Thrum.
Undulating across the cyan, sea scented lagoon,
  I watch Venezia condense like an artist
  sketching grey lines in the mist.
Murano: thump, a deeper varum,
  static air fills with diesel vapour,
  smelling of engine, tasting of oil.
Thrum away.
My eyes wash the roofs and domes with terracotta,
  till I step into the canvas

Sing my song of forgetting,
Of lips never wrong, never upsetting,
Sing the wine-infused air along,
From the violin’s grapevine song,
Purely gifted as the altar wine and alms
Of the Santa Maria della Visitazione,
A cadenza from the catgut of stringed waves,
     The vibrato in polyphonic staves across the lagoon,
          Amid the psaltery sway of submerged algae plumes,
               Like the strident tails of the horses of Neptune,
Or the teardrop-surge of the glass chandeliers of Murano,
The same powdered hue of Venetian sky,
As bluebirds fallen into their own drowned tune,  
As absence awash over the sun-scattered tombs of Olympus.

Sing with a felt-tipped tongue,
So my song of forgetting is never undone.

Remember
Back in the day
When those parties
In Venice
That say would have 25 people or so
Walking through?

Now they were
Too big
Over-packed with
50-200?
With frat boy vibes?

Dana Rick and I
Arrived at one
And I thought a
At the sliding glass door
Oh God
And quickly escaped to the kitchen
Cutting through the living room
Where there was the make shift bar
Nothing much in the
Fridge

Anyway
I made my drinks
And turned around
To cross back
And somehow Dana was there
In front of me

She raised her hands
And wiggled through the bodies

While I
Said
NO
I will dance
When I feel like it
I choose

So I began to follow
And every elbow knees hip and arm
Reached out to touch me
Knocking all the contents out of
my little plastic cups

And though
I got to the other side
Contemplatively
Looking back
Empty

The three of us
Went to stand on the side of the house
Safe
By the water meter
And I laid down my cups
Laughing

So the moral of this story
Although I think it’s obvious
Is to
Go
With
The
Flow

Outside it is snowing, just a bit.
Twelve years in and it still seems odd
Vermont, cold and with its ethereal light
feels more like home than the hills and mountains
you spent your first 54 years immersed in.

It seems odd that you were nearly sixty
before rediscovering the ocean,
Maine and Cape Cod, wild, often rugged,
nothing like the sprawling sands
where you were raised. And yet, it is these seas,
not the seas of your first half century
that calm your soul and raise it
from it’s gloom.

It seems odd that the place
that sings its siren song,
calls to you, makes you yearn like a lovesick boy,
lies in a foreign land,
with a foreign language,
nothing familiar, nothing, and yet
the first time you arrived,
sitting in Saint Mark’s square,
cappuccino in hand,
the Adriatic light and salt water filling your senses
you felt more at home
than you have ever felt in your long fractured life.

It seems odd, that you are so in love
with a woman so different than the southern sirens
that surrounded you most of your life.
Darker. More direct. Challenging, yet gentle,
Struggling strong, real.
She enflames you. She calms you.
She protects you. Even from yourself.
You have never known a woman like her.
And yet, in her arms, you feel that most unusual of things,
safe.

It seems odd that at this age, you look at the places
you called home, and the places you feel home,
that make your soul feel whole, complete, possible,
and you question so much of the place and time
and people who raised you.
But only for a few moments
before realizing home has never changed.
Truth has never changed.
You have.

Opulent,
Decadent,
Almost vicelike.
The people grovel,
Teeming among the city that sinks
Under the weight of its own
Infestation of the self.
The glass reflects the leering eyes of the masses.

The stench of the water rises,
Cloying.
Languid in obscenity
The shadows rot, unseen.
A graveyard of moorings past.

A woman falls.
We crowd around,
Vultures
Jockeying for view.

Guitar strings vibrate in the square
The sun beats down.

It was beautiful here,
Once.

i threw the rose into the canal

and


you pushed the tired away into other people's
eyes

Venezia, its musical key of brick and shade
And the canals in rejoining polyphony
Sweeten the dour Church-ear.  
From the impasto knife and loose brushwork,
A thumb-smear of waves and gently-bristled strife
Rise to assumption of the cloud-submerged bay,
Mural of cristallo, only-light without landscape,
Made too from the winds of Murano,
Its clayed blowpipe of waterways molding
The lagoon of blown glass and bouquet of colored sea-shadows.

The Tiber lies on its side, like the lion and fox,
Licking its paws at empire’s dust,
A drifting gaze of water that already foresees
The swift-run northward to Romagna,
Where the veined fur of the roe will succumb…
A ripple twitches like one dark claw of the Borgia…

The watercolors of the Arno are a fresco
On the wet plaster of the lips of Firenze, Tuscan fire-dream.
Or like the warring leg in curve of counterpoise,
Sprung foot-forward to the daring world
And arm slung down in stone-victory
From this valley, too much like Elah,
With taunting eyes turned from the Medici toward Rome.