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.

 

Hydra

Gartenfieber I - Gardenfever I 100 x 80 cm acryl on canvas by Karin Goeppert

HYDRA

It would seem there’s nothing

better to do in Iowa than to turn

a prize-winning hog into a heap

of barbecue on paper plate,

potato salad hugging

its oily flank, or turning a

sonnet sequence into tenure,

or your wife into my special friend,

sifting through

the fragments, making things up as we go along.

Remember what 4-H stands for?

Neither do I.

No hogs on this Saronic Island.

Just scores of donkeys more or

less inedible but essential—

no cars, just a garbage truck—

for hauling stuff and tourists around.

The hairy waiter’s face is lit up

with a yellow-toothed leer—mother-

fucker also seems to like your wife—as he

smuggles on-the-house ouzo to your table

and you, hammered, nothing but fragments

no one’s bothering to sift through.

This isn’t Iowa, Mary. The island’s harbor

town curling up into the burning blue

nutmeg-cinnamon-cumin odor

redolent of sex on a warm afternoon

in summer. Your mind, finally catching

up with your body, begins to loosen up.

Suspicions fade away. Your dreams

are in technicolor. Back from a swim

you are just in time for lunch—

she’s making tomato salad with those big chunks

of feta cheese and those fat Kalamata olives

you love so much, whose praise you sing endlessly,

and she’s poured you a glass of

crisp retsina—lunch on a hot Greek island 

just the two of you watching the play of light

on flowers and white washed stone buildings

is not only better than most dreams

it might even be one.

Dark Side of the Moon

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Windflüchter - Windtrees

Windflüchter - Windtrees 60 x 50 cm - acryl on linen canvas

ONE DAY BY THE SEASIDE

Moving through dry brown grass,

through sea oats, down to the sand,

into the cold surf, ankles, knees,

chest, shoulders, and then we swam out

to a jetty upon which white-clad models

or investment bankers were drinking a 

pale golden beverage out of slender glasses. They could

have been shooting a commercial for luxurious fabrics

or a sparkling wine from the hills outside Verona.

Treading water, we heard some of their conversation,

relieved to discover that despite their elegance

and apparent wealth these lovely, subtly tanned people

were either witless sycophants or sex addicts. It was getting cold,

so we stroked back to the boardwalk where some artistes were

plying their trade. A little juggling, some Simon and Garfunkel on a

blind dude’s accordion. Crusty sea critters & fries from a stand nearby.

Later that evening we allowed ourselves to be swallowed up

by a large party near the bon fires. The light danced off

people’s reddish faces. Do you remember what you said as the

embers cooled? Must have been six, seven in the morning,

the sky bruised and abraded in tattered pinks and clotted charcoal

like back stage at the ballet, colors but no dancers as if painted by Degas.

I knew then that nothing we’d seen and done had made you want

to change your life. I think that’s what you said. You almost cried.

Then laughed. Maybe next year we should try somewhere else?