I understand nothing about Moscow, almost. At a latenight cafe, smoking Hamlet cigars & sipping coffee, lit by a plasma screen TV, I wonder at what age my fingers stopped shaking. This woman in high white boots with dark powerful eyes, & the aggressive man on her arm,  with his shades & long sideburns, do not care what I do or do not understand.

I inquire of a statue (resembling Orson Welles, grey against a grey sky, leaning back in an armchair, bored by the busy intersection) where I might find comrade Mayakovski. He climbs down & eyes me, in my cheap black furry souvenir hat with red star, & says, “You were taught that the worth of a thing is in its utility, so you drank the blood of the skies & are unhappy.” “The skies?” I ask. “Seven skies, he says, & this is the least of them.” “Cпасибо—” I stammer but he interrupts, “You are the luckiest man alive,” climbing back up to his perch: “Do not surrender your shadow.”

His bronze finger leads, sure enough, to Mayakovski, bald & surly, skating backwards, wiggling his ass to ragtime music at an ice rink on Red Square, in full sight of Vladimir I. Lenin who is dreaming that Pain & Pleasure are cousins kissing in a Starbucks window, their joy so fragile, Love under Capitalism. Mayakovski skids to a halt, dramatically, spraying me with ice shards. I laugh & admit, “I thought a couple of fold-up tables were the Burghers of Calais.” “I know what you mean,” he says. “I never outgrew my love for turning over logs to see the bugs underneath.” “Nostrovia!” I shriek, raising my hat to him.

The snow falls, light as crystallized vodka, on the tourists of this world & the other.

is so quiet, snow-baffled. Green trams glide in silence or I have gone deaf. Long rows of colourful tenements, like Vienna, curve with the street. Muscular fanciful brick buildings, lit with red lights, with oddball art nouveau towers & arches, as if Mussolini designed them on acid. The sound of many bicycles in the snow is no sound at all. A woman stands in front of a closed flower shop, staring at red exotic plants through the frozen window.

When the next big war begins, I will take you to the only safe place on earth. You will be my father & I will listen to your stories & eat apples & feel content. I will read or write books or if there are no books I will carry snow gladly & not ever speak of books. Or I will be your father & we will smoke cigars or if you do not like cigars we will just walk among the trams & glass buildings which are quiet animals breathing & these animals are made of loose leaves & time is a slow wind. In any case, we will hold hands & soon forget who is taller than the other. The past looms in the harbour like Portuguese ships, so we shut our eyes & nothing hurts.

The cabin is crouched on its shanks above a frozen lake. Deepest chill of the year. Shrillness, stifled. Swallowed. Such freezing contains its opposite. A sensation already there. Fear, rose-pink. The landscape is white. Sheer & mute. Immutable. We shovel a path to the outhouse & to the lake. We cut a hole in the ice. We six feast by the fire. The men take a sauna. The women sing bawdy Finnish songs, top of their lungs, by candlelight.

In Mexico there are many ghosts. Here is just a single ghost. At dusk arctic mist wraps its tail around the valley & through it the sun is a child’s red ball & diamond dust takes the birches. Aurora borealis is a flamenco hand, one green finger uncurling over the shifting snows of life without measure. As we sleep, ice sailors navigate an ice ship over the lake. The mountain takes away our ability to forget, so we must leave the mountain.

Spruce trees are tall men in white raincoats, waiting for their wives to give birth. So hushed, the songs of icy trees. Crystal soprano, no wind, fox paws in snow.  Baffled knowledge of a quiet in the hips of the frozen shore, & low mountains are its breasts. The forest, hair-tufts of a god or witch.

Stepping out at night to urinate in the bright dark, my fear is ash grey. The moon a lover who has forgot me. Pine, red wine. No time at all, an hour like this, would end it. Silence enters the throat & blooms. A silence that contains its opposite.

The poet & the traveler (& the graverobber) are squabbling brothers. They fill their rucksacks with any detritus containing aura: that is, with any experience or object or person which seems original, unmediated. Don Paterson says, “So I collect the dull things of the day / in which I see some possibility / … I look at them & look at them until / one thing makes a mirror in my eyes.” A digital pic of the Arno River on Flickr.com lacks aura. But there is aura to be had in leaning over the Arno from the Ponte Vecchio. Or is there? What if the bridge teems with jewelry shops, ads for Diesel Jeans (their ubiquitous new campaign: “BE STUPID”), & tour groups whose corrosive American accents cut through your reverie like a child’s blunt scissors through a garbage bag?

