Our chinablue-and-white tearoom
Shanghaied. A scroll wiped blank. A bone
Well of cold blood where the wits had been.
Broad strokes, deliberate,
Of character unknown—the Scribe’s?
MYND YOUR WEORK SIX MOONES REMAIN
Edict: head eunuch to his slaves—
Then, bald eye lidded, long sleeves billowing,
Rapidly from terraced peak upswept.
DJ massaged his fingers. Fun was fun.
The pencil in my writing hand had snapped.
Like something hurt the cup limped forth again.
Maya: GEE THEY PUT THE WHAMMY ON US
Maria: JUNTA Stevens: WHERES MY HAT
E: A DOOR WAS SHUT THE MIRROR WENT BLACK
We, no less bowled over than used up,
By mutual accord left it at that.
(Not quite. Next week we called him and he came,
But things were not the same.)
Jung says—or if he doesn’t, all but does—
That God and the Unconscious are one. Hm.
The lapse that tides us over, hither, yon;
Tide that laps us home away from home.
Onstage, the sudden trap about to yawn—
Darkness impenetrable, pit wherein
Two grapplers lock, pale skin and copper skin.
Impenetrable brilliance, topmost panes
Catching the sunset, of a house gone black…
Ephraim, my dear, let’s face it. If I fall
From a high building, it’s your name I’ll call,
OK? Now let me go downstairs to pack,
Begin to close the home away from home—
Upper story, lower, doublings, triplings,
Someone not Strato helping with my bags,
Someone not Kleo coming to dust and water
Days from now. And when I stroll by ripplings
A wingèd Lion of gold with open book
Stands watch above, what vigilance will keep
Me from one emblematic, imminent,
Utterly harmless failure of recall.
Let’s face it: the Unconscious, after all…
Venise, pavane, nirvana, vice, wrote Proust
Justly in his day. But in ours? The monumental
“I” of stone—on top, an adolescent
And his slain crocodile, both guano-white—
Each visit stands for less. And from the crest of
The Accademia Bridge the (is that thunder?)
Palaces seem empty-lit display
Rooms for glass companies. Hold still,
Breathes the canal. But then it stirs,
Ruining another batch of images.
A Lido leaden. A whole heavenly city
Sinking, titanic ego mussel-blue
Abulge in gleaming nets of nerve, of pressures
Unregistered by the barometer
Stuck between Show and Showers. Whose once fabled
Denizens, Santofior and Guggenheim
(Historical garbage, in the Marxist phrase)
Invisibly—to all but their valets
Still through the dull red mazes caked with slime
Bearing some scented drivel of undying
Love and regret—are dying. And high time.
The wooden bridge, feeling their tread no longer,
Grumbles: per me va la gente nova.
Gente nova? A population explosion
Of the greatest magnitude and brilliance?
Who are these thousands entering the dark
Ark of the moment, two by two?
Hurriedly, as by hazard paired, some pausing
On the bridge for a last picture. Touching, strange,
If either is the word, this need of theirs
To be forever smiling, holding still
For the other, the companion focusing
Through tiny frames of anxiousness. There. Come.
Some have come from admiring, others are hurrying
To sit out the storm in the presence of Giorgione’s
Tempesta—on the surface nothing less
Than earthly life in all its mystery:
Inflicting on it a fleet blur of couples
Many of whom, by now, have reproduced.
Who is Giorgione really? Who is Proust?
ABOVE ME A GREAT PROPHET THRONED ON HIGH
Said Ephraim of the latter. One sees why.
Late in his Passion come its instruments
Thick and fast—bell, flagstone, napkin, fork—
Through superhuman counterpoint to work
The body’s resurrection, sense by sense.
I’ve read Proust for the last time. Looked my fill
At the Tempesta, timeless in its fashion
As any grid-epitome of bipeds
Beeped by a computer into Space.
Now give me the alerted vacuum
Of that black gold-earringed baby all in white
(Maya, Maya, your Félicité?)
Her father focuses upon. There. Come.
One more prompt negative. I thanked my stars
When I lost the Leica at Longchamps. Never again
To overlook a subject for its image,
To labor images till they yield a subject—
Dram of essence from the flowering field.
