Italian Movie

3 Gefässe 2 - 3 Vessels 2 42 x 56 cm Dispersionsfarbe/Tinte - wallpaint/ink/acrylic medium c/o Karin Goeppert

ITALIAN MOVIE

Right now dreaming my way around

a hot room perfumed by bunches of lilies

stuffed into a score of vases and earthen-ware pots

under a baroque rotunda in the Tuscan countryside.

A young woman with a beautiful bare back

playing a piece by J.S. Bach(from BWV 988) on a grand piano

which looks as if it’s been given a coat of lip gloss

just before the performance.  

Her family’s lumped together in a cheering section of sorts, i.e.,

clap or die seems to be the message.

Everyone applauds enthusiastically so no one gets hurt.

Now I am inside the head of an older man

in the audience, an aristocrat from the look of him,

silk tie, sumptuous shark-skin jacket, cheekbones

bespeaking generations of selective breeding. As him, I am beginning

to swell with an inexplicable sense of my own entitlement and

self-importance all out of proportion with what I’ve accomplished

in life and am admiring the girl soloist’s long olive-hued

dimpled back with its faint scatter of pretty moles and delicate  

articulation of finely inlaid muscle during the fugue, and in my thoughts

she’s naked, bound hand and foot to the lowered piano lid

upon which I am having my lordly way with her, enacting the

Tuscan version of droit de seigneur. The woman sitting next to me

is probably my wife, eyes closed, chins resting on a pearl necklace,

dreaming of dinner parties and snoring softly. Cherubs are chasing

amazingly fat nymphs across the ceiling, which reminds an American girl

   sitting in the audience(unable to fully fathom her jabberwockian

Marketing Studies (sic?) majorette soul, I cannot be her)

of a shopping mall in Iowa. The cherubs are beefy football players

from the high school, and the fabulously fat nymphs could be

any local girls over the age of sixteen. She’s pretty much ripped

on a bottle of Vino Santo(16% alc.) which she shared with her

boy friend before the concert began. Picking through the contents of her mind

   I come across a jumble of Victoria’s

Secret under things and shoes and more shoes and a basketball gym dance

after which she lost her virginity and now I witness a fit of  

pique over a rather large zit that dominates her chin

(damn those Italian desserts!)  

plus the echo of a student who earlier mentioned

the state of something called “Italian Cinema.”

   “What,” she might have asked,

“is an Italian movie? Would that be something with Sylvester Stallone in it?

Or, like, one of those boring ancient “Godfather” type flicks that my

dad thinks are s-o-o-o awesome?” She has no idea of course that she’s nothing

beneath the frescoes above her and the frescoes nothing beneath Tuscan sky.

And what of our lovely soloist?

Whose string, as it were, did she pull to get here

this stifling lily-sweet evening, and I hope she never stops.