A travel in Italy II parte (POESIA) ~ di Jerry Mirskin - TeclaXXI

 

POESIA

Jerry Mirskin

A travel in Italy – Parte Seconda

Venezia Jacqueline Spaccini©2013

Venice

 

The essence of which is a delta

of lovers unfolding their fans in the great square.

Or the painted gondoliers, standing unmoving

as the narrow streets and canals curl

in perpetual rendezvous.  I waved at them

as they pimped their boats on evening’s narrow skids.

The local angels, poised above it all,

stepping with hard shoes across dark water.

On foot we coursed from one smooth stone

to another, from doorway to square and piazza

and with each step seemed to go further within

as if toward an inner channel, a smoother stone.

Venice is a middle earth for honeymooners.

The light at night, luminous in its small golden cups,

a valentine that says your heart is real.

It seeks its other.

I walk behind you and take a picture

as you climb a small bridge to our true life together.

Do you remember the gondolier who let me sing my song?

The shutters that closed as I climbed into my better voice?

As we slid evenly on the narrow skids.

Day was entirely different.

I remember the Jewish ghetto on the northwest side.

The emptiness of the square, and the light

that illumined a tableaux of men and cattlecars

suddenly soulless as dirt.  And then inside

the museum, the remnants.  A few candelabras.

A scroll. A decorated marriage contract

beneath which an old couple from Philadelphia

took our picture, and then left us alone.

And how with their going I felt so many absent,

until in that museum of loss I began to cave.

Do you remember how I pried at your clothing?

The thin veil of your blouse?  Tugging at your body,

grasping for crease, for sensual curve.

Intent as I sank in that ungodly history

on mauling you for all you or I were worth.

Where were the golden cups of light?

The standing gondolier?  The river of love?

I remember Venice.  The wonderful food and wine.

The canals and the cave-like light among

the buildings, which was perfect at night.

And how I felt as a newlywed that I was entering

another life as we stepped into the fan of human history.

But mostly how I came to my senses

when, away from everyone, alone on the second floor

of the museum, you gently pushed away from me.

Out of modesty.  Out of respect.

 

Returning to Venice

When, in the gondola of memory, I go back

I do not sail to the top of the Basilica

where the four steeds of time arch their wild manes

and snort and hoof eight hundred years.

Nor to the rivers of love, with the painted gondoliers

singing in horizontal shirts of spaghetti and macaroni

or any other words they know of flattery, like that sailsman

who said my singing was better than Sinatra,

but then to prove more English made distinction,

saying, "No, not better.  Different.” 

Not there, or to the court, the gardens, the goblets

of wine that blossom like tulips, so large the blown stems

are still blooming in the glassblower's vineyard breath.

Nor to the ghetto.

That is another time and place.

My destination is the small arched Bridge of Sighs

that from outside looks like an eyelash between buildings, 

across which prisoners in a room where there would be

no love or mercy were taken to the stone cells.

Crossing the bridge, they would look out one last time

on the canal and the piazza and further—

at the slops of light slapping the surface of the sea. 

The cells are there today.  Nothing else.

Just the stone and the emptiness. 

The stone, the emptiness, and the light that comes

from the walls as they perspire, cool and wet.

Which must have been exactly the way it was. 

For in the hard center in the inner cell, there is what was,

is, and will always be. 

Slivers of light on a cold wall.

Not far from the frozen horses.

Not far from the drama of new lovers taking off their clothes,

some for the first time in the small honey catacombs of light,

their luna del miele rooms. 

Each bare as light, each desiring to be born into the inner cell

of their own design.

Which, if one could look so closely, might appear

through the bars of consciousness as a shimmer,

a silky slick eye on a wet wall.

                                              Pitigliano CC Wikipedia

Taking a Picture in Pitigliano, Italy

 If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?
And if I am only for myself, then what am I?
And if not now, when? --Rabbi Hillel

There was a small synagogue,
built off the side of a hill.  The front door
was on the street, so when you looked at the building
you couldn’t perceive the way history would drop away
when you entered and looked and saw two flights down—
the absent congregation. 

They say that space abhors a vacuum. 
And the mind. 
I pictured the Jewish congregation filling the chamber
with their Sabbath clothes and prayer shawls flying
as they swayed in prayer before their most recent exile
hundreds of years ago.   

Prayer, as you know, is more than speaking. 
Praying with one’s whole body is an act to endow
in the word a place, a station. 
It is meant to align one’s life in time.

Afterwards, we strolled back into the present. 
Though I did not feel history waiting for us,
crouching in the alley to see what today might deliver.
After so much exile, one would think that time would want
to commence immediately-- be the urgent present.

For a while without destination, we floated free
with a few neighborhood cats, who were at home
in the curving streets, purring and arching
on the broad stone walkways.

When we reached the small-town square
I wanted to take a picture. 
I wanted a souvenir--an image of the end of wandering. 

It was when I asked two local men
if they would pose with me, gesturing with my hand
and holding up the camera, stirring us together
with my finger, that I realized my wandering
was not over.

I had not anticipated the sadness
that would form on their faces when I asked

if for the picture, I might place my place my arms
around their shoulders.

I had not anticipated my own sadness.
For how was I to answer
for a world that does not give without permission
the souvenir of simple affection?

 

 

Dante A.

 

O holy beloved and beleaguered

with the ache and with the heavy

how did it come to be that in the middle

of my small and insignificant

I did not suffer for love

of a woman who would not have me

but as fortune would have we were

sharing a bed in a little town by the sea

in a pension called Albergo Barbara, not far

from the pension of your own sorrows?

And not only sharing a bed, but let me say—

and not simply for the pleasure of saying,

but in honor of the sheets, which like all sheets

represent the white and timeless flags of lovers—

that as for the sharing, mio miglor fabbro,

she was friendly.

She was friendly as hell.

 

JERRY MIRSKIN 

BIONOTA 

Jerry Mirskin was born in the Bronx, New York, and has lived in California, Wisconsin and Maine. He has worked as a herdsman on a dairy farm, as a carpenter, and as a New York State Poet-in-the-Schools. He is a Professor Emeritus at Ithaca College and taught select classes at Cornell University. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, and he has presented his work and given workshops at universities, colleges, public libraries, art centers, and on public television and radio. He won the Arts & Letters Prime Poetry Prize for a selection of poetry.  His manuscript, Picture a Gate Hanging Open and Let that Gate be the Sun, was the winner of the Mammoth Books Prize for Poetry, a national poetry competition. As a result of that prize, Jerry’s first and subsequent books were published by Mammoth Books.