Le gloriose pompe e’ fieri ludi
della città che ‘i frena allenta e stringe
a’ magnanimi Toschi …
The yellow river and the violet hills
Henry James embossed in permanent-black
Jollied a flagging fellow to exuberance.
He saw the angel of Florence cozy-gold.
This scornful beauty soothe, who’s least a flatterer?
Her suavity silk-on-steel; her ease ironic,
Queen of the pageants bear and zebra lead.
On Bellosguardo’s scarp (the great-browed ghost
Our conscience and our quest) where baritone-black
Cypresses volunteer for the lost causes,
Clamber the cobbled ramps in clarion air
To a gravel belvedere breezy and cedary
Lavishing:
Florence mortised in her hills,
Oxide-rose, a glory of quartz sunning.
(Misnomer of blossomy nods, stern fleur-de-lis,
Igneous stone’s your heritage and trust.)
Over all, the ebullient dome, great brazen hub
Of the derelict circus-wheel of faith parading.
(Michelangelo, off for Rome, raged at that cupola,
Eyelids hooding gruff energies of love:
“Excel her I cannot. Copy her-damned if I will!”)
There’s Florence to the core: canyon spaces
Dry as adobe air, a sunset flush
Of memory burning where the glamorous name
Pitched nerveless, the weapon wedged in his skull,
blonde hair
Drenched like a diver’s: excitable Sandro spun
As panic rent the veil of the Mass; as blood
Wrote fast on the floor; Lorenzo behind portals
Paced tiger-thighed in rioting partisans,
Tear-spangled face a comet of imprecation.
Or the cotes of watery gold where Dante hefted
His sledge till the marble stung like spray!
Above,
How Giotto’s mother-of-pearl recorder glories
Over tubas of cloud, over jubilant woodwind blue!
But listen: testy antiphons come wrangling
From the Palazzo Vecchio, haggard shawm.
Here’s varmint-eyed, hard-bit, surly Firenze,
The snarl in the name, no name of blossoms now:
The hanged man’s booted somersault from merlons;
Gullet stairs stilettoed bodies bump.
Duck with a sheepish cocktail under its turbulence,
Tourist in sporty shorts. The immense contempt
Of a spearshaft thick with thorn, of fangy battlements,
Of a rusty-gold old hauberk-harsh façade
Panics your chattering cameras to far corners,
Looms like an old bogy’s matterhorn.
Compose its face to serene avatars,
Shrink it to atavism-not a flicker
From the craggy brows that rake Siena still
Through mountainous indigos of execration.
So to the river: yellow after showers
In quercine purlieus of the Casentine
Busy their taupe melodeons, clarabella.
Then Tuscan silt yaws cargoed to the sea.
She’s a glum trawler then. But other mornings
See the sweet-minded mirrors.
Under the sunset
Her loitering dreamers, hunched toward Pisa, know
Dire aurum like the Arbia’s: heinous red
You sniff in the wind still. What passion hangs
Over the ruined bridges ! Underwater
The smoky palms of divers, webbed with mud,
Probe in lunging murk for the lost features.
Streets we essayed at every hour: those piquancies
Are graven deep in the brain the nostril’s tingle
At pine-shavings on shopfloors when the rain
Purpled the somber gorge of Vigna Nuova;
Or flower-banks under the granite mien, a sweetness
Coddled and mocked by dubious ambience:
Boisterous savor of hot herbs from kitchens;
Halls ether-sweet with desuetude; the celery
Reek in lichenous archways, iron-railed
Against such pungency: rankness of time,
Of human life and human love-its mouldering
Packed in the common halidoms we plod.
It’s Rome for all cajolery. This Florence
You find in your own heart, if anywhere,
Prizers of wild acridity, sunset-crimson
Rancor of peach too near the rusty pit,
Or thralls of a northern calm, camellia-white
As limbs slid dripping from numb monochrome.
Surely no pendulous angel cozy-gold.
O candor-of-almond cheek, cool lashes’ raillery
Bemused in the lancers’ porch one drenching day,
Serene in the great hotel’s glory of foreigners,
Or niched from pitiless snow in San Frediano’s
Grot of a door, by the bleak Bar’s fluorescence,
Your hair a sowing of stars, oblivious lady
From over time and the sea my gift, carissima.
Bear it with bantering palm: rough everlastings,
Thistles purple as stelliferous night.
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