Poetry:
Park, Nancy
NANCY PARKE Shoe Shop, Urbino Umberto Ottani carves angels like this high heel, four...
...for this angel His shop is full of its pungent tang image of Umberto Ottani layered with something savory summer and winter going up the steps basil alive oil and garlic of Federico's castle become gallery from the kitchen upstairs, to browse among the cittadini there full of motes of dust with a piece of fruitwood adrift in the wedge of light chestnut maybe from the open door, from the hillside below Pretelli's vineyard full of wooden figures in mind and here and there in mind a miniature shoe as the way things ought to be...
...in wine red calfskin lined in kid in has-relief and round they cram the shelves also his craft...
...about eight inches square in walnut...
...Crucifixions...
...and now at eighty Here in Ottani's shop they stand at ease can't stop making things...
...for form's sake I should argue Angels...
...with Michelangelo's Pieta He knows his worth...
...This humpbacked thicknecked angel a young warrior midstride startled out of abstraction that Greek bronze they found to glance up with lunatic sweetness in the sea off Riace two weeks ago was thirty thousand lire...
...local and foreign Fifty thousand copied and imagined...
...Beh, fifty thousand, declares Umberto Ottani...
...22: 13 August 1993 Commonweal...
...NANCY PARKE Shoe Shop, Urbino Umberto Ottani carves angels like this high heel, four inches long, and other local figures...
...at mandatory retirement Their originals live up the hi Il returned to shoes and carving in the Galleria Naaionale...
...Cittadini...
...He dangles this one 11 17uca Federico of and grins Piero's famous profile Umberto Ottani squints one-eyed at Rafaello s who began as artigiano moony self-portrait repairer of shoes, which dreamily regards then as state employee the three foreground figures taught his craft to prison boys of Piero's Flagellation at the reform school, who deep in talk...
...a snoutnosed professor from the university: tin pezzo intern d'ulivo gttesto an Uccello devil: an olive tree uprooted by a storm more devils and saints a little down the road to Fermignano...
...santo cielo Nativities...
...but I would give more than that He finishes their surfaces my ticket to California if I could with shoe polish...
...Ottani has the clipping...
...of his shoe repair shop...
Vol. 120 • August 1993 • No. 14
