For Joseph Tusiani
For Joseph Tusiani
Father Joseph, when we are gone, and night
Has covered us in purple cloth of Tyre,
When our clear lights are dead to stars and moon,
Perhaps someone attentive, maybe curious,
Will read your poems, and in one brief lyric,
Will wonder who that "Robert" might have been,
And what he did, or why he lived in meter,
As an artifact of a long dead tongue.
What a fine thing, I think, if such a lector,
Moved by words and whim, might search the stacks
Of dusty reading rooms and the dry threads
Of memory preserved in mute machines,
Until some words, some lines unique to me,
Take form out of spun cloth of renaissance,
And sing across the ocean of time past.
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In life Joseph Tusiani was a scholar, translator, and poet in four languages: English, Latin, Italian, and his native Gargano. Many considered Joseph the greatest Latin poet of his time. In death he is a tender memory, an aged trace of humanitas. The occasion for my little poem is acknowledgement of a short poem in Latin hexameters written by him for me when I sent him a birthday greeting.
Eh bien, hier une nomination au Nobel, aujourd’hui l’immortalisation par un auteur renommé, qui sait, peut‑être une canonisation demain. Saint Augustin pourrait avoir de la nouvelle compagnie. Mais peut‑être que c’est juste un remerciement tardif pour un honneur impossible à savourer. Ah, être l’hominidé mystérieux principal d’une thèse de doctorat en 4000 après J.-C. Peut‑être que Shakespeare ne voulait pas impliquer son « homme noir » dans une sorte d’aventure amoureuse désapprouvée. Mais ici nous avons Robert, un vrai nom, un indice sur qui il est, mais pas de mal fait, aucune implication compromettante, puisqu’il n’y avait aucun type de romance désapprouvée, du moins c’est ce que je suis enclin à supposer. Pourtant, les érections sont parfois difficiles à remonter à leur source. Essentiellement, nous avons une reconnaissance d’un grand honneur décerné à un acolyte. Eh bien, cela devrait conclure la Révolution française. Maintenant, passons à la bona part. Moins Sainte Joséphine, qui a été remplacée par Saint Robert. But just a sec, must check my halo in the mirror, the glow button sometimes runs out of battery juice. Just ascribe that diagnosis to my mechanical expertise. Oh, and I should add I was amused by the renaissance allusion, or just say I like seeing it as an allusion. A cute swipe at the chief exec. of The Good Ship Lollipop. Shirley T went on to an ambassadorship I think, perhaps still tapping out good will with her trusty metallic soles, thereby proving, if so, that her soul could not be metallic, nor any Platonic foundry production short of the shiniest, such as, peut-etre, N. Pompilius's or Montaigne's. So much for the heartless German's will to power. So anyway, the ditty's devotional but not without detectable wryness. Maybe it's sharing a joke with its subject, who possibly was sharp as a tach-ometer. It brings to mind a more infamous ditty some jocular prophet wrote. To wit:
When history lapses and the words
Go mute as all the blotted blessed,
When not a nose is left to sniff
Your gas, who then will even like
Whiffs of his own emissions best?
Well, but that's just in case others' olfactory preferences are like his. Ah, but our resident Methusaleh complex just wafted by. The prizewinning baby picture became Jabba the Hut. Life loves to transmogrify. Just a teaser, like coming attractions. Wonder when the RCC will become mythology. But then, Odin could return to stardom, hardly impossible, easy enough to imagine anything making a comeback. The time machine is entirely self-steering.
And now concludes the English Revolution, which dethroned some of the same birds as the French. White doves and cardinals. But time for Amen.