Monday, December 4, 2006
(Musing on the way objects, people and environments quickly become caricatures of themselves as the media fixes them in the aspic of populism, led to this poem.)
Venice
Venice is a recumbent dead octopus engorged in the sun of a hot May day
Its tentacles rising and falling, bridging canals and submerging in a lagoon
Pinkly soft, offering itself, benign and bloated, without threat
To its Bank Holiday feeder fish, picking morsels off its exposed parts
It has the Borges quality of absurd paradox, a tenacious refusal to adapt
Despite the domino effects of time, a self-fulfilling prophecy of flotation
It only exists for the solipsism of its visitors, in coffee table books
In films and in lines of water-soaked verse. Central is
St Mark’s Square, a great bowling alley with one enormous skittle
Like a misplaced Diane Arbus close to one end of a runnel
Edged by exclusive terraced grandeur, windowed deathly open eyes
Blind to the liquid flow of human desire to embrace and know
Venice is not for depth, it is a metaphor for surface
A circulatory theme park, the antithesis of bone and blood
Whose cold carcass is caught in the voracious kiss of nature’s maw
Starting again with a clean bay, who would draw this profile now?
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