The Triumph of Death at Pisa and Premonitions
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I The Tower Time locus is in the body's person Corpus force released at death Sonic throttles modulates As distance darts (diminishing) between Pisan pomme and earth buried green Cemetery marble name slabs Given by the living as monument to Living science and progressive unseen Advance of inclining generations All those dead, the tower, wanting to lie down. Off balance wavering, a priori sight Tips out over, oblique and back, probes Where shadows rain. Reason pendulates when death is near, swings its natal line. Camposanto Trionfo delle Morte Savage odors gaff the body's gravity, Drive back (trip) ancestral feet. Gay lords and gray robed ladies tilt away. Their thin hounds turn, sniff, test the air And Death steps forth its bare locus empty Where understanding rights the cask of accedence and rat discovery whiskers death laps newness that is veritas in skull chalk paws The visitor sees vertically sees the gravestones of the dead the fresco freckled plasterings imagines all that Death let stand (master stroke, residuum in form remains) Galileo leans on the world's bell and death spins in in terrestrial heresy
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About the Book
The famous frescos in the Campo Santo at Pisa painted in the 1340's include striking images of "The Triumph of Death," "The Devil," "Hell", and "The Last Judgement." The cemetery of the Campo Santo contains shiploads of earth imported from the Holy Land. The Campo Santo was damaged by Allied air strikes during World War II. The restoration of the frescos revealed the drawings beneath the frescos, which have also been meticulously and wonderully restored. I visited Pisa three times to see the Leaning Tower, which I climbed on my first visit, now no longer permitted. It was a dizzying and unbalanced experience, a feeling that produced new insights and ideas. At my home one evening rocking in my family rocker where my mother rocked and nursed her eight children, I almost lost my balance and tipped over backward, which made me think of The Leaning Tower of Pisa and Galileo's experiments with gravity there. I also remembered that Copernicus lived in a leaning tower. The opening passage of my poem reproduces the feeling of being out-of-balance. The "Premonitions" poems are fitting prophecies.
About the Author
Frank Cebulski is a San Francisco poet, translator, and art and book reviewer. His books of poetry are: "Corm" (Berkeley: Oyez, 1974), "Mediterranean Sonnets" (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1988), "Concrete Visual Shaped" (Berkeley: Light-Gravity Press, 2006), "Only Emotion Endures" (AuthorHouse, 2009), "The Fifth World" (AuthorHouse, 2010), "Lonely Nights & Wild Women" (AuthorHouse, 2011), "Love Songs for a Certain Age" (AuthorHouse, 2017), and "The Triumph of Death at Pisa and Premonitions," He is founder and owner of Light-Gravity Press, where he published various broadsides of his concrete, visual and shaped poems. He has translated poems from Latin and French, including "Eros Raving" (AuthorHouse, 2016) a translation of a complete book of poems by Denis Roche. He studied physics and English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and British and American literature at the universities of Cincinnati, California at Berkeley, and Kings College, London. He was Bancroft Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and Fulbright Lecturer to France at the University of Metz. He was for thirty years contributing editor for "Artweek" and has written art criticism for "Art in America," "Sculpture,"and Examiner.com. He was the first Director of Technical and Professional Writing at San Francisco State University. To learn more about him and his poetry, visit his website at www.cebulski.net.