The Marble Veil

This unfamiliar place, if we succeed in figuring out what’s going on, could
be the locus of a secret. And it might, assuming that’s the case, then convey
certain things, things we cannot control, things that are fatal, voluntarily
uncontrolled. We need to find a compromise between what we control and
what we provoke.
—Jean Nouvel

What hides in darkness and what truths
it veils.
—Andrew Crozier

That some things are lost

some occluded

And of whether these categories are discrete

or if one may be solved in the other—

That loss may be a form

whose element is time

That, in time, questions of loss

become questions of faith

as one passing through Ca’ Rezzonico

Museo del Settecento—the city in decline

already, the great dream

turning lucid, eyelids trembling, the lagoon

picking up natural light—may pause

before Dama Velata:

Antonio Corradini’s

marble bust of Purity

depicted

according to convention

as a young woman

but (this is new) with her face covered,

the veil a device

to show the artist’s skill

at rendering fluency in stone—

urge to touch & try its

I want to say ductility;

ductile: might have meant easily led

but doesn’t—so it appears to stream

down her forehead & nose,

sweeping to gather

at her right shoulder, hang more loose

upon her left, edges embroidered

with a homely button pattern drawn

across her breast

al cielo e al tempo ...

A marble veil. Corradini’s specialty.

These are the hidden sayings

that the living Yeshua spoke

and Yehuda Toma the twin recorded ...

so it begins.

Hidden sayings: enshaje ethep (Coptic)

ethep: hidden/secret/obscure—

translators must choose.

... the scholars have taken the keys of knowledge

and have hidden them ...

There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed ...

The translator has chosen.

That some things are better seen

obscured—that’s veil logic for you.

That it is the wish for clarity

distorts? Veil logic.

Some things are lost

according to convention. Is

Dama Velata’s face occluded

or lost for good? Lost, I’d say,

supposing it exists, but things get through:

beauty—absolute: conventional—

and that her hair is plaited, and that her eyes

are closed—not downcast: closed

as in reverie.

Nothing that is hidden is lost,

but at the same time nothing that is found

is absolutely new ...

iii

flickering candescence—

phosphors vexed livid

like sun-dazzle on choppy waters ...

silence—primed, held—

then light once more shook out to flare

taut as a wind-snapped sheet on a clothesline ...

in the small hours

creeping to wake you

that we both might

witness the revelation:

the flashbulb-lit marbling of cloud amphitheaters,

it was ours

ours for a moment—

almost we could have read by that light

but what would we have read

my head in your lap

both of us looking out over

crazed rooftops, terraces

chimney pots, aerials

shuttered windows, bell towers

the tessellated congeries of the Dorsoduro skyline

stuccoed façades

courtyard an orchestra pit open below us—

il lampo che candisce

alberi e muri e li sorprende in quella

eternità d’istante, something like that,

strana sorella?

or The Aspern Papers,

the great, terrible bit where Miss Bordereau

appears at our man’s shoulder

just as he is about to pilfer—

so he reckons—

her long-dead lover’s letters,

the green shade lifted from her eyes once & for all

(that she is blind has only just been revealed—

her niece, incredulous, asking the narrator

Do you think she can see? )

and then: there in her nightdress,

in the doorway of her room ...

her hands were raised,

she had lifted the everlasting curtain

that covered half her face,

and for the first, the last,

the only time I beheld her extraordinary eyes.

They glared at me, they made me

horribly ashamed....

I went toward her, to tell her I meant no harm.

She waved me off with her old hands,

retreating before me

in horror ... next thing I knew she had fallen back

with a quick spasm, as if

death had descended on her ...

Unforgettable—except

I’d managed to forget.

but none of the five sacred facts

concerning Giorgione help

with La Tempesta

or, as it appears in the Gallerie dell’Accademia,

La Zingarella e il Soldato

though surely that is Eve—

sullen, imperfectly rendered,

right leg dislocated—

giving Cain suck—These nursing babies

are like those who enter the kingdom ...—

Adam looking on, proud, contrapposto,

propped on his staff, dressed up

like a soldier in his cutaway crimson jacket ...

