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)