So I try to look. What, here, makes a mirror in my eyes? A Japanese woman rides an oversized blue bicycle. An African man on the bus has skin that smells strongly of meat & onions. An old Italian’s breath reeks of grappa. (Must aura also contain death?) Through the window of an electronics store, TV static like barbed wire. A beggar leans over himself before a plastic cup. Him I enjoy, though he is in pain. Why? “He’s not selling any alibis,” as Dylan says. Yet as soon as the petit bourgeois in me—with my false modesty & leather wallet jammed with euros & credit cards—claims that this, this beggar, is an experience with aura, with this ironic self-awareness a veil lowers & the aura vanishes.

Il Duomo, the enormous black & white cathedral, lays claim to a kingdom of culture; for a small city-state to construct (from 1296-1436) such a church is to say, Make way, we are the centre of the cultural universe. By 2010, this claim is vague at best, like an old dying man recalling his first kiss. Its massive floors & cupola are as garish as the old man’s lascivious grin. I was the world before it changed, says the cathedral. The source vanishes, & with it its energy. In its place, all is for sale. A floor below the church are tombs (entrance fee: three euros) & a gift shop (free!) that offers umbrellas, postcards, virtual audioguide books, jewelry. The saleslady wears Diesel jeans. On the streets, water costs two euros. Toilets cost 60¢. Pizza is exorbitant.

What are we paying for? For the fantasy that this place exists. But it doesn’t! Its aura has dissipated, like the red of the old man’s lips. This is why we feel we must photograph it with such urgency. Should we expect any of this to be different? My petit bourgeois self shouts, Yes! But anything realer would give me vertigo of the imagination (as India does). What would I say to Dante, anyway—I who was raised on “Happy Days” (with Fonzie, not Winnie) & Hostess chips & rock ’n’ roll & a full belly—?

Where would Dante walk, in a world in which half a trillion photos are taken? Would he “see” Beatrice (that one time!) tagged in a facebook pic? What use would he have for the luggage stores, internet points, Ben & Jerry’s? La Casa di Dante—Dante’s house, a popular tourist attraction—is located at his birthplace, but is not the actual house: it is (like my afternoon) a renovation of a renovation. Dante himself was exiled from here for disagreeing with the pope, & died in Ravena.

An unknown city is like an angry dog: to be approached with open palms, a bit of meat, & patience. You cannot force it to like you. In the evening, we stop at Piazza Michelangelo, overlooking the city. From there, Florence is properly medieval, its ankles in fog. I can, again, imagine Dante strolling in the mist among arches & steeples & boxy gothic houses & the birthday cake cathedral. We dine at the apartment of lovely Florentines, at the margin of the city, far from monuments & museums. Six of us sit around a table & drink wine & talk. We feast on cheeses, pesto tortellini, salad, & dolce. It is lovely.

On the commuter train from Bassano del Grappa to Venezia, four impressive figures step on board in enormous red costumes & eerie deadpan white masks. They stand among us like phantoms for the next few stops, as if this were a train from Inferno to Purgatorio. The final terminus is Venezia. Festa di Carnevale. As you descend the train station, a mammoth “Calvin Klein Jeans” banner greets you, hanging from a crumbling building along the canal, a tanned boy-model reclining in an erotic sweat. A phalanx of pharaohs trots past. An ornate Marie Antoinette in a beehive powder wig leans towards a photographer, graciously, taking a drag off her cigarette through her beaded veil. Vixens dressed as black cats row a gozzo up the Grand Canal. A Star Wars family. The ace of diamonds. The jack of spades. A full brass band dolled up as a wretched royal family sits for lunch & plays at full blast beside a display of almost-dead mollusks, octopi, fish. God bless. We torture the oceans & we suffer.

And we gambol & frolic & romp. Earrings! Big blue hair! Depraved, without scorn. In the air, like hammers vibrating, something of Eros & Thanatos, a scent of Mexico’s Dios los Muertos. Flat collapsing facades of the museum city, memories of the dottering empire, whose ankles rot. Il Ponte dei Respiri (Bridge of Sighs), as legend has it, extended between prison & gallows, so it was the last daylight those men saw. Now closed for renovation, it’s submerged in interminable blue ads for the government-run Italian Lottery. In a bacaro three of us stop to drink a vin brulé (hot sweet wine, plastic cups), trying to ignore the TV where famous-in-Italy Vasco Rossi performs his horrendous video remake of Radiohead’s “Creep,” sentimentally rewritten, emo singing, complete with a ballerina pelvic thrusting in soft light. As an old man with a large (non-prosthetic) rosacea-nose glides by with a beer, a toddler-pirate busts in guns cocked, a harlequin behind him, his spectre-steward.

