Being Postmodern
Ten miles from Pisa, the beach where Trelawney burned the
drowned corpse of Shelley offers villas for lease, new stucco facades leering
sea-pink and rosy green. The heat of the pyre, three hours burning, failed to
consume the heart. The backdrop of mountains that so impressed Byron testifies
to the fireproof quality of that muscle, later claimed by Leigh Hunt but
surrendered to Mary Shelley. I walk from Viareggio on the strand for six or eight
miles and allow the summer heat to burn me like Byron, who blistered so badly
he wasted two weeks recovering. The thought of him shrivels me in my tracks.
The villas sneer and the scattered beachgoers chatter in
Italian too quick for me to readily decipher. A mile or two offshore, sloops
ply the Gulf. Pleasure craft built for
the rich: not for English poets but for Italian, French, and German corporate
clones wedded to cell phone and fax machines. They’re unlikely to gaze at the
beach and the background of mountains, unlikely to glimpse the ghost-smoke of
Shelley’s pyre, which lingers not quite invisibly.
The salt and frankincense Trelawney tossed on the fire still
sweetens the smoke plume, and I breathe it gracefully, deeply as I dare. I’m
well aware that by testifying to presence of that smoke plume two hundred years
too late I lay my heart as bare as Shelley’s, though being postmodern it’s no
longer an organ of love.
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