Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
‘A camera on a tripod stood at the edge of the water, apparently abandoned; its black cloth snapped in the freshening wind.’
DEATH IN VENICE Thomas Mann
…Cholera is no longer a rumour.
Besotted, face rouged, hair dyed, he dies
staring unseeing at the shallow sea.
Artifice, made and re-made, fades in the rain,
like the islands with their ‘gorgeous palaces’…
Near the Palazzo del Cinema –
where, annually, insubstantial
figures, louder than life,
At Punta Della Dogana, a cellist
seated under the arcade, is playing
melodies from operatic arias.
It is early evening. A fog horn sounds.
A cruise ship is sailing for Dubrovnik.
With a tug at the bows to pull, one to steer
at the stern, The Queen Elizabeth –
its superstructure higher than St Mark’s
Campanile, moves slowly toward us
through the Giudecca canal. Passengers,
silhouettes on the top deck, look down
on the packed, diverse crowds jostling along
the Riva Degli Schiavoni,
On the third floor of Ca’ Rezzonico –
where gondoliers slept when the palazzo
was let to the song writer Cole Porter –
is Egidio Martini’s collection
of five centuries of Venetian art.
Three of the floors’ small windows survive,
each an intentional belvedere.
Two view the Grand Canal, the third south west.
The eye follows the perspective below:
a canal and its quay with inevitable
eclectic craft, stone bridges and turisti;
then tenements and the terracotta tiles –
‘ The hand holds so much power – the power to love, to hate, to create, to destroy.’ SUPPORT, Lorenzo Quinn
The resin and fibreglass installation
of one of the sculptor’s small children’s
hands and wrists emerges from the Grand Canal
many times life size and startlingly white
to brace the rose Ca’ Sagredo Hotel –
once a palace where Galileo stayed –
as if to prevent its imminent collapse.
When we arrive on the opposite bank
so you can take photographs the market
has closed,
We came here more than twenty five years ago
but know when we reach the Trei Archi bridge
we have gone too far and turn. (Distracted by
a young black man begging with a baseball cap
we had walked passed the sottoporto
where the curfew gates had been). We see
a man in a keppel show the entrance
to his children. Inside the Old Ghetto now
are information points, and a café
and a restaurant with kosher options.
In the New Ghetto’s spacious campo
are more eateries,
‘Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know in life.
THE STONES OF VENICE John Ruskin
Many things are forbidden in Venice:
sitting on the steps in St Mark’s Square;
hailing water taxis from water bus pontoons;
putting out food waste except on the hook
provided between the designated hours
in order to deter gabbiani;
of which there are two species, compatriots,
the black-headed gull and the herring gull,
comune and reale respectively,
SIX DEGREES: THE MAY BLITZ, LIVERPOOL 1941
WINTER
WINTER
WINTER
NO LESS LIQUID