Crannog / No - Crannóg

Crannóg No 7 winter 2004
Venetian Notebook Ian Revie
1.
The city is a mask. The mask is epicene,
The faces that it hides perpetually unseen.
This was the scene where Marcel stumbled
On his past, following the ghost of Albertine.
Among the leprous stones and serpentine
Canals they move like music from il Buranello
Played in baroque palazzo rooms for tourists
( grand style only ) come to see and be seen
Perhaps with la distinction d’un regard
Plus élevé et presque incompris.
2. Miroirs vénitiens
The city has no philosophers but its artisans,
Workers in glass, whose masterpiece is not
The overgilded goblet but the mirror
Set in a frame of many-faceted glass
That surrounds with fragments of reflection
The central, mercurial illusion of the present
Self, whose right is left, returning candour
Amid a centrifugal splendour.
Existence here is reflections in a glass.
3.
The long-nosed mask was once the doctor’s – the man
Of reason, if the humour took him, - protection
From the plague. Miasmas of the air repelled
By the beak of knowledge. And here Von Aschenbach
Remained in sight of god and youth when
Reason fled the cholera, the city and the sphinx.
A danse macabre plays along the gothic
Crowning above the stolen body of St. Mark.
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