have names,Corte Sconta, Detta Arcana,
every name stencilled in black against white
rectangles on olive walls, an arrow
pointing to a church,
a fountain.
More than anything, I remember
those signs—more than the canals chopping
at the rose facades that arch San Marco
out of their shadows like seductive eyebrows
over sloe lids. More than
those twin gold robots hammering stiff time
in the bell tower, mangy pigeons flowing
over the piazza, a feathered oil spill.
After compulsory sights—the Doge’s tacky
palace, the Bridge of Sighs—get lost.
Ignore signs. Just walk
until you’re hungry. Fried squid
and a jug of cheap wine in a two-table outdoor café
under a washline of bleached sheets—
these can help you stop dying for a while.
The owner’s one-eared cat will come and sit on your lap
you sip espresso and listen
to a disc jockey’s voice
fade out
of a window somewhere.
You hear the latches of shutters
one by one close out afternoon heat, you watch
a few blackbirds flit
from one obsolete TV aerial to another.
All this is as exquisite
as Titian’s Presentation of the Virgin.
You print addresses neatly
on postcards, mimicking those letters
on the sign for the nearest piazza.
You send a small moment
away, convinced a thing as light
as a postage stamp
can carry the weight of Venetian stone
across water.
For maybe an hour
I had the muddy slowness of the Adige
to myself. Then suddenly
a swarm of preschoolers, shrieking
in primary colours. Climbing everywhere.
A few quiet ones examined
rusted iron rings (for boats)
in the old stones.
Their teacher smiled apologetically
and brushed them across the bridge
inside the church of San Antonio.
The thin pigment of the Italian morning
is beginning to dry.
I have to write this down quickly
before it hardens into memory.
Verona
Piazza Brà, dusk, sidewalk tables. Sparrows
gather at my feet for crumbs. Contemptuous,
waiters sweep small tips onto small plates
with the heels of their hands—
they think that I, with my pathetic
Italian, am another stupid American,
and they have every reason to think so, except
I have less use for the Americans here than they have.
To my right, the arena of Verona
is crumbling, quietly, as it has every evening
for the past two thousand years.
Terra-cotta roofs
glow dull red
with the little of the sun left in them.
The sparrows return to nests
in cracks under leafy eaves.
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