I once saw Alberto Giacometti walking
across a cobblestone street in the affluent
neighborhood of Beacon Hill -
Victorian and/or Georgian styles,
the creme-de-la-creme of New England,
18th century rowhouses and mansions
all covered in ivy like the fantastic history
that surrounds old Boston;
I had just stepped out from DeLucas,
a great little Wine and Cheese shop with it’s
brown-stone bricks and red cobblestone sidewalks;
it was 1998, some thirty-two years
since Giacometti died;
well, he looked very much alive as he walked
beneath that suddenly surrealist sky,
just a bit confused;
above us in that slate-grey sky
flew several pencil sketched gulls,
their wings like thin wires
and they were flying upside down
and backwards;
they kind of reminded me of da Vinci’s
inventions in engineering,

the smell of coffee was heavy in the air,
then there was a sudden rain
which looked more like the ashes
of burnt cigarettes;
Giacometti oddly made
my head feel as if carved
from the blade of a knife. I shivered.
He stopped me briefly
on Charles Street outside of DeLucas
and asked a question I thought bizarre:
he had said, “Do you know the way
to Borgonovo?” I did not know the
place, so I said: “Is it a new café?”
“No, it is in Switzerland, dear boy; it is the city
where I was born...” and he somehow made
me feel like a small and foolish child,

At that moment Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso
and Balthus walked past us, all as thin
as knife-blades and speaking in strange rhythms
strange tongues,

They crossed the street.

Giacometti watched them with a peculiar expression
beat in his eyes, and then those eyes bled,
or perhaps he was crying; the colours acidic
like acrylic paints dripping,
dripdripdrip-
ing...

I could only stare, silent and still.

The three men walking stopped when they made it
to the warped sidewalk beneath an old clock,
and they never moved again;
they turned to bronze sculptures
with a green patina; passing pigeons
shat upon them. Then from the oily shadows
a naked woman had stopped
to light a long thin white cigarette,
and then she turned
to stare at them; Giacometti became
excited, not, I thought, because the woman
was naked, or that the three painters
had turned to brown aluminous statues,
nor the fact that her hair was of the most
striking, iridescent blue
I had ever before seen

(Alberto made me think of Rodin's The Thinker
and inside my head I saw Angkor Wat
and still do not understand why,
all this while taxis & cars drove on by...)

Giacometti looked at me then said:
"All the sculptures of today,
like those of the past, will end one day in pieces...”
something I know he has said before;
he then he crumbled like dried leaves,
the wind came and blew him away...

The naked woman was gone.

As for Ernst, Picasso
and Balthazar, I noticed that they had morphed,
like Futurist sculptures of Umberto Boccioni,
dissolved in the rain stroked neon and had become
three everyday business men dressed in black Armani suits
carrying expensive umbrellas; they entered
a parked stretch black limousine
slowly and methodically,
one by one
while a man who looked very much
like Salvador Dalí held open
the door for them;
the car melted away into the street,
the wet neon and falling rain
like a jazzy movement of Bernard Herrmann
from Cape Fear,
Taxi Driver
or Citizen Kane...

The Hitchcock sense of vertigo struck me fast
and I almost fell over,

(Prior to Giacometti doing his vanishing act
he had handed to me something
that felt like waxy paper;
when I opened my hand to see
what it was, I saw
a 100 Swiss Frank banknote,
1998!)

I bought a bottle of Johnny Walker Black
went back to my small,
narrow flat on Acorn Street,
lit a smoke and had a few drinks
while listening to Coltrane, Davis
and Thelonious Monk
('Round Midnight, Blue In Green
& Epistrophy)...

Yea, that was a strange day,
a strange day indeed.

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