 | Luigi Marchini Biography: Luigi Marchini was brought up in London where he spent many a happy maths and physics lesson at the National Film Theatre. |
A Renaissance Kind of Cool
Geometry governs the
arc of her smile;
spheres, circles, parabolas fuse with cubes,
squares and
polyhedrons. Pyramidal lines
corroborate images.
Her folded hands, bust,
neck, face-
a pyramid. A golden triangle.
Leonardo drew her face and body
from neck
to hands in the golden rectangle.
The horizon split in
two,
left side higher
than the right. Undulating rivers,
winding paths,
abundant hills
beckon. An escape
from this anaesthetizing
pose.
Leonardo’s sfumato technique renders
outlines weak, merges
forms,
mellows colours, mixes light
and shade so we never know
the time
of day.
Forget the golden ratio,
Euclid’s elements,
and Fibonacci’s
sequence,
she should turn around
and run.
-
Winner of the Canterbury Writers Poetry Prize 2006
Gnocchi and Barolo
I
made gnocchi yesterday.
It wasn’t easy, my hands more adept at
holding
pens, making love than kneading
one kilogram of potatoes, five
hundred
grams of plain flour together, beating,
squashing the mixture –
King Kong
and the citizens of New York or me exacting
revenge on my
brother via his perfectly formed blue
plasticine models of a Spitfire or the
Titanic.
I made gnocchi yesterday.
Later the family sat down to
dinner -
Bolognese sauce, a 1998 Barolo standing guard;
the gnocchi could
have been better:
the dumplings weren’t smooth, my hands not
powerful
enough to do the deed; the Barolo, however, tasted like
the scent
of Dolce Gabbana Light Blue
pierced by the early morning sunlight, and
its
colour was red gold.
I made gnocchi yesterday.
My mother
cooked gnocchi on my eighth
birthday - it was a different family that sat
down
to dinner then: no more can I see my grandmother-
La Giaconda – at
the head of the table, smiling,
or my aunt on my right, so close I could
touch
her dreams; now there are daughters,
wives, nephews, but they were
not there on
my eighth birthday.
I made gnocchi yesterday.
My
grandmother and my aunt, did they
eat gnocchi on their eighth
birthdays?
I made gnocchi yesterday.
Did Garibaldi and Mazzini
taste gnocchi before
they spilled blood the colour of Barolo uniting
the
country that bore my grandmother,
my aunt; did Mussolini devour gnocchi
before
marching on Rome, or just before he got his
comeuppance: his body
trussed up,
a bloody pig heart, not beating; and if
he did was it washed
down with a glass
of Barolo, Chianti, or a crater full
of fear; did Verdi
savour gnocchi as he composed
Macbeth, and planned Luisa Miller,
Rigoletto,
while on the same continent the Irish
starved -no potatoes for
them,
just grass and weeds for the lucky ones: those alive
herbivores now,
like the mule deer, the prairie dog -
one wasteland is like any
other.
I made gnocchi yesterday.
I can still taste the beef and
tomatoes
of the sauce and if I squash my
tongue between my teeth I can
squeeze out
little bits of potatoes; and I can still see my
grandmother,
my aunt - only now they are dining with the Giuseppes
and
Benito, company for potatoes
and the shells of deer and rodents.