No further need henceforth of this
Receipt (gloom coupleted with artifice)
For holding still, for being held still. No—
Besides, I fly tomorrow to New York—
Never again. Pictures in little pieces
Torn from me, where lightning strikes the set—
Gust of sustaining timbers’ creosote
Pungency the abrupt drench releases—
Cold hissing white—the old man of the Sea
Who, clung to now, must truthfully reply—
Bellying shirt, sheer windbag wrung to high
Relief, to needle-keen transparency—
Air and water blown glass-hard—their blind
Man’s buff with unsurrendering gooseflesh
Streamlined from conception—crack! boom! flash!—
Glaze soaking inward as it came to mind
How anybody’s monster breathing flames
Vitrified in metamorphosis
To monstrance clouded then like a blown fuse
If not a reliquary for St James’
Vision of life: how Venice, her least stone
Pure menace at the start, at length became
A window fiery-mild, whose walked-through frame
Everything else, at sunset, hinged upon—
When in the flashing pink-and-golden calm
Appears a youth, to mount the bridge’s stairs.
His pack and staff betoken those who come
From far off, as do sunburnt forehead, hair’s
Long thicket merman-blond, the sparkling blue
Gaze which remembrance deep in mine compares
With one met in some other sphere—but who,
Where, when? Dumbly I call up settings, names,
The pilgrim ever nearer, till we two
Cry out together, Wendell! Uncle James!
It’s Betsy’s child, whom I last saw—life passes
In a mirage of claims and counterclaims—
When he was six or seven. He confesses
He k
new me only from a photograph
As any stranger with an eye for faces
Might have done—faces being (a shy laugh)
What draw him, and vice versa: why enroll
In art school when all Europe—! And now half
Wishes to leave me, having bared the soul
Of an, I reckon, eighteen year old boy.
I too more sweetly from a pigeonhole
Not labeled Uncle coo—ma cosa vuoi?
If blood means anything, it means we dine
Together, face the music and enjoy
Strolling come evening like two genuwine
Expatriates out of Pound or Hemingway
Into the notoriously vine-
Secluded trattoria—no display,
Just bottomless carafe, and dish on dish
Produced by magic, and all night to pay.
Melon with ham, risotto with shellfish,
Cervello fritto spitting fire at us,
Black cherries’ pit-deep sweetness, babyish
Skins glowing from a bowl of ice, nonplus
My footsore guest, such juicy arguments
For the dolce vita. Though omnivorous
He rather looks down on the scene, I sense,
Or through it—not for nothing are we kin—
So that at length, returning from the gents’
To Strega and espresso, I begin
Offhandedly inquiring, like those Greek
Hosts who would leave the hero’s origin
A riddle—only after some antique
Version of the torture we call red
Carpet treatment was he made to speak—
As to the contents of that wave-bleached head.
Art, he reiterates (a quick proud look),
Is his vocation. Whereupon, instead
Of hem and haw, he proffers a sketchbook
For me to leaf through. Portraits mostly. Page
By page my pleasure in the pains he took
Increases. Yet pain, panic and old age
Afflict his subjects horribly. They lie
On pillows, peering out as from a cage,
Feeble or angry, long tooth, beady eye.
Some few are young, but he has picked ill-knit,
Mean-mouthed, distrustful ones. When I ask why,
Why with a rendering so exquisite—?
“I guess that’s sort of how I see mankind,”
Says Wendell. “Doomed, sick, selfish, dumb as shit.
They talk about how decent, how refined—
All it means is, they can afford somehow
To watch what’s happening, and not to mind.”
Our famous human dignity? I-Thou?
The dirty underwear of overkill.
Those who’ll survive it were rethought by Mao
Decades past, as a swarming blue anthill.
“The self was once,” I put in, “a great, great
Glory.” And he: “Oh sure. But is it still?
The representable self, at any rate,
Ran screaming from the Post-Impressionist
Catastrophe…” Bill paid, I separate
The cordial from my restless analyst,
“We’re really rats, we’re greedy, cruel, unclean,”
To steer him where a highest, thinnest mist
Englobes woolgathering in naphthalene,
“Dumb, frightened—” Boldly from their bower of Nile
Green plush The Signorino cannot mean
Us four sharp little eyes declare. We smile
Because in fact we’re human, and not rats,
And this is Venice. An Italophile
Long buried now emerges from me: “That’s
A good, simple façade. The Renaissance
Needn’t be judged by its aristocrats,
Etc.,” till my companion yawns
And scattered dissonances clang adjourn
Twelve times in tongues like Ages, Iron or Bronze.
