Venetian State of Mind

Lagune - Lagoon 50 x 60 cm by Karin Goeppert

VENETIAN

Maybe I should mention American

universities and banks, how they fake

Venice: gothic windows, phallic bell

towers, all those genre pieces

of plaster and brick, a gondolier in the Dean’s

office, in the lobby, whistling a Corelli concerto—

and there’s this stretch of marble and stained glass

in Hamburg that’s not a bad knock off at all.

Which brings to mind John Ruskin who thought

that Venice was a simulacrum of itself. Also a fake.

Nobody cares anyway. Could be Disney Land

or Vegas, just another place to go.

Attractive to honeymooners, to depressed aesthetes.

Somewhere in history

a fat man’s being led out for the last time, his last time,

hands bound, and the fat lady

is about to sing, and that the Bridge

of Sighs has the last laugh is an

irony much admired in these parts.

Want you scampi or Bellini? Says the Harlequin.

He means the composer, of course. Even an execution

is an overture of sorts, a flourish, the beginning of something.