Sunday 8 May 2011

Waking up in Venice

Haven't posted in a while, gave up on Nano (usual excuses), here's a new poem I wrote at lunchtime on Thursday, when I should have been revising. Usual meh-ness.


We woke up in Venice, once.
Spent lanterns hung from threads in the doorways
like failed nightlights, doused by arteries
we traced on a map, noting where they split
from the body and became sewn in with the fabrics
against our skin. You always liked simple linen
because of the heat.
Straw hat and sunglasses, such the tourist.
Our breakfast in bed was disturbed
by an early-riser, singing from a boat below to the lady
in the room above us.
She closed her window,
and told us later she preferred the voiceless Einaudi,
direct to the soul, you know?
That morning, some of the neighbours hung
bunting between the houses, window-to-window
like little Chinese washing lines,
tying the fourth storeys.
I sent a postcard home (hello, Albion, miss me yet?)
and bought some olive bread
you said tasted like the smell of cut grass.
I remember the bar: a pokey little place
beside a bridge grown green in the centuries,
and like everything, barely floating.
Two glasses of flat wine each. Risotto, just because
it’s what’s done.
Outside the wind tore at the colours
flapping in their zig-zags and pulled them from the windows
so they streamed in ribbons down the streets.
Poetry for the rejected lover in his boat.
We fed the birds with baicoli crumbs,
watched the canals grow dark,
and counted the fireflies burning holes in Venice’s
new curtains. We fell asleep and woke up
in someplace old
where aeroplanes flew overhead,
and the jet streams faded
like the memory of dreaming.

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