Well, so we shall. However a wrong turn
Discovers where the Master of the Ring
Once dwelt, the same who made Brünnhilde spurn
Heaven’s own plea, ecstatically cling
To death-divining love, while the sky-folk
—Scene I, so help me, first heard Flagstad sing—
Touched by her tones’ pure torch, go up in smoke.
And here is La Fenice where the Rake
Rose from the ashes of the High Baroque;
And here, the marble quai whence they would take
Largo by gondola Stravinsky, black
Drapery snagging sun-spokes in his wake,
Moons waning in the Muses’ Almanac,
For burial past—see that far, bobbing light?
Wendell…? But we parted some time back,
And only now it dawns—to think I might—
Too late. One final bêtise to forgive
Myself, this evening’s crowning oversight:
Wendell was Ephraim’s representative!
HE IS AN ANGEL HE HAS DREAMED OF ME
The point’s not my forgetting—I’m a sieve—
To tell the boy in all simplicity
How, as to Composition, few had found
A cleaner use for power, and so maybe
Guide Wendell’s theme (this world’s grim truths) around
To mine (his otherworldly guardian);
But that our struck acquaintance lit no drowned
Niche in the blue, blood-warm Palladian
Sculpture maze we’d surfaced from, which goes
Evolving Likeness back to the first man,
Forth to betided lineaments one knows
Or once did. I lose touch with the sublime.
Yet in these sunset years hardly propose
Mending my ways, breaking myself of rhyme
To speak to multitudes and make it matter.
Late here could mean, moreover, In Good Time
Elsewhere; for near turns far, and former latter
—Syntax reversing her binoculars—
Now early light sweeps under a pink scatter
Rug of cloud the solemn, diehard stars.
Xrays of La Tempesta show this curdling
Nude arisen, faint as ectoplasm,
From flowing water which no longer fills
The eventual foreground. Images that hint
At meanings we had missed by simply looking.
That young man in dark rose, leaning on his staff,
Will be St Theodore, earliest patron
Of Venice, at ease here after rescuing
His mother from a dragon—“her beauty such,
The youth desired to kiss her,” as the quaint
Byzantine legend puts it. One could daydream
On and on outstretched beneath this family
Oak of old stories—Siegfried and his worm
Slain among rhinestones, the great wordsmith Joyce
Forging a snake that swallows its own tail…
Ringed round by fire or water, their women sleep.
And now St Theodore. Grown up, he will
Destroy a temple to the Magna Mater,
And his remains still cause electric storms
In our day. As for the victim, flood-green, flash-
Violet coils translated into landscape
Blocked the cave mouth, till Gabriel himself
Condescended to divert the stream
And free the lady (nude still, and with a child
Who needs explaining). This will be why the foreground
Is now a miniature wilderness
Where the mute hermit slithers to his cleft,
And why the dragon has been relegated
To a motif above a distant portal.
All of which lights up, as scholarship
Now and then does, a matter hitherto
Overpainted—the absence from these pages
Of my own mother. Because of course she’s here
Throughout, the breath drawn after every line,
Essential to its making as to mine;
Here no less in Maya’s prodigality
Than in Joanna’s fuming—or is she
The last gasp of my dragon? I think so:
My mother gave up cigarettes years ago
(And has been, letters tell, conspicuously
Alive and kicking in a neighbor’s pool
All autumn, while singsong voices, taped, unreel,
Dictating underwater calisthenics).
The novel would have ended with surveyors
Sighting and measuring upstream from the falls.
A dam projected. The pueblo elders
Have given in, not that they had much choice.
Next year there’ll be no waterfall, no stream
Running through Matt and Lucy’s land. They’re lucky,
A Department man explains. Communities
Three or four miles West will be submerged.
On the bright side, it means a power station,
Light all through the valley. “Light,” he repeats,
Since the old husband shakes his head. And she:
“Oh…light!”—falsely effusive, not to belittle
Any redress so royal, so…Words fail her.
What did I once think those two would feel?