I’ve always been afraid to visit Venice. A city famed for the grace and reserve of a Bellini madonna is easily ravished. I feared the city of mirrors, masks, dreams, would prove to be nothing more.
Venice is known for forming her streets out of the ‘trackless’ sea rather than the scarred, limited land – endless streets for the imagination.
I thought the image of my imagination would be replaced by cruise-ships, ice-cream tubs turning on the water, heat rising from every stone and from swarms of shouting countrymen fighting their corners with selfie-sticks. My dream would be shattered forever.
The last place I went before lockdown was Venice, and we spent a lot of time there, during the freezing winter nights, in bacari – traditional Venetian wine-bars. The name comes from the Venetian dialect expression “far bacara” – to make a noise. They are tiny, ancient (some dating from the 1300s), and really crowded, serving cheap little glasses of local wine, ‘ombre’, and snacks – ‘cichetti’ – often seafood fresh from the lagoon. The experience of the bacari has come to symbolise for me everything that is the opposite of lockdown; but my memory of them, on the one hand investing all of missing physical social intercourse with a warm glow, has also taken on a strange edge since Venice was one of the first places in Europe I heard of the virus spreading. Beneath is my poem about it all.
Bacaro
We were drawn to the windows’ warm honey
moths to a lantern or a night-musk flower,
but heavy,
Tired of catching iced breath, faces aching
to be touched by the dawn pink
of sudden heat.
Feet throbbing with plodding calle of frozen shadow
and pathless warrens of sotoporteghi threaded only by fog to find
to find dead
ends
black water
The little door clicked shut against wan mist behind,
and we drowned in the rippling warmth –
ducking low beams and laughter
copper pans blinking like bright opened eyes –
and shoulder to shoulder ordered one of everything
as the crowd
bursting from coats like opening buds
gathered loud and snug.
Morsels of fresh cod fished
from chill quicksilver tide in thin rain,
are whipped into a cream
and the squid, stewed in its own subterfuge
sails in tiny gondole of corn.
Ombre, little glasses of sparkling red
bubbles rising as in the wave
of warmer, stranger seas
tingling down my throat and filling inner cold
with a slow sweet rush.
Knowing little more than ‘Grazie!’ its exchange
was deeply satisfying, full
of the companionship
of being out of the cold.
When we turn to go, the moment
trembles like a weighing-anchor
and the doors close like time behind us.
Doubling houses foam-frail in the fog
Canals of spilt ink open to a dream silence
louder than laughter.
Standing at this crossroads of water
I feel the surface tension of the city of masks
mirror-image of a city
blown from sand and sea like a bubble of glass
frosted by history’s tide of plagues and fear,
But Serene still.
There seems a facelessness behind the mask
a cruelty in such serenity.
Over the bridge there rises moon pale
a young Madonna,
sleeves falling like water at slack-tide
pressing her child’s cheek to hers
eyes seas wide.
(For more on the history of Venice and plague, see my latest blog post)
