Gary LeBel
Tattoo
While on his journey through Italy in the 1580s, writer Michel de Montaigne met Veronica Franco. The meeting was recorded by his secretary in the travel diary he carried to note the details of his master’s itinerary.
It’s said that she presented him with a copy of her book, Lettere familiari e diversi, having beaten the clergy at their own game, in being one of the most famous and admired of courtesans in all of Venice. (The film Dangerous Beauty depicts her life and the “sentimental education” her mother had given her.)
I wonder, what would she and Montaigne have talked about? She, a professional escort of the nobility, a beauty bronzed with a brilliant and scathing wit, as well as being an accomplished writer and poet, and he, the talk of Europe then, the writer of some of the most original volumes ever written in a genre that he himself had invented. Much admired in England, his forthcoming, expanded edition of Essays was about to be printed: yes, I do wonder what he and Veronica would have talked about, likely in Italian, in which Montaigne was also fluent,
as I also wonder if Hadrian, one of the “Good Emperors,” when lovesick and grieving one night, really did kiss the marble lips of his dear, departed Antinous standing amid the colonnades that lined the pool at his villa … for, as always, I relish the unanswerable as a starting point for pleasant fictions.
The qualities of another’s heart
go everywhere you go,
even as Time’s attrition
stretches and blurs the beloved’s face
like an old sailor’s tattoo
About the Author
Gary LeBel is an artist-poet living in the greater Atlanta area whose poems have appeared in journals throughout the USA, the UK, Japan, and India. He believes that art, or anything else worth doing, is a life-long pilgrimage.