La Serenissima, in morning light, is beautiful. But you already knew that. Palette of honeyed ochre and ship’s bell bronze, water precisely the color of the hand-ground pigment with which the water of Venice has been painted for centuries, angled slats of aquamarine chopped by wakes to agate, matte black backlit with raw opal and anodized aluminum, rope-work of wisteria, wands of oleander emerging from hidden gardens. At noon, near the boat-yard of the last gondola maker, a violin echoes from deep inside an empty cistern. Lo and behold. Ecco. A swirl of wind-blown ashes from yet another cigarette and for a moment you see December snow in Saint Petersburg, the Lion’s Bridge, crystalline halo crowning Akhmatova’s defiant silhouette. Sunset: bitter orange and almond milk, sepia retinting the canals with cartographer’s ink as you study the small gray lagoon crabs patrolling a kingdom of marble slabs descending into the depths; rising almost imperceptibly, the tide licks at, kisses, then barely spills across the top step’s foot-worn, weed-velveted lip in slippery caravans, dust-laden rivulets. So another day’s cargo of terrestrial grit enriches their scuttled realm, and they make haste, like drunken pirates in a silent film, erratically but steadfastly, to claim it.
Copyright © 2014 by Campbell McGrath. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on March 5, 2014. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.