When magic was still in the air...

Auferstehung - Resurrection 27,5 x 23 cm

nach/after Piero della Francesco

HISTORY

History isn’t the music coming through our window—

Led Zep working out some Hobbit-derived obsession  

antiquarian in its own quirky way—and history  

isn’t the lilac-hued romance that Karin, warm as a muffin

beneath her feather-stuffed covers, is reading right now,

a story fraught with murder and pestilence and courtly intrigues

and troubadours singing rapturously of love and such matters

(that many of these wandering poets were gay didn’t

stop them from knowing what the girls might want to hear)

and it may not even be those gorgeous frescoes by Ghirlandaio

climbing the interior walls of a white-faced gothic church close to     

the train station in Florence, which are as close as we can ever

get to boarding a time-machine and actually visiting

the Quattrocentro, if minus the putrid odors

and public hangings—it is the art that survives, is all that’s left

of rumors of rumors and various vague confabulations

neatly reduced to the scholarly gossip of specialists

hoisting cocktails at academic festivals—try to

remember that even if you remember not to forget history, you’re doomed

to repeat it in some weird way. And so what if it’s “bunk,”  

as Henry Ford stupidly put it? We seekers of the olden days—another Henry (James)

called us “passionate pilgrims”—seem to need its tattered raiment, its half-forgotten song. 

Ramble on - Led Zeppeling