From Ischia, and: Illuminations

FROM ISCHIA

We love because we can't unlove.The sun, some flat disc in the sky.Vesuvius, maybe, in the haze, just

as temporal, hammered into distanceswe can't discern, don't want to. For this,a single boat adrift in the harbor's arms

somehow reassures. We love becausewhat else to glove the hands with,lest they burn from all this closeness?

A green cockatoo whistling through oleanderthe theme from The Addams Family.That too. All this growing out of, growing

into. The over and over. We have come backto the same island, same thin, late morningshades of laze and laundry billowing below us

like flags. Tiny nations. All of them. The somberanthems and symbolic birds, secretaries of state.We love them through their petty skirmishes,

trade disputes, bland exercises in the DMZ.We love this place but not as frail loversdumb enough to hope. Leave that

to the ferries, their schedules and snakesof cars along the jetty. The cockatoo has silenced,too, through with such disasters. We love

like the cockatoo, who repeats some drivel,yes, but travels continents to do it, and singsnonetheless from his shade above the sea.

ILLUMINATIONS

After Frederick Barbarossa sacked Spoleto,he gave the town an icon of Madonnavenerated still. Once a nun cautioned methat I should never smoke, though I was sixand the nun was my mother, who was nota nun. Whatever gives her licenseto return, even as a non-nun, is a gift,like the Madonna hanging in the duomo,and rare, like the absurd names of tiny birds:vermilion flycatcher, rose-breasted grosbeak,cerulean antswallower, the last of which so rareit never existed until now. Because, my friends,my copy of Birds of the World Imagined by Meis immense, 10 volumes, its last editionspectacularly illuminated by Blake.It's worth millions, they say, millionsof imagined birds, like those that perchin the frescoes of the papal apartmentsin Castel Sant'Angelo, in the center of Rome,and some with human heads. If you go to Rome,be sure to visit Nero's house, the Domus Aurea,with grotesques of griffins and other imaginedfauna so delightful. Dog-bodied women,the occasional man-eagle. Someone imagined them.Smoking is bad, but fire—fire's in the forgesof Hephaestus, patron saint of kicking assand art, lame as mania and just as silly.They buried Nero under his art, and charity,I suspect, works like that—level a city,give an icon, and we will think of you fondly,like the time a tiny, unknown bird alit atopour table. We suspected nothing. You were readingof Frederick Barbarossa, Freddy Redbeard,you liked to call him, whose destructionof Spoleto made room for a Spoletoeven grander, more illuminated. Sometimeswe erase and then want back, and sojust make it up as best we can. Set againstthe blaze of that August noon, though, that birdseemed ancient, cast in bronze, iconic.