The city sinks at the speed of history itself. I mean, I don’t think anybody will remember Venezia in the end. In the same way that the words “Once upon a time was a fairy bride” do not resemble reality in any way. On the traghetto back to the station, jammed in with us revelers, is a luminous fairy bride, all pearls & bows & veils & tiara & white poker-face mask. We hapless supplicants quietly defer to this mad snow-queen. Out of windows crawl boys worthy of a Caravaggio painting. Out of doorways. From the chiaroscuro lagoon. Apparitions. Shadows of bankers & postal clerks & carabinieri. Dimmer now the medieval drums & gondolieri baying.

Sometimes I fantasize that my job in life is to search for bombs, deftly placed around the world. First I must detect, then disarm. On a quiet piazza the other day — watching a little girl in her puffy winter jacket circling on her bicycle — I was told that there is German ammo, including live mines from WWII, buried underneath. These aren’t the kind of bombs I mean. What my bombs look like, I have no idea. I think their appearance has something to do with beauty, but I bet I’m wrong. I also wouldn’t be sure how to disarm them. If it’s not through poetry, I have no idea.

On the north train to Bologna, we stopped three hours in the little town of Cesena. A man had jumped in front of the train. The station was so typical and nice. A coffee bar. Snow on the tracks. Albanians and Africans selling chocolate bars. I paced the platform, imagining blood in the snow. Then I remember that J.D. Salinger had died a few days before. Zooey is one of the role models of my life. He is so generous, when he calls his sister Franny and tells her Seymour’s story of the fat lady, who is Christ.

A hauntingly wonderful Italian song swirled around in my head (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB3TfBXUOKw), by Rino Gaetano (he died in a car accident in Rome, at 30), listing a long series of bittersweet citizens: chi vive in barache … chi porta gli occhiali … chi ama la zia (who lives in slums … who wears glasses … who loves his aunt), and then the lovely refrain, Ma il cielo è seeeempre più blu! (But the sky is aaaaaalways more blue!). One of the people listed: chi va sotto un treno (who jumps under a train) …

Such a night to bid arrivederci to one’s body. Cold, colourless. Moonless. Only distant yellow streetlights to distinguish earth from sky.

And Pasolini, who killed you? Who smashed you in the face with a board with nails, and drove over you in your own Alpha Romeo, November 2, 1975? Was it Giuseppe Pelosi, the 17 year old who you had intended to screw that night, who was picked up later speeding in your car? Director Michelangelo Antonioni said, “In the end, he was the victim of his own characters.” Did you concoct an elaborate suicide? Was it the mafia? Or a political assassination? No, no, no, no . . .

Late tonight I visited Pasolini’s grave. He’s buried beside his mother Susanna at the outskirts of his hometown Casarsa, Friuli, north of Venice. The driveway is lined with cypresses. Oval photos of the mortals, at their vivacious best, stamped on the stones. Many tiny electric lights in the cold fog, like a glittering underwater realm.

A dog barks, happy to live.

Today the sea revealed one of its dead. A squid like a broken mop in the sand. Head big as a child’s, face down, tentacles tangled like Medusa’s hair. Grey-blue, like fog at dawn. At the end of La Dolce Vita, a “monster” appears on the beach, a primordial blob from the sea, dead, one eye on Marcello. It’s the morning after a party: Marcello and his friends poke at it, make jokes, leave it there. As he walks away, a girl is yelling to him from across a stream, but he can’t decipher her words over the surf.

In Rome Pasolini discovers a bestione papalino, a papal beast, <<not lacking in grace … in the sun that was, for centuries, thousands of noons, here, the sole guest, this papal beast, fortified, laid down between poplars in a boggy coastal plain, fields of watermelons, dykes, this blind papal beast braced by Rome’s sweet orange touch, cracked like the works of Etruscans or Romans, halts for it can no longer be understood.>>

Pasolini himself was a beast. Angering all. His homosexuality, Marxism, sexually explicit films. Frankness. Eventually he was murdered. The Roman beast holds in its claws the ripest tomatoes on earth, its eyes LED screens advertising the past to the future, selling Sophia Loren at twenty-five to you in a rest home. It groans like a train outside the window of the Hotel Cressy.

