Venice, 1969
On the Calle dei Fabbri, in ripening dusk,
I heard you coming:
glib old geezer almost eighty-five.
You passed my table leaning on your stick,
repeating in a whisper broken lines:
Nel dritto mezzo. . .
while I sipped espresso,
writing in a notebook thick with silence,
filling up a void with my own chat.
Frail grizzly red-beard, Barbaroso
in a wide-brimmed hat and velvet cloak,
you swished beside me
reeking of old wax and brittle parchment.
And the bells above San Marco beat;
Venetian side-streets folded on themselves,
hexangular in shadows, smoke-light,
lapping water, low-hung skies,
with claims and counterclaims
that trailed behind you as before
through rambling decades as you fought
for this or that lost cause,
some odd, some noble, some unhinged.
Cui dono lepidum novum libellum?
You asked a number of good questions,
wading into dusk through scattered passages.
You were still afraid of what-comes-next,
that room of readers, large or small,
no consolation for the motley decades,
what was said and done, undone.
You saw the silver underside of heaven,
writing in your cage through nights in Pisa,
shivering in black rain of your making
as you cursed the economics of another age,
that bitch gone sour, tooth and gum,
with profits taken though of course unearned.
It was not enough to run the numbers
when so many died—mothers and fathers
with their daughters, sons, in blood-whelmed camps—
Nel dritto mezzo del campo e maligno
and the pits were largo e profondo.
Ezra, dwindling compound ghost:
you never understood that God is everywhere,
and all vengeance must belong to him.