from the harsh smashing of glass.
A not unsuitable local industry,
Being the frugal and space-saving work
Of the young men who run the garbage scows.
Wine bottles of a clear sea-water green,
Pale, smoky quarts of acqua minerale,
Iodine-tinted liters, the true-blue
Waterman’s midnight ink of Bromo Seltzer,
Light-bulbs of packaged fog
, fluorescent tubes
Of well-sealed, antiseptic samples of cloud,
Await what is at once their liquidation
And resurrection in the glory holes
Of the Murano furnaces. Meanwhile
Space must be made for all ephemera,
Our cast-offs, foulings, whatever has gone soft
With age, or age has hardened to a stone,
Our city sweepings. Venice has no curbs
At which to curb a dog, so underfoot
The ochre pastes and puddings of dogshit
Keep us earthbound in half a dozen ways,
Curbing the spirit’s tendency to pride.
The palaces decay. Venice is rich
Chiefly in the deposits of her dogs.
A wealth swept up and gathered with its makers.
Canaries, mutts, love-birds and alley cats
Are sacked away like so many Monte Cristos,
There being neither lawns, meadows nor hillsides
To fertilize or to be buried in.
For them the glass is broken in the dark
As a remembrance by the garbage men.
I am their mourner at collection time
With an invented litany of my own.
Wagner died here, Stravinsky’s buried here,
They say that Cimarosa’s enemies
Poisoned him here. The mind at four AM
Is a poor, blotched, vermiculated thing.
I’ve seen it spilled like sweetbreads, and I’ve dreamed
Of Byron writing, “Many a fine day
I should have blown my brains out but for the thought
Of the pleasure it would give my mother-in-law.”
Thus virtues, it is said, are forced upon us
By our own impudent crimes. I think of him
With his consorts of whores and countesses
Smelling of animal musk, lilac and garlic,
A ménage that was in fact a menagerie,
A fox, a wolf, a mastiff, birds and monkeys,
Corbaccios and corvinos, spintriae,
The lees of the Venetian underworld,
A plague of iridescent flies. Spilled out.
O lights and livers. Deader than dead weight.
In a casket lined with tufted tea-rose silk.
O that the soul should tie its shoes, the mind
Should wash its hands in a sink, that a small grain
Of immortality should fit itself
With dentures. We slip down by grades and degrees,
Lapses of memory, the vacant eye
And spittled lip, by soiled humiliations
Of mind and body into the last ditch,
Passing, en route to the Incurabili,
The backwater way stations of the soul,
Conveyed in the glossy hearse-and-coffin black
And soundless gondola by an overpriced
Apprentice Charon to the Calle dei Morti.
One approaches the Venetian underworld
Silently and by water, the gondolier
Creating eddies and whirlpools with each stroke
Like oak roots, silver, smooth and muscular.
One slides to it like a swoon, nearing the regions
Where the vast hosts of the dead mutely inhabit,
Pulseless, indifferent, deeply beyond caring
What shape intrudes itself upon their fathoms.
The oar-blade flings broadcast its beads of light,
Its ordinary gems. One travels past
All of these domiciles of raw sienna,
Burnt umber, colors of the whole world’s clays.
One’s weakness in itself becomes delicious
Towards the end, a kindly vacancy.
(Raise both your arms above your head, and then
Take three deep breaths, holding the third. Your partner,
Your childhood guide into the other world,
Will approach from behind and wrap you in a bear hug,
Squeezing with all his might. Your head will seethe
With prickled numbness, like an arm or leg
From which the circulation is cut off,
The lungs turn warm with pain, and then you slip
Into a velvet darkness, mutely grateful
To your Anubis-executioner…)
Probably I shall die here unremarked
Amid the albergo’s seedy furniture,
Aware to the last of the faintly rotten scent
Of swamp and sea, a brief embarrassment
And nuisance to the management and the maid.
