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Faver The Adriatic goes turbid in flood, stays dark, not yellow-mud brown Virtually the only commercial fish left in the Adriatic fatten in rectilinear floating pens The topsoil of the surrounding hills is gone The Mediterranean's profound ecostress at its worst at the top of the Gulf of Venice Cà d'Oro to San Marco one Christmas in falling snow, the water of the Canal Grande a transparent black And on one summer night bound for Trieste, hundreds of tourist sleeping bags spread on the station steps. Walked into the center for hot bread behind the Basilica and then stood in Piazza San Marco and the Piazzetta until dawn The sleepers still there at the railroad station on the way out, like transistors on a circuit board, like insect eggs Where Venice's station stands there was once a church named for Santa Lucia The reds. Roman lake, Vienna lake, Venetian lake He sat in with the various gamelan players we'd come upon in a restaurant on the road, played the gambang, in one set a saron. His brother, a professional boxer, was two months from fighting in Jakarta for his fifty-five kilo national championship The hammers for both the gambang and saron are tipped with small padded disks. Gambang hammers are of supple buffalo horn On only their hundred and fifth day do Balinese babies become accepted human beings, leave the spirit realm, have their feet touched to the ground To be fully human is to walk Green Bali's coral culture, coral light, in this petrodust and rubber asphalt ferroconcrete six billion plus world Turned inside out, turned upside down Mandela walked out of prison toward the cameras in afternoon sun in Paarl and the world was changed The Eastern European flat glance of ingrained hesitation becoming as defunct as Marxist-Leninist central planning She brings William James's standup desk with her at which her new husband, with his bad back, will write Both brothers lived on well into the twentieth century. William d. 1910, Henry d. 1916 Unimaginable to contemplate 2100 but 1900 is an almost familiar yesterday Persimmons, red, in early-winter hedgerows on the tree Mandela's wondrous face with its Khoikhoi-Xhosa eyes Western Cape windy days and evening glow Paarl, Stellenbosch, Somerset West, Strand, Gordons Bay, Kleinmond, Hermanus Zinc orange is yellower and lighter than carrot red, lighter than Mars yellow, slightly redder, not as strong as sunburst It is not easy to picture his face, it has been so long His voice tentative on the phone, then hurried and patient, admits that she has had MS for years, experiences bouts of blindness Her enthusiasm, her warmth They must have special arrangements at home, deal with it in ways impossible to imagine Losing track of people becomes time-forced acquiescent regret Griffith Stadium out Florida Avenue NE close to the NW line after a Senators game. A Virginia judge, his son, a nephew going home through Culpeper and Warrenton, the low sun as though through Arbois juane The crab apple jelly-clear nostalgia of Cape Town sunsets, Upstate blowing snow, San Gabriel Mountains dawns, Blue Ridge ice storm shards of dumbfounding brilliance, Alpine glow, mid-Pacific clarities Paprika, yellower and darker than poppy, redder and deeper than coral red or fire red or scarlet vermilion Dead-eyed flat American "Hi" out of the same selfish impersonality as Northeastern states' averted eyes Combat Infantry. US51353433, Hq&Hq, 1st Bn, 34th Infantry, 24th Division, I Corps, Eighth Army Forward "Don't mean nothing. Not a thing" Zinc orange, also called cowslip "Holler on me, girl" Were there horses in Venice? None turn up in Canaletto His humanscapes, the Riva degli Schiavoni Horses were expensive, saved for war, no more common than Italian sports cars are now Draymen and carters stayed outside the gates of cities. Only the rare gentleman's mount in town Venice became absolutely unique only when people the world over no longer walked everywhere they went Parma red is blood red Red ocher is bole Kit Peak, Cerro Tololo. The four-meter Chilean telescope just down the cordillera from Gabriela Mistral's Vicu–a adobe casa materna The Space Telescope was planned to have fifty times the sensitivity of Palomar Purple lake is burnt carmine She sat in a brown sari playing on a tin plate with a finger ring, tapping out monotonously and singing, recounting details of her former lives Spoke in European languages that as a village girl of twelve she would have had no way to know Remarked privately to those closest to her that she would soon lose this ability The Virgin revealed, water to blood, copper to gold, Joan of Arc Lourdes, Fátima, Dark Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos Such people reputedly have a black spot on one of the soles of their feet "Fakirs are not the same. The come around and you give them something, but they're not the same" India still with an aura of the dawn of civilization. Six thousand cities, three hundred thousand villages, and a hundred thousand of those villages have no clean drinking water Its population tripled since independence. A billion plus now. Like more than one Australia added every year She plays the Yamaha wind instrument accompanied by a smoke