“I want to find some left turn into dream/ or story, the
next chapter, memory/ not saturated with regret, into/ a vision as unlikely as
the mare/ with sweat-soaked roan flanks and a tangled mane,/dragon’s breath
steaming from her flared nostrils/ onto a wind too sharp to call a breeze/
cantering riderless across the square/ opposite, between the children in the
sandbox and the old men arguing/ on benches, in French…”
Marilyn Hacker, “A Sunday After Easter”
Left is sinister in Italian, and I want to find some
sinister turn or hook or swing into another week, not my last in this country
of impossible doors. In Venice, trying to board a vaporetto with only half an
hour until our train pulls metal across metal to Bologna, it begins to rain,
and we realize, breath-close to so many strangers, that we are not on the boat,
but in a waiting room anchored into the canal whose bottom we cannot see
through the green water. We ran until our faces filled with heat and the rich
dank earth rose from our skin, through the rain, across slippery Venice, the
water already lapping across the slate tiles by the Grand Canal, we thought we
could follow it. We run to walls. A fork, a beggar sits cross-legged, head sunk
into his shoulders (like his shoulders are the sea and his bald head his city),
looks up, hard palms open to ring with coins, closes one, points left. “Santa
Lucia? Stazione?” I burst, and his finger remains to the sinister left. There
is no time to spill gratitude, no time to regret dropping the map into a canal,
fumbling with my camera, no time to regret the old lady I sideswiped with my
duffle, only burning in the rain in a labyrinth of a city built over a sea.
There is only the bridge, white, rising to the left, over the Grand Canal,
darkening in the rain, and Santa Lucia.
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