or
THE INSIPID NARRATIVE
of
GINA AND MIOVANNI
The door was an absurd thing
Yet it was passable
They quotidienly passed through it
It was this shape
Gina and Miovanni who they were God knows
They knew it was important to them
This being of who they were
They were themselves
Corporeally transcendentally consecutively
conjunctively and they were quite complete
In the evening they looked out of their two windows
Miovanni out of his library window
Gina from the kitchen window
From among his pots and pans
Where he so kindly kept her
Where she so wisely busied herself
Pots and Pans she cooked in them
All sorts of sialagogues
Some say that happy women are immaterial
So here we might dispense with her
Gina being a female
But she was more than that
Being an incipience a correlative
an instigation of the reaction of man
From the palpable to the transcendent
Mollescent irritant of his fantasy
Gina had her use Being useful
contentedly conscious
She flowered in Empyrean
From which no well-mated woman ever returns
Sundays a warm light in the parlor
From the gritty road on the white wall
anybody could see it
Shimmered a composite effigy
Madonna crinolined a man
hidden beneath her hoop
Ho for the blue and red of her
The silent eyelids of her
The shiny smile of her
Ding dong said the bell
Miovanni Gina called
Would it be fitting for you to tell
the time for supper
Pooh said Miovanni I am
Outside time and space
Patience said Gina is an attribute
And she learned at any hour to offer
The dish appropriately delectable
What had Miovanni made of his ego
In his library
What had Gina wondered among the pots and pans
One never asked the other
So they the wise ones eat their suppers in peace
Of what their peace consisted
We cannot say
Only that he was magnificently man
She insignificantly a woman who understood
Understanding what is that
To Each his entity to others
their idiosyncrasies to the free expansion
to the annexed their liberty
To man his work
To woman her love
Succulent meals and an occasional caress
So be it
It so seldom is
While Miovanni thought alone in the dark
Gina supposed that peeping she might see
A round light shining where his mind was
She never opened the door
Fearing that this might blind her
Or even
That she should see Nothing at all
So while he thought
She hung out of the window
Watching for falling stars
And when a star fell
She wished that still
Miovanni would love her to-morrow
And as Miovanni
Never gave any heed to the matter
He did
Gina was a woman
Who wanted everything
To be everything in woman
Everything everyway at once
Diurnally variegate
Miovanni always knew her
She was Gina
Gina who lent monogamy
With her fluctuant aspirations
A changeant consistency
Unexpected intangibilities
Miovanni remained
Monumentally the same
The same Miovanni
If he had become anything else
Gina’s world would have been at an end
Gina with no axis to revolve on
Must have dwindled to a full stop
In the mornings she dropped
Cool crystals
Through devotional fingers
Saccharine for his cup
And marketed
With a Basket
Trimmed with a red flannel flower
When she was lazy
She wrote a poem on the milk bill
The first strophe Good morning
The second Good night
Something not too difficult to
Learn by heart
The scrubbed smell of the white-wood table
Greasy cleanliness of the chopper board
The coloured vegetables
Intuited quality of flour
Crickly sparks of straw-fanned charcoal
Ranged themselves among her audacious happinesses
Pet simplicities of her Universe
Where circles were only round
Having no vices.
(This narrative halted when I learned that the house which inspired it was the home of a mad woman.
—Forte dei Marmi)