There is Something Savage

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     ^{There I shall chew on my own laurel-tree’s
     harsh leaf, sitting on that sarcophagus.
     —Gabriele D’Annunzio, “The Roman Ark", Halcyon}

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There is something savage in such
sumptuousness, such superabundance—
an overripe autobiography in lacquer
and lapis, majolica and malachite,
in thousands of things—a mise en
page penned in the shell of the finest
nut. To enter is to pass from sunglint

into a clau(oi)stral gloom as leaded glass,
black-shirted in velvet, mars the lago’s
lambent light with veins of gang-green.
The villa turns its back on Titian’s hour
like a coat of fur twisted outside in, fit
only for someone so cyno-sure of self.
Annunciation and augury abound, spelled

out so that a visitor must stand avant la
lettre, with nowhere for the eye to rest except
on you. An alabastered glow beckons from the
room in which you let there be light, but low
lintels leave most anyone other than you in
limbo, stooped before your study. Phile and
phobe, you stuffed yourself with tens of

thousands of tomes—originals, translations,
editions—reading and rereading in the semi-
dark, tucking flowers into pages pondered,
a daisy-chain of decay pressed into print.
But the meter that drummed deep in your
ears—aesthete, author, soldier, sadist—
was duple. Sweet oleander’s first bloom

beguiled, youth’s spring of beauty—
Giovinezza, giovinezza/Primavera di
bellezza—but a smellscape of poison
catnipped beneath the pink. Picking
cherries as you fingered your favorites,
you reached for the crush of the bitter
blood-black. In your nightshirt tailored

to titanic fantasy, vainglory-holed in full
disclo(the)sure, you nicknamed lovers
into non-existence as if spun from legend,
raising your right arm in cinematic salute
as if you were too, the atavistic liturgy of
a well-heeled, would-be Achilles battle-
crying from the balcony. When the redolence

of reclamation failed to stamp out the
stench of peace, you fashioned a play-
boy’s pastiche, a designer death masque,
slipping into the skin of self-portraiture.
In a bed both cradle and coffin, you
worried beads of defeat and decline,
dreaming dithyrambs of distant times

and distant places, necromancing myths
of supermen who might make Rome
great again. Despite all the bells on
bobtails, many called you bard—Il Vate,
Il Profeta—as you dashed over fields,
jingo all the way, misprising word and
world for your mirror, your memoir.

Its pages, hypoxic from phrases florid
and filigreed—from so many rings
around posies—leave, in their wake,
a thing desiccated, a thing mutilated,
a gilded tortoise engorged from too
many tuberoses, its gods, still stuck
in their statues, finished in stone.

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^{*Gabriele D’Annunzio lived at his estate Il Vittoriale degli Italiani on the shores of Lake Garda from 1922-1938. “Giovinezza, giovinezza/ Primavera di bellezza” is the refrain of the official anthem of the Italian National Fascist Party.}

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