One drifts past oneself in shop windows, in a shoe store a shy boy looks back, threadbare, obsessive, like the kid in the photos on my grandma’s walls, so unlike these brash boys on their scooters, hair plastered with gel, barking dialect into mobile phones, clustered under the statue of Giordano Bruno, they swill beer where he was burned alive, faces round and impassive, like those of the neighbor’s boys in Bear River, when I was kid, faces so dull in candlelight, as if the animals of themselves had escaped somewhere in the dark woods behind them, they are cutting open a frog with a hunk of granite, shooting pellet guns at each other, riding bicycles through the forest, I am upside-down in the maple beside the striped cabin Dad built, the ferns! the giant oak! the fort! Now, like a child, blaming, afraid of my own thoughts, choking on false sentiment, I speak aloud to the city, ask for answers, I am its acolyte, its flatterer, inamorato, as I spoke to the open sea in Goa, submerged at dusk, light diffuse, the light of a buried April.

The beast will hover over a certain spot, like seagulls over a sewer, like beauty itself, just above our heads, and we stand in piazzas, breathing deeply, not locating the cave from whence it came, or knowing the sharpness of its horns, but the stench of its hide is wonderful, and how did it all manage to turn out so right? An evening like death, reborn beside a group of boys eating gelatos, not lacking in grace, their animals caught at the edge of their lips, stuck there, between this air and that, their bodies mired in the balance, and one can barely hear winter breathing.

For those who do not know him, I present the poet and filmmaker Pasolini:

It’s the 1950’s, he’s in his thirties, contemplating the grave of the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), one of his great heroes. Pasolini strove to carry the torch of Gramsci—who had suggested that it’s possible to bring about social change by using the “forbidden voices” of the proletariat—by becoming a civil poet, making art (poems and movies) about the impoverished multitudes who lived a frustrating and neglected existence in the slums on the margins of cities like Rome and Naples, and spoke in dying dialects.

I will share a few fragments of my translation of his long poem, “The Ashes of Gramsci.” (Caveat: it’s work from the last few days: unfinished!) Pasolini’s diction is sometimes technical, sometimes in dialect, and is generally way above my head—but I’ve plunged into the deep end, with a cracked snorkel, a leaky mask, and one flipper. Translating makes me feel like a reckless, drunk Santa Claus, shoving my oversized green bag down a dirty chimney, which will not fit unless I toss away many of the glittering toys; then I find myself in a strange house with a sad skinny bag of gifts, many of which are dirty and broken.

OK here goes. Assuming that good poetry should hold without line breaks, I transcribe this as prose, though the original is written in irregular tercets. Keep the physical Pasolini in mind, in his raincoat, gazing at the grave. The “you” is, of course, Gramsci.

from The Ashes of Gramsci

…humble brother, with one thin hand you describe the ideal that brightens (but not for us: you are dead, and we equally dead, with you, in the wet garden) this silence. You can’t, you see?, be buried in this weird place, still confined. Boring aristocrats around you. Listen: a few strokes of the anvil from the machine shops of Testaccio, fading, the evening slumbering: between the wretched shelters, bare heaps of cans, scrap iron, where a shop boy sings a dirty song, finished his day, while outside it stops raining.

…………………………………..

Rough climate, sweet history, between these walls the ground oozes other ground; this wet remembers other wet; and resonates with familiars, of latitudes and horizons where English forests and lakes scatter across the sky, between green prairies like a phosphoric billiard table, or emeralds: “And O ye Fountains…”—the pious invocation…

…………………………………..

A red rag, like those rolled up on the necks of partisans and, close to the urn on the pale ground, different reds, two geraniums. There you are, outlaw, with enduring elegance, uncatholic, listed among dead strangers: The ashes of Gramsci… I approach you, trapped between hope and old mistrust, by chance in this thin greenhouse, before your grave, your spirit here among them, free. (Or is it something else, perhaps, more ecstatic and humble, drunk teen sex in symbiosis with death…)

…………………………………..

I attack myself like the poorest poor, with their humiliating hopes, like them I beat myself each day, in order to live. But in my distressing condition of desire, I possess: the most thrilling of the bourgeois states, the most absolute. But how can I possess history: it possesses me, it illuminates: but what good is the light?

