The Cemetery Island
1. At Ezra
Pound's Grave, 1994
Still rocking from the vaporetto ride
I wander,
camera for amulet,
past
blocks of stacked tombs:
photographs behind glass
and sconces of bouquets.
Lost in long alleys, I turn
and stumble upon
cypresses in the
walled plot
for
foreigners
(who isn't in this true
Serenissima?)
overgrown with
heaps
of broken statues, bashed slabs, crosses
in pieces.
At last
since my first
trip to Venice in 1972)
I arrive:
an
ivy raft
with a tree for mast, a hatch of carved marble.
I snap a laurel leaf from the green crown
and press it in a currency
receipt,
wipe dirt from the
name
and what admirer does otherwise?)
the
slab
flattened to the earth's curve,
trap
door
sealed to the underworld.
2. What Thou Lovest Well, 1997
Now that Olga Rudge has moved in, the plot's arranged in
a family
portrait: two tilted slabs, like name plates on
an office desk, framed
in a white border with a half-moon
extension in front, geometrically
Palladian. A carved urn
with a dead plant sits in the semi-circle.
Sawed-off stumps
poke out near the rear line segment, the earth cracked
from
all the beautiful days in the treacherous lagoon.
3. At Joseph Brodsky's Grave, 1997
There's a white cross, with pebbles on the arms
and peak, more
offerings heaped up below:
a vase of daisies, a blue can with
terms
in Hebrew lettering, a candle's glow
inside (and in a red
translucent jar
with a gold lid) for this last seminar.
How did he
manage to be buried here,
the lucky stiff? Unsanctioned by the
chaplain,
apart from where the other Russians are,
Jewish by birth
and Ezra's fan, light rippling
through cypresses, the push of the
lagoon
against pocked Istrian marble, a surge of brine.
So now the
island has a grove of bards,
a college of silence, where the shade
refreshes
and lizards skitter under hidden birds.
A vaporetto's
diesel motor hushes
when it approaches past the crumbling walls,
and
sparrows comment with their quietest calls.