That would be bad enough without the fear
Byron confessed to: “If I should reach old age
I’ll die ‘at the top first,’ like Swift.” Or Swift’s
Lightning-struck tree. There was a visitor,
The little Swiss authority on nightmares,
Young Henry Fuseli, who at thirty-one
Suffered a fever here for several days
From which he recovered with his hair turned white
As a judicial wig, and rendered permanently
Left-handed. And His Majesty, George III,
Desired the better acquaintance of a tree
At Windsor, and heartily shook one of its branches,
Taking it for the King of Prussia. Laugh
Whoso will that has no knowledge of
The violent ward. They subdued that one
With a hypodermic, quickly tranquilized
And trussed him like a fowl. These days I find
A small aperitif at Florian’s
Is helpful, although I do not forget.
My views are much like Fuseli’s, who described
His method thus : “I first sits myself down.
I then works myself up. Then I throws in
My darks. And then I takes away my lights.”
His nightmare was a great success, while mine
Plays on the ceiling of my rented room
Or on the bone concavity of my skull
In the dark hours when I take away my lights.
Lights. I have chosen Venice for its light,
Its lightness, buoyancy, its calm suspension
In time and water, its strange quietness.
I, an expatriate American,
Living off an annuity, confront
The lagoon’s waters in mid-morning sun.
Palladio’s church floats at its anchored peace
Across from me, and the great church of Health,
Voted in gratitude by the Venetians
For heavenly deliverance from the plague,
Voluted, levels itself on the canal.
Further away the bevels coil and join
Like spiraled cordon ropes of silk, the lips
Of the crimped water sped by a light breeze.
Morning has tooled the bay with bright inlays
Of writhing silver, scattered scintillance.
These little crests and ripples promenade,
Hurried and jocular and never bored,
Ils se promènent like families of some means
On Sundays in the Bois. Observing this
Easy festivity, hypnotized by
Tiny sun-signals exchanged across the harbor,
I am for the moment cured of everything,
The future held at bay, the past submerged,
Even the fact that this Sea of Hadria,
This consecrated, cool wife of the Doge,
Was ploughed by the merchantmen of all the world,
And all the silicate fragility
They sweat for at the furnaces now seems
An admirable and shatterable triumph.
They take the first crude bulb of thickened glass,
Glowing and taffy-soft on the blow tube,
And sink it in a mold, a metal cup
Spiked on its inner surface like a pineapple.
Half the glass now is regularly dimpled,
And when these dimples are covered with a glaze
&
nbsp; Of molten glass they are prisoned air-bubbles,
Breathless, enameled pearly vacancies.
III
I am a person of inflexible habits
And comforting rigidities, and though
I am a twentieth century infidel
From Lawrence, Massachusetts, twice a week
I visit the Cathedral of St. Mark’s,
That splendid monument to the labors of
Grave robbers, body snatchers, those lawless two
Entrepreneurial Venetians who
In compliance with the wishes of the Doge
For the greater commercial and religious glory
Of Venice in the year 828
Kidnapped the corpse of the Evangelist
From Alexandria, a sacrilege
The saint seemed to approve. That ancient city
Was drugged and bewildered with an odor of sanctity,
Left powerless and mystified by oils,
Attars and essences of holiness
And roses during the midnight exhumation
And spiriting away of the dead saint
By Buono and his side-kick Rustico—
Goodness in concert with Simplicity
Effecting the major heist of Christendom.
I enter the obscure aquarium dimness,
The movie-palace dark, through which incline
Smoky diagonals and radiant bars
Of sunlight from the high southeastern crescents
Of windowed drums above. Like slow blind fingers
Finding their patient and unvarying way
Across the braille of pavement, edging along
The pavonine and lapidary walls,
Inching through silence as the earth revolves
To huge compulsions, as the turning spheres
Drift in their milky pale galactic light
Through endless quiet, gigantic vacancy,
Unpitying, inhuman, terrible.
In time the eye accommodates itself
To the dull phosphorescence. Gradually
Glories reveal themselves, grave mysteries
Of the faith cast off their shadows, assume their forms
Against a heaven of coined and sequined light,
A splatter of gilt cobblestones, flung grains
Or crumbs of brilliance, the vast open fields
Of the sky turned intimate and friendly. Patines
And laminae, a vermeil shimmering
Of fish-scaled, cataphracted golden plates.
Here are the saints and angels brought together
In studied reveries of happiness.
Enormous wings of seraphim uphold
The crowning domes where the convened apostles
Receive their fiery tongues from the Godhead
Descended to them as a floating dove,
Patriarch and collateral ancestor