Travel
Black Florentine - Buenos Aires - Currency - Non Capisco - Flowers - Three Blossoming Sextets
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Black Florentine
I don't pretend to know what they know: the darkened street, the grubby sale, the things they’ve had to do to survive.
I don't intend to thrive on borrowed tales of Victorian subterranean Baudelaire
transposed on African skin — Beware! Beware! His Nubian eyes, his Rasta hair! —
to shock and excite the suburban tourists in search of things they cannot know.
All I can say is that I saw them in the park:
furtive groups hiding from the carabinieri, and in the streets selling bangles and scarves.
All I can say is that amid all the chaos — Darfur refugees and the endless murk of Congo —
here in Florence I remain entirely in the dark.
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Buenos Aires, 9th of July, 2011
On the corner of Córdoba and the 9th of July, you can be forgiven for thinking that the world's a stable thing, that sophistication and the wide boulevards of St. Germain and Fifth Avenue, will always lead to prosperity and art.
The Two Towers may fall, and Mordor may increase its holdings, but Zurich and Buenos Aires will prevail. Castro and the Taliban can do their worst. Who wants to wear their baggy clothes and preach their worn-out doctrines when you can watch the girls go by on the corner of Córdoba and the 9th of July?
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Currency
In the dust and ruin of the ancient civilizations, where entire economies collapse and dirhams and rupees fall into a treardrop pond of infinite zeros, the tourist rises from his cab, like the Canadian dollar, and strolls into the bazaar.
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Non Capisco Più Niente
When I was young and first began to travel, I thought that one day, if I kept travelling I'd become a polyglot. But now, forty years later, surrounded by the beauties of Campo de' Fiori, I find that I'm not. I thought that if I travelled widely I'd encompass the world; that its riches and its deepest secrets would be unfurled before my staggered eyes. But now, forty countries later, I just look at the girls.
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Flowers
Think of these flowers, their perfect shapes, and their chaotic yearning; how they emerge from the centre, from the sap of life, from the roots and branches of time; how the purple swells outward into space along a sidewalk of two thousand years in Agrigento, Sicily,
luxuriant, decadent, unbuttoning their buttons, popping from the sweet sad passion of blue and red, out from the green stem, like love blossoming on a perfect day.
In dimensions unknown to us, flowers mate and open their beauty to every wandering Jack and Jill, who are so busy going up their hill that they forget to smell the roses, until their souls lift from the earth and it's too late.
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Three Blossoming Sextets
May 8, 2024, sitting at a cafe
in Bath, on the first warm day
of Spring, halter tops, tiny gym shorts, and white midriffs
that turn my historical points into buts and ifs
as a strap of pink Manchester cotton disapears over a white shoulder line
five decades past the Great Underwear Revolt of Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-nine.
Feminism and all that’s OK
unless they’re really trying to say
that no woman wants to be an object of male desire
or that their beauty never made a man into a liar
when in fact both of these things (disappearing straps and eyes) are as natural as breathing
to both, that is, to women no less than to men, no less than poets to dreaming.
Alyson says this is lecherous and strange
and I’ve missed the point of political change,
and she says that I shouldn’t talk so confidently on Kingsmead Square,
that I should show some respect, and at least pretend not to stare,
but then the invisible cotton strap slips knowingly down the milky-white contours of her ample tits,
the sap flows into my brain — which is thinking about the quaint dereliction of mills — and blows my mind to bits.
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Next: La Bellezza