Furtive, that's the version I want.
With eyes averted. Downcast, a little sly.
It's where it's looking, that's
where I want us—
in a harbor where we in our gondola
stare up and up at the enormous
freighters rusting the Adriatic, the ocean
oiled and ropey, scary even,
the way the waters seem higher than
our boat, about to topple onto.
Did I forget to say it's night, we're
seeing by artificial light how small
fists of snow are falling from. So easy
to say the sky, but that
would be wrong. We could puzzle over
how to say this. Or we could kiss.
Let's kiss, standing up in
scary, its huge hood lowering,
cover of darkness down
which the crusaders with lances and crosses
high held in a once upon a time still
tarnishing, still audible version
of a version of a version.
There's a vertigo to history different
from the vertigo of sex.
The children sold into slavery, into brothels.
The sores. The futility of crying and the futility
of stories that gradually wash up
on other shores. To what purpose all this
telling, version by version
deteriorating like silk, the patterns
longer recognizable: ripple by ripple, the lush
lappings as if certain words, pietá
or sofferenza were enough .
I had wanted to sightsee, to be taken slowly
by gondola, canal by canal where Byron
where shadows on stilts or like inverted
bells somberly under the arches
swaying and Goethe who stood on the foamy
crescendos and saw the chiaro