Men prove particularly ominous in “Costa Magic,” the third and final poem in the sequence of âItalian Pictures.â As in the previous two poems in the series (“July in Vallombrosa” and “The Costa San Giorgio”), the female speaker initially is positioned as an observer of her surroundings but in “Costa Magic” she chooses to join the community of women that form to care for a sick neighbor girl, Cesira. This community rises in response to the patriarch who looms over the street scene in disapproval of his daughterâs plans to marry. He breaks the space of the first lineâs insistent flush right arrangement, as though bursting the white space of the page to enter and generate the poem.
What is this âconception,â with its clear suggestions of fertility as a daughterâs duty but also in the sense of âconceptionâ as a concept or plan or symbolic image? Symbolic image and biological pregnancy intertwine in the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception, Godâs intervention at the moment of Maryâs conception in the womb of Saint Anne, her mother, to absolve her of original sin so that the divine plan for Mary as the Mother of God might be realized without taint. (See Loyâs âPortrait of a Nun,â âmystic conceptionâ.) What, however, is the âthis one / Hereâ or the âyellow hairâ? Is the father imagining a hearty (male) child that he wishes his daughter could conceive, Christ-like with âyellow hairâ common to Florentine Renaissance iconography of the baby Jesus, as in Fra Lippo Lippiâs typical rendering in the âMadonna with the Child and Two Angelsâ (housed in Florenceâs Uffizi gallery)?Â
This act galvanizes a specifically male force on the street, as the speakerâs âIâ realizes she hears her husbandâs voice accompanying the fatherâs act in a ritual robbing the young woman of her life:
While listening up                         I hear my husband
Mumbling Mumbling
Mumbling at the window
Malediction
Incantation
White spaces within the lines again yawn as chasms of male power into which a woman can fall victim, while the columns of words visually divide the linear progression of the narrative, a move both Futurist in its use of typographic disruption and anti-Futurist in its indictment of a collective phallocentrism (evoked by the columns) tethering traditions of marriage and church with avant-garde revolution in a shared system of misogyny : âI hear my husband/ Mumbling / at the window.â Mable Dodge, in her autobiography, comments that Stephen Haweis would âdelve into magic things and knew a few little magical tricks,â suggesting Loy ominously mirrors her husband in the poem (338).
Unlike in âCosta San Giorgio,â though, the female speaker of “Costa Magic”âself-identified as a wifeâis now on the street while the husband is at the window. She has moved from outsider to participant, described by Tara Prescott as a âcloseness, either emotionally or physicallyâ (19) and by Carolyn Burke as a moment in which the âdistance between observer and subject could collapse in moments of sympathy whenâas in Futurist paintingâshe place herself inside of the sceneâ (199).
In their waiting and their trust in the magic treeâs revelation, the community of women implicitly share the speakerâs condemnation of the fatherâs âunnaturalâ relation with his daughter, a âBewitchingâ rife with erotic, incestuous suggestions:
It is unnatural in a Father
Bewitching a daughter
Whose hair            down covers her thighs
This final stanza rediagnoses the ailment from the counter-magical perspective of women, a perspective perceiving an âunnaturalâ system of masculine power crossing and linking all nodes of authority. This understanding of a collective complicity that protects men and keeps them in power occupies the final lineâs white spaces, chiming with other chasms severing the poemâs lines to register unspoken silences structuring womenâs lives.
The poemâs compositional architecture, made up of glimpses and pieces, creates a network of connections between male-centered structures that collude in enforcing such silences as in, for example, the use of the upper-case F in the final âFatherâ that links the human âfatherâ opening the poem with a patriarchal god. From that association, others multiply, such as the suggestive use of the word âconceptionâ to point toward the Immaculate Conception as a narrative made by men for men to circumscribe and exploit womenâs sexualityâas the human father possesses the daughter sexually but must maintain the illusion of her purity, the god-father removes the taint of original sin in joining with his daughter.