California Reading

[Monte Davis]

>Not embarrassed enough,
>David
 
No call to be -- I'm just listening to the last minutes of the show, and
thanks for saying what's blazingly obvious but not said often enough:
"Sentence for sentence, paragraph for paragraph, there's no one who can
touch him."
 
 "Outside, citizens were being blown horizontal, hanging on to whatever they
could, shoes flown off their feet sailing away out over the stormy Lagoon.
Roof tiles were picked away one by one, gondolas bounced booming end over
end down the Riva, leaving spalled-off chips of lacquer to eddy behind in
tiny black tornadoes, as overhead, shed feathers counter-whirling in a pale
silvery turbulence, tutelary Venetian angels sought shelter among un-tended
bells, wind-beaten, signaling now hours canonical only to storm, calling
celebrants to invisible masses for the souls of the wrecked and sea-taken,
as below the grounded pigeons and waterbirds were fleeing the Lagoon
shivering into sotopòrteghi, into courtyards within courtyards, denying sky,
pretending citizenship in the labyrinths of earth, gone glitter-eyed and
shifty as rats in corners. Venetians pulled on rubber boots and waded
through the high water. Visitors, taken by surprise, went teetering along
elevated duckboards, negotiating rights-of-way as they might. Hastily
fashioned signs with painted arrows appeared at corners to indicate drier
routes to take. Water heaved crazily out in the canals, gunmetal gray,
smelling like the sea, some sea somewhere. Piazza San Marco was a great
ornamental basin, belonging to the sea, dark as the sky it was reflecting, a
ground for oblongs of orange light from the windows of the caffès and shops
under the Procuratie, images scattered and re-scattered by the wind."
 
 
Bora! Bora! Bora!
 
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