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Cole Porter

HOMEWARD BOUND

Our travelling companions, in their many

thousands, are mostly old or middle aged –

here from all parts of this divided land,

here where a local man set off a bomb,

in this utilitarian, concrete arena

magicked into a digital theatre.

 

‘The Mississippi Delta is shining like

 a National guitar,’ sings the elderly,

almost diminutive troubadour

from New York City, still centre stage

with his acoustic guitar, ironic

and lyrical, after all this time.

 

‘And she said losing love is like a window

in your heart. Everybody sees you’re blown

apart. Everybody sees the wind blow…

 

He has a young man’s energy. His voice,

nearly pristine, is rasped with wisdom.

Imagine Cole Porter and Irving Berlin

touring the world with their own orchestras!

 

‘And sometimes when I’m falling, flying,

And tumbling in turmoil, I say, Whoa…

 

He is accompanied by an off-stage host

of engineers, technicians and crew,

and backed by a multi-talented,

cosmopolitan band of angels.

 

‘…I’ve reason to believe we will all

be received in Graceland.’

 

 

O BRAVE NEW WORLD!

On the third floor of Ca’ Rezzonico –

where gondoliers slept when the palazzo

was let to the song writer Cole Porter –

is Egidio Martini’s collection

of five centuries of Venetian art.

Three of the floors’ small windows survive,

each an intentional belvedere.

Two view the Grand Canal, the third south west.

The eye follows the perspective below:

a canal and its quay with inevitable

eclectic craft, stone bridges and turisti;

then tenements and the terracotta tiles –

but not the anticipated skyline,

on the mainland, of the Euganean Hills,

distant and pale as if the background to

a nativity or crucifixion

instead seven, multi-storey cruise liners.

 

On the floor below are the city’s masters:

Canal, Guardi, Longhi, and Tiepolo

whose son’s fresco, Il Mundo Novo, depicts

the backs of a late eighteenth century

Venetian crowd of all clans and classes

queuing to see a huckster’s peep show

of America – the crassness

of the machine observed in profile

only by the artist and his late father.

When the son died La Serenissima

had ended. Bonaparte had arrived.

 

From the ballroom below there is music.

‘You’re the tops…You’re Napoleon Brandy…

You’re a painting by Botticelli…

You’re the smile on the Mona Lisa…the moon

over Mae West’s shoulder.’

 

 

 

JEWISH TUNES

Cole Porter was an Episcopalian,

a farmer’s son, from Peru, Indiana,

whose ambition was to write ‘Jewish Tunes’.

My mother’s favourite song was ‘Begin

the Begine’, which Cole Porter composed,

the story goes, one evening at the piano

in The Ritz Bar of the Ritz Hotel, Paris.

The love song is in a minor key.

It personifies longing, wit, irony.

 

My mother and father met in the city

of Kano, Northern Nigeria.

‘When they begin the beguine,
It brings back the sound of music so tender,
It brings back the night of tropical splendour,
It brings back a memory evergreen!…

She and my father, Gentile and Jew,

danced to the music at their wedding

in Kano’s driest, dustiest month –

the month Heydrich’s Wannsee Conference

agreed The Final Solution in

less than ninety minutes.