Just the two of us

Just the two of us - acrylic on canvas - 120 x 120 x 2 cm (47.24 x 47.24 x 0.78 in) c/o Karin Goeppert

PACKAGE TOUR

Another warm 

day in Sorrento

a couple of decades ago.

Followed by another. There were precisely

fourteen in total. Slow days

of alcoholic contemplation, out by the pool

drinking Tears of Christ, the cheapest

wine available, grapes grown on the slopes of Vesuvius.

Maybe a thousand

olive trees, I wouldn’t lie. And a Roman

bath with squirting phallic graffiti

all over its ruined walls. “Italians,”

my wife said, “apparently really love dick.”

We began to see cocks everywhere—in chalk

on brick walls, spray painted, even in

what seemed to be toothpaste—

Amalfi, Positano, later in Naples. Such over

compensation understandable

perhaps in a psychic matriarchy, the realm of Mama Mia.

“Despised and rejected,”

said the Dutch art

historian—quoting from Handel’s Messiah—

a reluctantly gay man

recently dumped by a long-time lover;

embarrassed by his life

he couldn’t stop talking about it.

We travelled over to Ravello

with him one day—he gleefully

clapping his hands, hoping we’d

bump into Gore Vidal

buying tomatoes and prosciutto crudo—

where he downed three beers

in thirty-minutes flat

then wobbled off to the bus

and waited for us there. Sadness

nearly geographic in its magnitude.

Death Valley, the Empty Quarter.

We knew him precisely fourteen days.

Breakfast and dinner included.  With a partial sea view.  

She came with Flowers in her Arms

 

She came with Flowers in her Arms 46,5 x 62 cm mixed media on paper

HAVE YOU HEARD THE ONE ABOUT

There are three interestingly feral  

angels sauntering up a suburban street,

flapping their Caravaggio pigeon wings,

clawing the air with dirty fingernails, and the

first one says, “Honey, get your big fat booty    

outta my face,” and the second one says, “Knock knock….”

and a nervous housewife, staring

out her kitchen window at the third angel

a hunk worthy of daytime TV she thinks

oh yum, calls the SWAT team anyway.

Three angels screaming BITCH! all the

way to the holding tank.

Basta, says the judge, you’re going down.

In a year, if they survive incarceration,

one of them will be selling mobile phones 

out the back of his vintage Toyota.

The other two, like you and me, saying nothing

or blathering incoherently, are barely managing

the daily shit storm. Are comparing tattoos in a motel room

for fun and profit. Nothing is against their religion anymore.

Even the people we think of as good, or at least ethical,

rare and tender, their innocence buckling

under the weight of soul-altering cocktails,

stare in wonder at what their words have wrought. 

Venice Revisited

Redwood 60 x 50 cm acryl on canvas c/o Karin Goeppert

CAMPO DEI FRARI

Ignoring a swarm of super cute Japanese snap shooters

aesthetes come and go talking of Carpaccio, but they

aren’t dragging their surfboards and their knuckles

behind them, because we are not in Venice, Ca.,

we’re in the other Venice, the one where rising water soaks

sneakers in a heartbeat. Shoppers jostle our unquiet appetites 

and we theirs, each of us in a frantic search for artifacts. I buy a pair

of black dress shoes in a shop the size of a closet. I look at pictures by

Titian and Bellini in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. I eat overpriced,

not very good pizza. I think about my apartment in Berlin. Why   

does that basil near the kitchen window smell like cat pee? Why do I feel

that if I just had a row boat all of my problems would be solved?

Because I’m lost, hemmed in by water, that’s why. O Byzantine scribes,

strutting charioteers of the 6^th century, I dream about home

when I’m here and about here when I’m home. Why is that?

Scientists don’t have much to say on the subject. Issues of the spirit

not easily testable, which is why poets and novelists still manage 

dubiously to teach at colleges that resemble Venice

vaguely (here a bell tower, there a loggia) no matter how

   whorish and worldly the template

before the sons and daughters of Nippon posed giggling in its odors and shadows.

 

Winter

Im Baum - In the Tree 36 x 52 cm

WINTER TO THE CORE

Located in the deeps of cold fog and snow drifts  

is a museum in which a sun burned meadow by Monet   

hangs in a heat haze of July or August, young ladies   

in long gloves underneath parasols, and

across the room is a Renoir girl—

hands red, 

roughened by work—

the liquid green light of oak and chestnut leaves

surrounding but not touching her as she lingers on a porch,

the look of resignation on her face so consummate….

But who can get there? The wind comes clawing 

icily out of Russia, as far away as the Steppes, an awful hint on its breath

of the Red Army shitfaced on bathtub vodka

freezing the will, leaving it ravished and half consumed 

half way to the bus stop. All that’s left as the snow and ice swirl

by is the birthday call to a close friend who could just kill you for “reminding” her.

Winter - Vivaldi

performed by Julia Fischer

Summer

Chamisso-Platz 39 x 29 cm

FINALE LIGURE*

Guess what comes from this place? Here follows the Birth of Pesto:

fresh basil and olive oil plus garlic crushed with a pestle

in a deep narrow bowl and

mixed with pasta then sprinkled with old parmesan,

on the table a fiasco of Vino Rosso di Toscana,

not a fine wine but a very robust one, yes, a muscular robust

wine of the earth rather than of the air—which is

doggerel a semi-poetic wine dealer might recite—

the stucco façade of the ancient farm house 

peeled back in places

to reveal

its original brick sub-structure,

decay does wonders for some buildings,

fireflies bobbing and weaving above the lawn

on hot summer evenings, sun-drunk boxers, the thickness of trees

and ivy hanging

heavily as if held there  

by the dark yellow and purpling light. Sometimes 

it’s hard to believe that we are a part of all this gorgeous stuff,

we sit back and try to be satisfied

with our good fortune but it feels like

television somehow, a story

belonging to someone else,

though in a way similar to us,

an actor mired in middle-age, say, walking 

through a cool, high ceilinged room

forgetting his lines, tripped up by a carpet,

knocking over an expensive vase, spooking the cat, and thinking perhaps

that decay doesn’t do wonders for most people, not in this life.

*Finale Ligure is a small town on the Italian Riviera.

 

 Vivaldi's Concerto No.2 in G minor "Summer" 3rd Movement
 Nigel Kennedy performs "a la Citadelle", 2005, France
with the Polish Chamber Orchestra