Dove Sei?

Today, Franci, a barge with your name on it
brings you back sharp as a photograph.
I re-picture you exactly, brash figurehead
facing down the Atlantic, where it buffeted
the Cliffs of Moher, holding on hard
to your stripey hat.

I think of you now, holed-up in that satellite-town
with your tool-salesman from Novellara:
did you ever complete your laurea,
my improbable philosopher, your thesis on Truth?
Was it beauty you had, after all, or just youth?
– and have you kept that?

Are you scored with soured dream
and making-ends-meet and butting a pram
through the shopperdrome?
Do you hold on to hope?

I would have it that motherhood blooms in you
riotously, like a bank of azaleas,
and twice-married men made crazy
in your landlocked suburb buy ruinous sloops
to name them for you.

Philip Morre

By way of variation:
Donna Leon dancing with a penguin,
and vice versa.

Funeral Games

Scour your local charity shops for a copy of ‘Venice – Photographs by David Hamilton’ (Pavilion Books, 1989): the old child-peeper’s smeary shots are of no more interest than one would expect, but the book does contain a remarkable, if incongruous, introductory essay by Peter Lauritzen. Try this:

..It was also in these final decades of the fifteenth century – in the era when Giovanni Bellini and his pupils were inaugurating a Golden Age of Venetian art – that extraordinary ceremonies were being devised for the funerals of the Republic’s Doges as part of the vision of Venice. After the Doge had lain in state for three days, his body, swathed in the most lavish golden robes, was borne on a litter through the Piazza and along the city’s winding streets to reach the great Gothic church of the Dominican order, San Giovanni e Paolo. The most prominent of the city’s six great secular confraternities, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, led the procession. Its meeting hall had long stood adjacent to the church. However, it is seldom realised that the immensely wealthy civic corporation had commissioned a new façade for their building just at this time simply to provide a suitably grand backdrop for the ducal funerals. Mauro Codussi, the architect who completed the building, went even further by moving its crowning elements along the roof line towards the canal so that the entire composition would be centred not on the building itself, but on the first distant view of it from a small bridge over the canal which each of the ducal funeral processions would have to cross.
But the effect of these spectacular public celebrations of the state was not limited to the remodelling of one or two facades. The immense Monks’ Choir inside SS. Giovanni e Paolo had to be removed from inside the building in the seventeenth century in order to accommodate the vast catafalques that were erected to receive the Doge’s corpse during the ducal obsequies. These had become multi-tiered affairs, draped in silver-trimmed black velvet and decked out with literally thousands of candles. The Patriarch of Venice had to climb up several flights of stairs to reach the level where the ducal litter was set down in order to bestow his blessing on the dead Doge. Once the absolution had been given, the Doge’s body was taken to the sacristy where it was stripped. His golden robes would be distributed among the city’s religious houses to make up chasubles, dalmatics and copes: the golden liturgical vestments of the church. It was also at this moment in the sacristy that the reality behind these great ceremonies became apparent as the defunct Doge lay revealed as a straw dummy whose face was nothing more than a wax mask. The real Doge had been buried in secret even before the ceremony of Lying-in-State had begun..

Wednesday Afternoon on St Elena

Lùcia’s walking away in a white dress:
acacia, magnolia, avenue of lindens
block off snapshots of her progress
further off, and further, and further..

St Elena’s famous albino blackbird
lurks somewhere in these gardens: he’s shy
as if he knows something’s awry
- maybe he’d just rather be black..

Lùcia walks away under the lindens
and does not look back


Philip Morre

Poets Dancing - an occasional series

Much better were the parties in the studio of the Rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs. A selection was made. Here
were real people really trying to do something. A phonograph
was set going, and the guests danced to their hearts’ content.
Ford himself was indefatigable: a trifle heavy, but enthusiastic.
Ezra Pound was a supreme dancer: whoever has not seen
Ezra Pound, ignoring all the rules of tango and of fox-trot,
kicking up fantastic heels in a highly personal Charleston,
closing his eyes as his toes nimbly scattered right and left,
has missed one of the spectacles which reconcile us to life.

