Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SURFACES AND MASKS; 1, by CLARENCE MAJOR


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SURFACES AND MASKS; 1, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: And who must remain


and who must remain
stuck with the idea
that the Byzantine is "unlovely"
or with the notion that
a "cultivated Negro" is necessary in a country
where one does not expect to find him,
available
and speaking many languages, causing one
to feel ignorant?
Had he been a son of North Africa
and not South Carolina -- what then?
This Beloved Humorist
on the one hand
could damn the Arabs
and defend the rights of Negroes;
step into Santa Maria dei Frari
and feel outrage
in the entranceway. And why

was the gondola black?
Behind every closed window
on the Grand Canal, Othello and Desdemona.
The threat of cholera, then
hung like fog on the surface
of the page, in the end being itself
a signal --
vast signs of poverty, many
beggars begging -- insisting really
on their own serious anger ...

Thomas Mann. Thomas Mann
was impatient with the closed windows,
the smelly streets,
did not imagine Desdemona
but a boy white-shod, "at once
timid and proud,"
a boy, Mann's boy -- and not Bordereau.
Giovane as the Fountain of Youth!

... something about Venetian girls, too,
having sweet and charming
and very sad, oval faces.
And wasn't there something about
an underfed
look? Well, I never thought of them
in those terms...

To take a posture -- "I quote the principal
parts,"
"wave-washed steps" (to quote James,
to quote myself), seeing this place
as a getting-away place, away
from the hardness of plastic edges
and the sharp surface
of every secure thought I ever had,
is, in itself, a conspiracy

Left to rifle the situation
I'd hang them all in San Marco
like the French conspirators
were hanged
after the Plot of 1618
was uncovered.
Then console myself with the music
of Schubert and Miles.
They?

Her face was framed by
a halo of thick dark hair.
She was no doubt a contessa, (they
all are!)
and you could see the distant signs
of Asia around her African eyes,
the Middle East
in the slope of her nose.
She was the summation of the human race.
Her seriousness was Greek.
There was no way to point
a finger at any part of her.

In her knit stockings,
she walks
arm in arm with another girl.
She parts with the friend
and calls back over her shoulder,
"Ciao, Anna!"

She is the dama Veneziana
of the 1720s,
complete with hooped
silk skirts
and a black velvet cape
which is attached
to her jewel-studded crown
and reaches nearly to the floor.
She carries in her left hand
a gold cross
suspended on a circle
of pearls.


Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA
98368-0271, www.cc.press.org




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