"ALTHOUGH I FOUND HER THUS, WE DID NOT PART..."

The wind walks
about St. Mark's Square

stooping to ******
this and that man's hat

or slyly lift
a lady's skirt

so that she drops
her purse with a curse

before chasing off
some offensive litter.

A cat watches the evening
getting entangled in the magic

of a hurdy-gurdy man
who appears

to have stepped out of
a century

other than
our own.

Venice and its passing
procession of pedestrians and cats

barely on the cusp
of consciousness.

This table I am
seated at

is an island
of memory

and I am
shipwrecked

somewhere between
the present and a past.

A wave slaps a gondola
as if it had told a ***** joke

about the filthy weather and
what a seagull had said.

I have brought you to Venice
because you have never been.

Your death has seen
to that.

One day as the earth turned
away from the sun

you stepped off
into a greater unknown.

Now, I say: "See, sister
with my eyes

all the future you
have missed.

The moon landing.
Me - grown to be

this man
willing to share the world

with you always
I see the world for two.

You shall exist
in the silence between

note and note
word and word

Puppets dance and laugh
show us ourselves for

whatever we are
all our gaudy follies

or brightly painted
foibles.

A moon sits upon
a bridge as if

it were  Humpty Dumpty
his very self.

The puppets now
half in-half out

of their many stickered
packing cases

look as if they could
run away when

the humans
aren't looking.

Even the hurdy-gurdy man
has stepped back into

the century he had
come from.

Rain and a star
falling...falling.