Luisa Casati

Venice never closes!!
Casati never stops her flamboyant dance,
and Rome has monuments and artists in
narrow alleyways full of hope.

My broken camera captured her movements
in orange hair with twisted curls in front
of the ruins of antiquity, where her dark eyes
sat on the marbled shoulder of Hercules.

This gay Italian city watched her
in Medusa dress, stroll with jeweled leash
leading two borzois, one black, one white,
to an audience with the Pope,
but he was busy playing bridge.

Upon watching her pass, I went straight to my house,
hoping for an invitation to her dinner party, but it arrived
sixty years too late.

Posing on her polar-bearskin rug
as others took siestas during the renaissance,
she heard The Volga Boat Song and on the first playing
noticed a bold red circle with an empty center
smeared on the title page.

It was Picasso pimping for the Bolshevik
uprising against the Tsar, dabbling in paint,
while his friend Stravinsky scored that tune for
the Ballets Russes, where Olga played a part.

Later in Paris, the largest cloud in the world
sat on the waterfront near Montmartre
where tourists spent their day with wine
and local cheeses, learning French.

Nearby, Casati's Palais Rose was built of red marble
and was naked except for images of herself,
many tall and skinny.

If she were insane, as rumored, she would have had more than
two arms smelling of incense and a necklace
of love bites underneath her river of pearls.

She died in London on June 1, 1957, many years
after Shakespeare, and is buried at Brompton Cemetery
with a taxidermed Pekinese dog
resting at her feet.