machine, and dressed in turban and robes, roams the stage with a forty-foot cord Mat black plastic with wide, flat electronic valves played clarinetlike. The cord emerging from what would be the instrument's mouth is disconcerting Sorrel a brownish orange, darker than caramel, yellower than tawny, redder than terra sienna Revised official figures for the Second World War reveal that instead of twenty, it was twenty-six million killed in the USSR During the summer before the War, lesser flamingos reached the great Hungarian Plain from East Africa. She remembers seeing an immense flock on the lake flats near her family's country house She visited the States first for a summer at seventeen, came for good in 1939, has not been back to Hungry again Flamingo red Older generation Colombians bemoan the loss of a romantic rural dream to narcocracy, the army and the police The extreme beauty of the Colombian Andean cordilleras and their valleys As the Andes, drier that far south, rise behind Gabriela Mistral's birthplace and grave (d. 1957 in New York) all the way into Patagonia Conjunctive continuities Die Wende German unification as a fait accompli Gris-de-lin is gridelin, flax gray The best year for Suffolk apples in decades and in October, when she was at home to help pick the last of the pippins, there were windfalls everywhere that her father hadn't had time to get in off the tree Their six-hundred-year-old house has a long lane out through the orchards to the A12. There is constant traffic noise Carmine is bluer and darker than apple red Salmon fillets with lime and sugar "Something in the civilization and spirit of Ferrara that was not followed, a direction that took a sharp turn, stopped abruptly" Ferrara's own literature of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata Tasso left Ferrara in the 1580s and wandered Italy writing in explosive creativity before he died. At the end he wrote and traveled as though he carried the whole meaning of the Renaissance within himself As though within the philosophical paganism in the Room of the Months in the Schifanoia Palace The Salone dei Mesi, late 1400s, was done by Francesco Cossa, Ercole de'Roberti and other Ferrareses for the Duke Borso d'Este Gennaio and Febbraio: both ruined Marzo: Minerva, hawking scenes Aprile: Venus, Duke Borso home from a hunt and the Palio of St. George Maggio: Apollo, remains of farming scenes Giugno: Mercury, scenes of the Duke in a landscape Luglio: Zeus, the Duke receiving, scenes of women working hemp Agosto: Ceres Settembre: Vulcan and Vulcan's forge, Mars in bed with vestal Virgin Silvia who bore Romulus and Remus Ottobre, Novembro, Dicembre all ruined Schiavoni, Schifanoia The Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara, was built in 1391 Went to school with two Estes whose helmet heads were like their ancestors' portraits Their part of the family refugees from fascism Wearing a white linen maillot and an Indian red pareu Absorbed there on her hands and knees she is peering into the stream With him and his caustic scorn gone along with him, she will recover, regain herself, go on Kitanai, kiken, kitsui Dirty, dangerous, difficult In the early 1850s, Goncharov took a melancholy trip to Japan via Denmark and Cape Town, returned to St. Petersburg overland Nise-e is what the likeness picture style from the Kamakura Period is called Except for Dada and Fluxus, no comparable overlay from formality to spontaneity has ever developed in European art And there is the ubiquitous mask, the decorum of fine things Japanese Gagaku, bunraku, reigaku, shomyo and percussion Tore Takemitsu's Green (1967), overlaid, the precise to the impressioned Maki Ishii's Hiten-Seido I (1983), for ryuteki, two hichiriki, and two sho In the same way Renaissance Ferrara started to slip off from Christianity, Japan's primed disinterest in religious dogma leaves its brilliant secularism uncurbed Princess Princess, a female Japanese rock group's competent kawaii A letter exists recounting the king's gift of a gold chain and a medallion to Vivaldi, the rumor that Vivaldi took the position in the Pietà orphanage because of the girls Venice had four conservatories for orphaned and abandoned girls All who arrive in Venice belong immediately, as surely as the figures of the dyers in Canaletto's Rio dei Medicanti Vivaldi and Canaletto shared the same Venice Canaletto painted five views of Riva delgi Schiavoni looking east. The church of the Pietà appears in each version. Scan each, while looking for horses, for Vivaldi's bright red hair because he was often there among the people on the Riva Maybe Vivaldi stopped on the Molo to gape over Canaletto's shoulder at his work In all five of Canaletto's versions of the Riva degli Schiavoni the fondamenta beyond the Ponte della Paglia is narrow, it was not widened until 1780 In 1780 Vivaldi had been dead for a generation, Canaletto for a decade The Stonemason's Yard, from about 1730, is how Canaletto could have painted all his life if he hadn't been constantly stroked by his aristocratic English collectors' country-house tastes Rose red, deeper, bluer, lighter, stronger than cherry wine Calm as the summer Adriatic |
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