The name I go by is Joe

My mother called me Giuseppe

I have a skill

And a curse.

I know they are related.

My skill

Seeing and creating beauty.

Swirls of plaster

Sphinx

Garlanding untasted fruits

Aloft as skies

And lives

of Britain’s wealthy

men

I watch

From the ladders.

Them

doing whatever they like

Me

doing as I’m told

- but within a range of freedom

allowed

now that I am second only to Pietro

I used it

- that freedom

Back in Venezia

in palazzi

- those cheap copies

of Signore Palladio’s masterpieces.

I learned quickly

to stifle a giggle in this wet green and pleasant land

at what passes as Palladian

Why am I here?

Both my skill

And my curse

I loved another.

And thus I fled

with his memory

under the wing of the maestro

Pietro Lafranchini - Stuccodore magnifico

And so as I mix the ingredients

I feel again his hands on mine

teaching me those seven years.

And in the gestures

that make art

I find him again

And again

I wonder

if I too shall wither away

with the white dust disease

- the untold cost

of their love

of this chinoiserie.[1]