HOUSE OF THE TRAGIC POET
To be able to dream like this is certainly worth
the trouble it took to get here.
—Goethe
I look and look,
As though I could be saved simply by looking
—Anthony Hecht
the trouble it took to get here.
—Goethe
I look and look,
As though I could be saved simply by looking
—Anthony Hecht
Ask me, chatty, gap-toothed muse,
about April on the Italian peninsula.
Truth be told, soon enough
one becomes used to beauty, yawning
at ideal mountains, waking up
to a Windows ’95 desktop. As though
nature were capable of exaggerating.
I’d binged, just completely last-minute,
a Rick Steves playlist, hundreds of clips
in total, on the history of artichoke
or a winemaking dynasty
whose chianti cools in tombs abandoned
long ago by the Etruscans—bottled
to dust in their coffins of marble.
Waiting at the gate for my red eye
strapped into canvas and leather,
I wasn’t yet bloodshot but exhausted
with anticipating this trip,
a tour of the central and northern areas,
sure to be grand; there, elevators
have a zeroth floor, such that one
may be claustrophobically nowhere,
suspended by a thread of braided cable
over a basement, that Miltonic lower deep.
Husbands with their midday brandies
clink glasses and slap dominoes,
inquiring about one another’s wives
who call these men, what else, but love?
The faithless Roman snow, it seldom
lands except as rain. Umbrella men
emerge, seemingly out of the humid air.
Boulevards alight; dead gladiators
stand in lines, waiting to buy gelato
with copper money. And ear-budded nuns
follow the whisper of their miked guide.
South of Florence, in a Smart convertible
reminiscent of a Fisher-Price coupe,
claws of trees hacked at the knuckles
beg for admittance—something
out of Wuthering Heights. So the highway,
flanked by yellow, Tuscan weeds,
maybe itself wind-slanted, terminates
in farms; the car is a fuel-efficient arrow.
Country digs—absurdly spacious,
with free-range geese and kids—suffice
for the weekend. The bathroom’s every inch
is eerily Barbie, while a macramé Virgin
framed on rose paper guards my bed.
Almost holy, the outlines of her eyes
in their frozen wakefulness. I drive us
from hilly San Gimignano to the commune
of Volterra, with its flag-throwers
and obsession for pressed bread,
snaking toward d’Orcia, Montepulciano . . .
fairytale locales that survive to offer
a whiff of the medieval. Here and there
old rumors about a jailed philosopher
or a polymathic German author
dot the shops, according to blue plaques
fired in a language I cannot read.
All the shaved ham, laid waveform
on a wooden board, traditional alcohols
and break-away slab chocolate,
an Olympus of tagliatelle: I, gourmand—
mildly hedonist, a dilettante eater.
The train pulls in like an anaconda
with a fantastic paint job, a kind
of sparkling thought. (On and on like this,
in praise of transportation and lunch
as much as the luxury of finding oneself
bored of Europe.) In Bologna, elbowing
the bedspread, a red-and-black nebula,
my inattention saccades from video
to idiotic video: stand-up comedy,
a Nietzschean abyss of memes. The CEO
of a haunted trolley-bus company
sends me a like and asks what it is I do.
An ill-tempered radiator is hissing
in the corner, a thick dribbling of latex
hung beneath like a beaded hem.
Biscuits and suspicious fruit cups stale.
I gulp a probiotic with hot coffee
and soak my always cold feet in the bidet
(on the floor, a fresh caulking gun
and extra washers); from that ceramic
perch I savor a British paperback
on my Kindle, its provincialism quiet,
until I am convinced the bowl’s warmth
will have a measure of permanence.
Then I towel off, pink and steaming,
like one of Inferno’s entry-level sinners.
Masturbating in the osteria. Sipping
grappa on a date. Stuck in one costly
pulpit after another, no air-conditioning,
eating mostly pasta. From amaro,
they claim, a writer succumbs
to fernet’s sorcery, that directly herbal
spirit of rhubarb, aloe, and myrrh.
The punishment is Freudian, of course,
to wind up in Umbria sharing Airbnbs
with one’s mother (Christ, who dislikes
wine!), round-trip in and out of the capital
and soloing it thereafter. A month,
roughly, which has for its culmination
bunking in Lombardy with gap-yearers.
That loop’s cold apolune, threatened
by the tide and cruise ships, boils down
to her hand luggage click-clacking
and a big Guggenheim tote—hard wedge
of parmesan, souvenirs in newspaper—
digging into my shoulder. A crow taps
at a crust of pizza; the harsh surf
girds its oysterish city. A profile of Joseph
Brodsky, cut into a gray estate marker,
faces the cemetery: Arnold Böcklin’s Isle
of the Dead, with its dark cypresses?