When I ache for the ache of a woman, there is another ache inside the second. An ache for home, no matter where I am. A third ache. Sometimes, walking with my cigar along a cobblestone street, I feel another ache inside that one. This is for a home inside home, an archetypal place which I will call Rome. Many call it Paris, a central hope for a sacred locus which contains all the excess and adventure of the soul. An axis mundi that seems to crystallize our desire for being on earth. There is, I think, a fifth ache as well, a central stillness within that Rome of the heart. I imagine it’s silly to literally travel to Rome or Paris or Dharmsala in order to unpeel these layers. Surely it’s possible in a windless room in Musquodoboit Harbour. But I seem to need the displacement and trepidation of the physical journey, or else the first ache becomes torturous.

Walking alone the other night along the powerful Tiber river toward the Vatican, referring often to my cartoon tourist map of the city, watching the myriad couples and old ladies with groceries and priests stroll by, I heard the distinct notes of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” Naturally I followed it along the river path. What would I find? A disco? A circus? A concert? Finally I came across a tent, and behind that a tiny skating rink, the size of a tennis court. Six or seven Italians were skating under floodlights. It was so nice. A father with two kids. One couple: the girl kept falling down and the boy helped her, laboriously, laughing. Everyone seemed to have weak ankles.

But there was one chubby older man with a grey moustache and a tight sweater who was spinning madly, like an Ice Capades diva. He wasn’t a very good skater, but could spin like a demon. He twirled and twirled, slowed down, and then keep twirling. He tilted his head back and became a kind of blur. Just when you thought he would fall down from lightheadedness, he stopped briefly and then began spinning in the other direction. He would skate one lap around the small circuit, and then spin.

There was nothing normal about his spinning. It was beautiful. I thought, he is spinning for God. But then I knew in my heart that his wife had died and that he spun for her. Her name was Tiziana. She used to scratch his back before he fell asleep. Now he doesn’t even keep a cat. He is so lonely. Only in the dizzying centre of his spin can he forget her.

He was, I think, as he spun, the central ache in the Rome of the heart, a strange still point in the chaos of existence, with Michelangelo’s Vatican dome, the imposing Castel Sant’ Angelo, and the dark Tiber as dim backdrops. He waited out three or four forgettable songs, till everybody else drifted away. It was getting late. I thought he’d leave too, but then the Flashdance song (“What a feeeeling”) came on, and he drifted pensively toward the middle of the ice again.

you, the tarot card reader of Piazza Navona, whose hunger reminds passersby that catastrophe is always near; you, the woman, who has suffered a stroke violent as drowning, mind sinking like a palace in Venice, talking homicidally and slurred into your collar; you, Bangladeshi grocers, waving oranges and radios on the main arteries, locked outside the gates of empathy; you, lovers calling out to each other from cars, in earshot of the blind cats of Torre Argentina; you far-off groans of trains, and you, the madman leaning over your guitar like Picasso’s blue man; you, the Nigerian in the bus station line-up, longing for the touch of a friend, under a cloud of circling swifts; you, the sex-addict, eyes veiled, chain-smoking in the bare cold beauty of Campo Dei Fiori; you, the pantomime in gold skin-paint, utterly still but for your eyes, which follow a howling ambulance; you, the exhausted vacationer seated at an unmarked ruin, like a tomato on a porcelain washbasin, overripe, downright purple, sick with the desire to be cut; you, the bald man in a tight military jacket, thinking one immutable thought, Arbeit Macht Frei; you, the tall Icelandic woman busting the balls of your cowed boyfriend, in a market of flowering poinsettias; you, quiet swaggerer with a sad white imbecile beard; you, the drunk weaving your BMW past a busy schoolyard; you, the manqué in a silk scarf, whose enormous rage, forced to leave the body, must soon present itself somewhere else; you who suffer from vanity, pushing black strollers through Villa Borghese; you, the artist, with an epileptic impulse to reveal all, scratching out private ideograms in a dark cell which only the garbage man will ever see; you, the gum-chewing prostitute who knows of the body’s absolute contempt for the well-being of the spirit; you, the man whispering into a payphone, But I love you, Baby; you tone-deaf singers of the Tiber River; you impatient tourists in the churches of the heart; you passive leerers in this city of daughters; you childless fathers, ingenues, amnesiac heroes hunting for your stories in the gelaterias of Fellini; and you, Rome herself, like an old myopic librarian in gargantuan tattered skirts and bows, reading on Dewey decimal cards the names of books that might never have existed …