However old you are, now is now.

Venice is her own body. Old body,
fluid, swollen, flooded, a scarf around her neck,
glittering, crooked, arthritic, breathless, saturated, exhausted,
reinvigorated by love, recast by new generations, mythically wet,
fond, arrogant and vulnerable, welcoming.

Rest here beside. Repose, my favorite. Glittering.
Water in floodlights. Eyes.

The Century Across the Water

Venice had no pants on. I could see right inside.
No path to the door, no porch or yard,
no foreground foreplay.

Venice had the water right before the door.
The plane foreshortened flush
a flatness hotness faded red.
I lost perspective or hadn’t arrived,
the century open across the water
and I, already old, felt virginal.

Pale pink, green marble, stone and fluid.
A thousand years of history
hung like a chandelier suspended from the sky.

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To pass anyone in the grocery is like passing on the street:
impossible if…