Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Venice Wood

Posts. Hundreds of posts. Thousands of posts. Millions of posts.A whole city built on posts. Posts driven into the mud, below the surface. More than ten million trees. Posts for buildings. Wood for houses, storage, churches, bridges. Wood for shipbuilding. Wood for docks and levee systems. Wood for heating and cooking. Wood for the glass furnaces on Murano. Wood harvested and brought to Venice: wood from the Lagoon's littoral forests - larch, pine, alder ; wood brought downriver -oak and beech forests; wood from the mountains,from Slovenia,from Istria. Brought to the Zattere, named for the barges carrying the logs, now that long, flat walkway along the Giudecca, next to the water, Fondamente, where Pound loved to walk.
All of those ghosts.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Love your post about Posts (and your other homages to Italy, massive cruise ship pollution and all!). No-Saint Ezra captured so many poetic hearts, if not heads, or is it the other way around? Changed the ear of English language poetry for a century, from the rhymes and rhythms of Yeats to the image-driven echoes of mistranslated Chinese and Japanese forms. Much gained, much lost. At our annual Winter Solstice fire again the crowd favorite was the narrative pulse of "The Cremation of Sam McGee!"

I have a new book out last month you and Beth might like, A MARRIAGE BOOK; 50 YEARS OF POEMS FROM A MARRIAGE (Milkweed Editions) for all on that Silk Road journey, and those who wonder about the ecstatic oases and the sting of sandstorms.

Again can'g make Great Mother conf in June, permanent sked conflict these days, but do see Robert Bly weekly, across the street, silent and thin at ninety-one, But with 3 books coming out this year! Blessing, my friend, JIM LENFESTEY jimfest@aol.com