I haggle for a vintage tin of cinnamon
lozenges and a gondolier’s fero (a hunk
of metal, now in the mezcal glass
I bought in Oaxaca). That lapidary fog.
The architecture hurts to look at,
to picture it sunk once and for all.
Orphaned, as it were. The Frecciarossa
leaves for Campania, the nation’s shin;
hundreds of kilometers simply to hate
Naples—its urinary tang and smell
of killed fish, the Vespas’ incessant
beeping—calculating the cost of lodging
anywhere else, far from Styrofoam cubes
of mussels and shrimp. I contemplate
in daydreams walking to Capri and listing
into Vesuvius. But then I’m bound
for Pompeii, a clique of Adidas tracksuits
loudening the carriage (Archimedean
displacement for noisy, pig-eared boys).
Near the archeological park, some
wait in tanks and almond sunglasses.
A one-man juicery blasts Tupac.
After twenty centuries, Pompeii’s homes
flourish with yew and oleander.
Poppies, watched over by a colossus
of green bronze, jostle in the spring air.
Atop the promontory, where they hide
the restrooms and new cafeteria,
a handsome student filches the Winstons
from his fanny pack, begins smoking.
Cats hunt sandwich meat. House
of Jupiter, House of the Tragic Poet.
My peppermint breath contributes
to its second ruin. Amalfi, whose sailors
heard of scurvy, shelters under tarps
an embarrassment of lemons, each limb
heavy with them; basketed, monster
citruses, as pockmarked as Auden,
sell in front of gift shops. They named
a garden in Ravello after a comment
by Wagner. From the terrace, I glimpse
a bit of the Pacific, blue as fluorite:
Erchie’s single windsurfer traces
a figure eight for hours, and the elderly
socialize inside a roadside chapel.
The tower, a chalky cropping of sea rock
being its nest—like an abandoned
sand castle—lords over Cetara, a dog
and CAVE CANEM (the famous mosaic)
fastened to its door. On a municipal sign,
one finds a note about Orson Welles,
how a certain mise-en-scène was shot,
etcetera. The sudden choreographing
of a coach line as Vietri’s police whistle
and semaphore. Motorists idle. By night,
basking in front of the quartz heater’s
orange radiance, I mix sour toddies
out of herbal tea and nips of bourbon.
From the upper cul-de-sac of Raito,
like a good bard I lose whole mornings
staring out across what the internet
says is the Tyrrhenian Sea. The boardwalk
where I lolled plotlessly wanting romance,
a change one might characterize as luck,
is a distant splinter. Two white-haired
pensioners drift by unbothered in an Alfa
Romeo. Finally, I need to slingshot Salerno
to a Milanese hostel. Over breakfast
a Swedish scientist with a lisp entrusts us
with a quest: letters to be hand-delivered,
mine for a Verona couple. At the refectory
I study the loss of Jesus’s feet
in The Last Supper. It is perfectly Christian,
or American: the washer of extremities
has his own amputated. Around vespers,
I order a mediocre “BEST RISOTTO”
admire the cathedral’s crusty, white spires
and the glassed-in fashion brands
arcades hide. Poplars sperm the square
with hairy parachutes, which blond tots
on the cusp of pubescence race to catch.
That day, I took the regional to Genoa,
hometown of Columbus; I’d long wanted
to go, for no reason I recall. The couple
with their matching windbreakers
and Vibram shoes, a passenger in skintight
corduroy the color of a dirty plum,
and you, whom I swilled lots of asinello
with and taught to play table tennis.
Don’t I remember other things? Il Sentiero
dei Limoni out of Maiori and the woman
who made me try her marmalade;
a Moses of solid onyx holding God’s laws,
like newborn twins, in a family crypt.
At Malpensa, airport of bad thoughts—
thumbing my passport’s important,
laminated page, a blood-stained kerchief
in my back pocket—a frog-eyed man
begs to jump ahead to the kiosks beyond
(for duty-free Juul, a boxed Laphroaig
or Johnnie Walker? Like they’re bartered,
unbeknownst to any government).
Hypnotic, an immensity’s slow crawl:
the Swiss alps, crinkled as a black napkin
tossed over with salt, and at cruising
altitude the gaseous, blue focaccia
of clouds. Our Boeing lands to applause,
and then laughter at the applause.
Biographical Statement
Erick Verran is the author of Obiter Dicta (Punctum Books, 2021) and a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. His writing is forthcoming or has appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Georgia Review, Literary Matters, Gulf Coast, Nimrod, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Salt Lake City.