Rimini

Tempus loquendi,tempus tacendi

Inscription in the Malatesta Temple,Rimini


Will the elephant tell his secrets, out of the east?
Will the circling stars devolve their powers upon us?
Fortune-teller, turn the next card.
Here comes Gemistos Plethon, the noble Byzantine,
Smuggling wisdom and magic under his cloak,
Thrice-great as Hermes himself;
Ficino and Mirandola are as his familiars,
Two black cats walking on tiptoe.
I see them all walking in the streets of Rimini:
Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato and Christ,
Commanding stars, stones, plants, symbols and places.
The artist makes his heart a talisman,
Conjuring spirits, good and ill, into matter,
Fashioning models of the universe.
The Temple is a mystery that the soul
May solve at last only in solving itself;
Dreams and doctrines lure you on,
Apotheosis or anathema your destination.
Cults and sects muster their faithful for the reckoning,
False prophets stalk the streets, crying their wares,
The hidden hand makes moves on the chessboard.
See Sirius rising over the Adriatic:
Philosophers and artists, like the Sabeans of Harran,
Build pyramids of images to the stars,
Pharaohs on golden barques ascending.
Sigismondo Malatesta returns from Greece, defeated,
To his bankrupt city, surrounded by foes,
Having lost his last chance to save himself,
Bringing home the dug-up body of Gemistos Plethon
To bury him with honours in his Temple,
Beneath the claws of the Crab.
These stones are a zodiac unto itself,
Grand enchantment for initiates’ eyes,
Drawing me as a bird to a snake,
To fathom the fathomless, trusting to find
In history reason, in death resurrection.
How many ghosts infest this weird city,
Parading their torments and terrors through the mind,
Running wild in the streets’ grimoire?
By day the sun burns like a witch’s pyre,
Like Eucharist on an excommunicant’s tongue;
Then shadowed moon presides over a séance,
Speaking in the mingled voices of the dead.
Night’s fool, I seek the Muse in bodies,
Intoxicated by the smell of women and the sea,
Dancing in a carnival crowd of skeletons,
Till dawn melts my bones down to mercury
And drips me onto mirrors, into the abyss.