Thursday, June 2, 2011

Botticelli's Niece


Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Rumi

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William Faulkner

Gotta hurry on back to my hotel room, where I got me a date with Botticelli’s niece...
Bob Dylan

...trying to write but can’t ignore that classic profile...pre-Raphaelite...if moderated by a nose ring...hair straight outta Botticelli, eyes staring into another world...but there I’m editorializing...or, more accurately, fantasizing...more likely she’s thinking of some boyfriend with six-pack abs straight outta Jersey Shore...and, certainly a lot younger than I...but maybe that’s just cynicism...hard to stay out of these frames...a year or two ago on my birthday, a younger guy I was talking to said he bet I got laid a lot back in the day and asked if I regret never getting married...since, apparently, a man in his mid-forties is ineligible for either marriage or sex...no matter how much time he spends on the yoga mat...then, I always say, while it’d be great to have a twenty year old body again, I’d rather hold on to the mind I’ve got now...and sometimes believe it...and, anyway, now she’s stepping out the door to get away from a screaming child, carrying a paperback copy of To the Lighthouse, which, to tell the truth, I saw before coming up with the eyes staring straight into another world thing...and Botticelli’s Venus always looked more classically vain than anything, a yoking of Renaissance ideals with those pretty girls who wouldn’t talk to me in high school...which was exactly what appealed to me, wandering through the Uffizi after crouching awake all night on the train from Brindisi, having last slept, for only an hour or two, the previous afternoon...passed out from all those godawful early morning shots of Ouzo on the boat from Patras...covered by my rail-pass, of course...I’d slept out on the deck and rolled over in my sleeping bag at around seven a.m. to an invitation from that somewhat older guy I’d been talking to the night before to join him for a drink...and, later, somebody lent me a Walkman and I passed out blissfully listening to a scratchy Dead tape...twenty years old beneath a Mediterranean sky...

5 comments:

TheRiverWanders said...

Beautiful. So many levels of beautiful. And honest.

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earthtoholly said...

The conversation with the younger guy made me giggle...people's perceptions of time, at different ages, are interesting. When I was in my 40s, I and one in his 50s were talking age-related stuff with a 20-something. Seeing the puzzled look on the young guy, I said, "Oh, you're young yet," and I could tell by his face that he didn't even get that.

If she's thinking of anything having to do with Jersey Shore, drjay, let 'er walk. :o)

You must've taken a camera with you on your travels...right?

Word verification: ingsgr...my last name (kinda) and today's 'tude!

Daisy Deadhead said...

Well alright.

WR said...

LOL!!!

"a year or two ago on my birthday, a younger guy I was talking to said he bet I got laid a lot back in the day and asked if I regret never getting married...since, apparently, a man in his mid-forties is ineligible for either marriage or sex."

I love young people. They can be so silly and myopic but they are pretty cute in expressing a skewed (by the limitation of age) funny view of what people should/ shouldn't/ could/ couldn't be doing at any given time. I work with elders who think that they should still be getting "laid" at 90 and I never hear them say marriage is a prerequisite.

Love the image of falling asleep under the Mediterranean sky. Nice!