‘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,
CITY OF ART
FRUITS OF THE SEA
CITY OF ART
HESPERIDES
OF PLUMS AND FIGS