Tuesday Poem - Getting to know you, Venice

GETTING TO KNOW YOU, VENICE

Pigeons in Venice are born mathematicians.
Under their wings, the flash of fob watch
and compass with metal point sharpened.

Kohl-eyed from nights spent marking
and route-mapping, they leave their ledges
in the mornings, the distance between dome,
cornice and cobbled square plotted ahead
for ease of business. The city is theirs - a lavish
3D drawing of scrubbed stone and stolen-gold
mosaics, an almost-place conjured by saints
and lines, angles and lions, and - of course -
the pigeons' squawk. Raucous at ground level,
they are silent in flight, daring to keep
the company of angels, graceful enough
not to graze the pinnacles of temples.
Down a side street, away from the crowds,
a gondolier monitors his comrades' movements
via cellphone; the smells of garlic, myrrh
and dead fish mix. And above it all, the quiet
white whirr of pigeons' wings. I imagine
it might be possible to attempt the impossible
here - grow feathers, dissolve solid marble
on the tongue.

In this city, where rain falls from frescoes
and children fence their shadows in courtyards
at dusk, even the gutters and drainpipes
and dirt bins shimmer.

CB

A decade ago, I was lucky enough to spend some time in Venice, a city that had (as is true for so many) occupied the vaulted basements, tiled rooftops and watery alleys of my imagination for years. Before I'd had any inkling I might actually one day go there, I experienced two especially powerful encounters with the place - each time through a book; the first, whilst reading Jeanette Winterson's The Passion where I seemed often to be walking a few steps ahead of one of her characters, Villanelle - a cross-dressing, web-footed, red-haired young woman living in the city during Napoleonic times - so that I found myself somehow knowing before 'we' got there which street she'd choose to turn into, where she was heading, who she would meet, the nature of their exchange and how things were likely to end up. Villanelle's clothes and attitudes, the city's sounds and smells, its bridges and flat-bottomed boats, interior spaces and outer features were as familiar to me as if I'd lived there - or at the very least pre-read and committed to memory, that story. I have no way of explaining this. It was not something that had happened to me whilst reading a book before - neither has it happened since; I was both fascinated and a little unsettled by it at the time. 

Venezia - 1613

My second significant encounter came whilst reading Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (you can read Jeanette Winterson's compelling review of this book here.). Again, it was as though I'd been listening in on a conversation from a bygone time. It's probable both these experiences can be explained away by linking back to art school where we studied Venetian art and architecture in quite some detail, but I'm content to consider life is sometimes more mysterious and unknowable than we can imagine.

When I did eventually get to Venice, I was woken in the pre-dawn hours of our second night there by a massive thunderstorm (I wrote in my journal afterwards that it had sounded like 'a marble sky cracking'). I have always adored thunderstorms and the pull to be outside in one in Venice was too strong to resist. I  crept out of the bed where P, my then-husband, was sleeping, pulled on the nearest garments and headed barefoot into the dark. It didn't occur to me that it might be a crazy, hair-brained thing to do; we had barely arrived, let alone oriented. I couldn't speak Italian (although I do have a reasonable handle on Latin!); I might have gotten horribly lost, been captured or mobbed down a side-alley and dumped into an oily black canal. . . and how on earth was I going to find my way back to our tiny hotel without a torch, candle or map? These thoughts and details only occurred to me in retrospect, hours later when P and I were standing in front of Tintoretto's heart-stopping paintings in the Scuola Grande di san Rocco.

In the moment, I was beyond hesitation, beyond fear or good sense; I took to the streets with exhilarating joy, running with bare arms outstretched to drink up the rain, my face turned not to the ground but to the sky so I could bear full witness to its drama. Heaven was in the mood for tantrums, belting out its protestations and indignation with the most terrific lack of restraint. I cannot recall how long I was out there, only know that the hair on my arms, the skin on my throat and the nape of my neck still remember the texture and temperature of that rain. The soles of my feet still carry the memory of the city's stone streets.

Running through Venice in the fist of that storm remains one of the most vivid - and deeply free - moments of my life.  

*  

For more Tuesday Poems, please visit the hub where Jo Thorpe's poem Hunt the slipper: a romantic divertimissemente begins 

'Taglioni's lilies,' he says

handing her a long-stemmed

bouquet in the bar near

his chambers. . .