You were ready; I was not. Early days

and our illustrious progenitors

oblivious to the rebuke

that jags the sky

above Castelfranco, the city walls

emblazoned with the Carraresi coat of arms—

A city built upon a high hill & fortified

cannot fall,

nor can it be hidden;

blind, also, to the riches of the earth, the herbs of the field

that they will work in sorrow & sweat

all the days of their life

starting tomorrow: for the now

all eyes are on the bairn.

and there it is again in Carducci:

A le cineree trecce alzato il velo

verde.... A sit-down meal in Venice is

rarely a good idea. Street food’s where it’s at.

Locals move at speed, heads bowed, monastic.

Bloated & self-medicated, pushing forty,

I approach enough’s enough from different angles.

Is the vineyard owner a good man

or an usurer: ourome enchre[sto]s

or ourome enchre[ste]s?

The restorer must choose. Either way

his servants will be beaten, his son

murdered either way. Cinereous,

out of puff, competing with the gargoyle

on Santa Maria Formosa

that so offended Ruskin ...

And did Yeshua’s mother give him

life or lies?

A century after Corradini

veiled busts were all the rage:

for Strazza, Rossi, Monti they represented

the soul of Italy, a secular Madonna

vanilla-bonded, a contrivance

aiming to stir emotions maybe not

especially deep. Il velo verde.

If the phrase “green shade” occurs five times

there must be something in it.

vii

Not that it is historical, I mean

the Fall in La Tempesta, Adam & Eve

as louche Venetians, worldly, too cool;

it is eternal, waiting to be found

everywhere, then & now—call it

The Soldier and the Gypsy Girl,

call it the story of a man of letters

who dreams of being a thief

until life makes him a gardener—a little

green thought goes a long way.

We cannot all have our gardens now

nor our pleasant fields

to meditate in at eventide ...

As for us, recusants for life,

childless & at large among

Mother Italy’s crop of spoiled bambini,

our money goes on bottled water,

pistachio gelato, faux Murano baubles,

tickets for Damien Hirst’s hot tat ...

Things to see, free stuff, the Regata Storica—

pick a color: cheer it: green:

why not. Should your boat win

it hardly matters. In this dream we’re

all to ourselves with love to squander like

so much future-perfect guilt.

And they are like children

living in a field that is not theirs ...

viii

Always all already over,

corybantic rapture, the never-achieved

republic of promise, fantastic & involved,

infamous pretender

eating the bread of bitterness,

city without sound, even the shade

of that which once was great is passed away.

Ruskin went to ground here, Rilke

came to grief—on his first visit

after the war: You do not know, Princess,

how altogether different the world is now ...

Whoever thinks of living as he used to

will find himself continually caught

in the mere once-again

and its sterility.... Ten decades on

fascist Salvini tweets

with Trumpian scare-quotes: “Censimento” dei Rom

e controllo dei soldi pubblici spesi ...

while the Madonna nods in dumb assent

wie eine Nymphe die den Zeus empfing

and those variegated stones of Venice—

jasper & porphyry,

serpentine spotted

with flecks of snow, her bluest veins to kiss—

lilt & dazzle

as she lifts San Giorgio like a sunstruck wineglass

and gazes languidly into the waves.

ten years of glory—

court sculptor, Vienna: 1,700 florins per annum

(plus expenses)—till the fashion turns:

begins the unending

search for a not-unreliable benefactor,

and the trials, and the schemes, and Vestale Velata

that had to be done

without a commission

and that then never sold;

then back to Naples for one last job: Verità Velata:

Veiled Truth: one final work in marble,

a statue, a funerary ornament

for Cecilia Gaetani dell’Aquila d’Aragona,

his patron’s mother

whose passing called for something less

monumental—not this

embarrassment to mourning, accomplishment

exceeding its occasion, by one

too often overlooked, too much to prove;

or did he, Antonio Corradini, first man in Italy

to fight for—& win—a legal distinction

between mason & sculptor, between work & art,

think of his father

whose prime was spent stitching

canvas for latin-rigs on the triremes

and packing up the shrouds for the brigantines,

such being his trade, he being a veler ?

Source: Poetry (December 2019)