Sisley Huddleston – Bohemian Literary and Social Life in Paris
(London, 1928)

Robert Lowell in Venice

I think he was probably the most entirely cerebral person I
have ever known. His creativity was not diffuse as it so often
is with great artists. there were no signs that his talent spilled
over into other fields. He didn’t sing, didn’t play an instrument,
didn’t draw. He wasn’t a linguist. he couldn’t dance, nor did
he have, in spite of his unusual physical strength, any athletic
skill other than a puffy game of tennis. In other words all his
genius was concentrated entirely in his mind – a mind so original,
so perceptive, so finely wrought, that it seemed able to intuit
sensory experience without reacting directly to it. He could
discourse on music as brilliantly as any trained musician but he
could not hear whether a note was higher or lower when played
for him on a piano. He had only the meanest most rudimentary
grasp of foreign languages and yet he translated foreign poetry
brilliantly. He had an extraordinary sense of metre but no
physical sense of rhythm. He visited churches and museums,
avidly seeking out works of art by the great masters. Yet if over
there in some small chapel within a great church you found a
madonna and her infant sitting tranquilly as she had these last
three hundred years or more under a perfectly carved cupola,
touched by a beam of unexpected sunlight, and he found you
there almost hypnotized, moved nearly to tears, he would pause
to ask “Who is it by?” and if it was not by some famous master or
was simply ignoto, he would pass it by as though blind.
Once in Venice when I had become impatient with being asked
to locate yet another masterpiece – this time it was a particular
painting by Titian in the Basilica of the Frari – I said “Why don’t
you find it just by looking”. He didn’t like this at all and began to
cajole me into finding it for him, telling me I was being childish,
that Titian was more important than guessing games, etc. But
when he understood that I was not going to locate it for him he
intercepted a monk hurrying to his prayers and asked him “Dov’è
Tiziano?” and the monk pointing to heaven replied “In Paradiso,
speriamo bene”, crossed himself and hurried on. I was trying to
stifle my laughter when Cal asked “Is he a friend of yours?” Then
he appealed to me again. I was tired. We had been sightseeing all
day. I bolted from the church and made for the nearest bar. Still
trying to persuade me, he came puffing along behind me, calling
out “Wait! Stop this! This is a bad joke!” As we entered the bar he
suddenly gave up (for the moment) and ordered ‘caffè in bicchiere”.
That was one of his oddities. In Italy he always ordered ‘caffè in
bicchiere”. I never heard him do it anywhere else. Anyway, that
much Italian he had mastered. He had his coffee in bicchiere, and
I had mine in a cup. Afterwards, feeling somewhat revived, I agreed
to lead him back to the Frari. Once there, standing before Titian’s
great work, Cal without any embarrassment whatsoever, began a
discourse on its merit as a painting, on Titian and his times, on
beautiful women, on Titian and beautiful women, on old men, on
the works of old men. And as always he was riveting, funny, odd,
and completely, interestingly original and serious.

Esther Brooks – Remembering Cal in ‘Robert Lowell: A Tribute’
ed. R. Anzilotti (1979)

How it Goes


Someone has to be, in life, the minor hood
who gets wasted in the pre-title sequence,
“the little man in the yellow inflatable”,
the maid that screams…

I guess we would all bestride, if we could,
the narrow world like colossi; reticence
is what holds us back, surely: we’re capable
of prodigious dreams.

Yet on the vaporetto once, overheard:
“Lauritzen! you may be a millionaire, and I
a flea…” (una pulce, feminine) – shouldn’t I have cried
“Bedbug, where’s your pride?

Flea-men risk being taken at their word.
Blow your own shofar!”? However busily
siphonaptera circumambulate the walls,
Jericho won’t fall.

Now I like to think the screamer gets to squeeze
Bogey’s thigh at the cast party; in the rower’s
own mind at least, his inflatable’s bearing down
on Sword or Omaha.

As for the hood, I’m not so sure: some knees
are made for bending. Besides, he’s ‘gone over’,
as they say, ‘stiffed’ – and his widow about town
in a new fox-fur.

Philip Morre