A conversation with Nietzsche

 

I was not always a maker of puppets

carving out loneliness in smiling faces –

nor, too, always this old man,

round spectacles perched halfway down

a Roman nose. My grey hair was once thick,

springy and as black as any witch’s cat.

Some cold nights before the fire I watch

red and blue flames flicker - life twists

and turns also, licks this log and then that.

I lost Loretta in Venice to a Gondolier.

She lives there still, beside the rising tears

of the Canałasso, with three sons

and a married daughter named Geppetina.

I misplaced God somewhere between Venice

and Sicily; on the road, beneath the stars –

He should have come close to me, instead,

like a shooting star, I felt the dearth of Him.

For a time the pain of His exit left me breathless

and fearful of each emerging, impermanent, night.

It was His loss that gave me the courage to fashion,

pretending I was part of a burgeoning family.

Pinocchio was the forty-fifth, the only one with a heart

and whose eyes I found beneath riddled bark; a son

who appeared to move even as the wood was being carved.