#that paper lantern looks like the lesbian flag

[ratstuckinamarble]

Since it's the day of love or whatever, I'd like to bring your attention to:

The lesbian rabbits at the mid-autumn festival.

[lostharvest]

BRUNO IN VENICE WEST By Lawrence Lipton

For Giordano Bruno burned by the Inquisition in the year 1600

http://www.freevenice.org/Sites/iblog-2008/B1986113144/C596342830/E20080502185457/index.html

Velvet and warm sweat under the torches the Procession entered the city, tall bronze men on the bronze great horses and the boys carrying banners, the fat prelates wheezing under the icons, and the musicians Up Main street, pausing to erect the great crucifix in the Circle before the U.S. Post Office, turning into Windward avenue to St. Marks Hotel, their flags and vestments, clowns In motley, peddlers hawking live birds and Turkish sweetmeats, drunks and tarts lurching along under the colonnades like any Saturday night, the P.A. horns blasting rock ‘n’ roll, sob ballads At the tavern doors, the winos wandering in and out of the alleys, blinking in the neon lights, and you Giordano Bruno between the halberdiers and the smoking torches wandering In the wind off the Pacific, here in this our Venice by the western sea as when, hooded, under the marble colonnades of old Venice once you walked, curing the Doges; burning Sapphire and crimson under his golden umbrella the merchant prince, over the pigeon droppings among the trash cans, Kinney’s dream of gondolas and gondoliers, his picture postcard Venice, chicken wire And Pittsburgh Pipe and Iron, the columns plaster, peeling now, the Grand Canal fouled up with oil, the derricks taller than windmills, we too, O merchant prince live on to see the dreges and ravelings– Tall steel and glass, high windows, greed piled high on pride, the blessed percentages; in vaticans of wealth the popes and antipopes give audience to the press, the old putridities, And men go gibbering to themselves aloud, hearing nothing, bereft of all the simple certainties. “When the first button’s wrong, all are wrong,” you said. Bruno, Bruno, When the iron key turned in the lock and the door clanged shut and the iron hand moved in the darkness, Bruno, was there sword play in the streets, the torches of the Night Watch lighting up Cut purse and slit gullet, perfumes, pomades, the stinking armour, rapes, vomits, silk brocades? Here the century that began in plush and diamond stick-pin elegance Explodes grotesquely beyond fire and ice orbiting in vacuums of space mathematics of disaster, madmen trapped in spidery black geometries. Do you remember Tintoretto’s Mounting circles within circles? Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus. The bible shouter on the corner speaks in tongues (I hear bullroarers drums of Africa!) The neo-Platonist Newly dead, dumbfounded by his immortality, Newborn in worlds he never dreamed where life steams out of methane gas– Bruno, Bruno, pinned to the center of the burning wheel, Adam Cadmon In his mystic circle–”All is good and tends toward good,” you said. I walk beside you, unseen by the halberdiers, up Ocean Front, wind whipped, slat-beaten, leaden-eyed Past Dinty’s hot dog stand, a lush holds out a spastic hand, a junky hustling for a fix; the moon is coming up a size too large, smog orange over the mountainous east. Is it true the end is fire and ashes and no phoenix cries? Bruno, in the cold wet sea wind mountainous words tell out the last dark secrets, what is there to hide? I know Four hundred years have not sufficed to cool those fires; the gentlemen of Florence, Genoa her ships at anchor, blood and incense rancid in the Roman Sun, the poisonous wines of Florence, serpent Women walk with hooded eyes–what was old Venice but a tourist trap, city of traders, merchants, speculators, middlemen, promoters, bankers– jeweled slippers in the pigeon shit. This, Bruno, is the Grand Canal, swamp scum, litter-. that’s old Michael toting a six-pack to his rented room, the window shades arc drawn on Teena and her lesbian lover, tears will flow– 0 Sappho of the golden eyes–this door conceals a love of three; those eyes in the window, broken mirrors in an empty room, rags and ashes, old newspapers, doors rot on their hinges, and the old go mad Numbly contemplating death. hand reaches out to hand, a child dreams in a fever; old Cap in his tiny shack reads by a ship’s lantern– upturned faces under water, eyes Like a stunned carp’s. This bridge has no approach no destination, hung between two hells. Was there thunder in your heart the night you pulled the crystal vault of heaven down! And Tintoretto’s angel hosts lost endlessly in endless space with Thor and Adonai–they burned you for it Bruno. This Venice of the West was born a bastard

Misshapen in tile womb out of some old world whore of Commerce by P. T. Barnum bred–when business and the arts are mated, money takes the Muse to bed

Bonds debentures title deeds wrapped up in flags and sermons, stamped with the Great Seal of the State; the Laws and Statutes are his alphabet his capital all upper case, cock o’ the walk Three gilded balls his ensign out of Calvin Luther by the dark satanic mills now white supreme, on every dotted line his X has sealed your doom–and mine– He’ll kill you for it again, Bruno, the Xian Gentleman, his AM FM TV movie image multiplied is stinking up a continent– the commercial more and more becomes the show. The wind has changed, the dry Santana hot breath of the desert: it’s the Hyperion sewer you smell: your Venice was no rose bed open sewers and tanners vats the fish wives haggling, sweat and fear, the smell that money makes The windows darken, only the street lights and the torches now, our Venice sleeps; Your eyes burn, Bruno, scanning the heavens, vacant now; no angels hymn the heavenly court, we are rational men; Those are landing lights, a Constellation blinking to a touchdown, that was not thunder but a sonic boom, our safety lies in speed, they tell us, death on wings the enemy is crafty, never sleeps And godless, cobalt is his brain and poison gas, his heart burns liquid hydrogen, his breath is solar flame his fingers are a million secret spies we are his image–sanctified. The latest satellite arcs across the sky, a star whose manger is a launching pad, the child a robot cradled in steel arms, his halo liquid fire his brain an electronic brain, Our wise men bring no frankincense and myrrh, no visions wrung from love or pain but only slide rules plots top secret plans, we do not stone our prophets, Bruno, we give them target dates. Agnosco, ergo sum; we’ve come full cycle. Cohesion, color, sounds waves and radiations: res extensa. Giordano Bruno chemically changed by thermal action, Jesus On the cross: a rearrangement of the particles. Our men of science will define the event: a thermodynamically stable configuration known as death. Why has the music stopped? Look back, the Procession fades away, a slow dissolve, you stand alone; your lidless eyes are indrawn lost in contemplation like a foetal sleep Where are the drums and trumpets? I had thought to hear the papal legate read out your doom in bastard latin hear a shout go up to heaven with your flames. I should have known; A dead God needs no crucified to sanctify his name; no faith, ergo, no auto da fe; we have a choice of trivial martyrdoms: if we must die for truth we die self-slain. Your image fades and there is nothing now only the blind window panes of broken houses telephone poles that lean against the moon cracked pavements sinking into foul canals I turn, retrace my steps to Windward and the Ocean Front, the pigeons of St. Marks Hotel are roosting in tile plaster niches, one lonely jukebox whimpers from an open tavern door “I love you baby, why do you treat me so mean? “ A single wino staggers down the empty street, I cross the beach and look out to sea. “Sophocles long ago heard it on the Aegean”–here too Many a truth-tormented Oedipus has reached land’s end, walked in for reasons Sophocles never dreamed and made his last incestuous marriage with the sea, as Bruno made his with the flame. Homeward bound I stop for coffee at the Greek’s, scan the morning papers– This night’s business may have meaning for our time-a poem or a play? I have work to do. I think (to paraphrase) I shall not drown myself today.