Beverley Bie Brahic

Carpaccio, San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice You are amazed to find trees in Venice — To turn a corner into a campo Where two or three rustling acacias Spread their halo of leaves Over two or three red-slatted benches. It’s as if you had slipped through a curtained doorway Into a hall full of dull gold scenes By Carpaccio — a miraculous light — Though the rio’s still shrouded in a mist Compounded of water vapour and smog So it’s not that the sun has come out, it’s Something to do with the leaves and painting In the realm of echoes where footsteps Reverberate endlessly between two walls And dawn is the chink of a stonemason At his reparations, disembodied Voices irresistible as bird calls. Yes, you’re amazed to find trees in Venice Shedding their gold leaf onto the pavement Outside a secondhand bookstore. It’s like Carpaccio’s little white dog Wagging his tail at the feet of Saint Augustine Who is staring out of the window Looking for the voice of Saint Jerome.

Cutlery clatters into the sink. But always the characters, uniquely themselves, only some decades older. They search for their coats. You were, she reminds him, our resident nomad, come to pitch your tent here, sidewalks for sand, unaccustomed taboos: Morningside Heights, one of your lives. Thirty years since the awkward goodbye? Before he goes— East Africa his beat, Germany hers—he’ll visit the nephew, the namesake in Boston who drives a cab, sends a pittance each month to a wellhead in—we’ll call it Sudan. He explains how it works, this drip feed of cash to Sudan from the United States: cheap, fast. She’s not clear about this—he jots her a website: it’s a place she can go. So they won’t meet again...suddenly Can you forgive me? he blurts— a classmate’s apartment, Upper West Side, the grown child’s room, bears in tidy shrines, scrum of sloughed coats. In the kitchen friends wash up. Sound of laughter. Sound of water flowing out of a tap.Yes, she replies, shocked by the twinge, then ache, of remorse. She “forgot”? And him—thirty years— the place still hurts?It’s myself I can’t forgive, she knows later. Right now, vague shame. End of March. Maybe April. Street trees are trying to bloom. The irretrievable sits on the table, white as a plate. He holds her her coat.

Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello Mater dolorosa , here I am hungry And ill-disposed on worn flags at your feet. Through high windows wintry sun seeps in And floods the six-tiered polychrome Apocalypse, This Sunday's text in comic strip. That's my son over by the door, impatient To be off somewhere. Other boys pose On attila's Throne while their fathers snap pictures And mothers price lace - clotheslines of lace Strung from trucks selling pizzas. Around the lagoon, your fields have grown wild; Vines redden on half-fallen fences That no longer keep the allotments apart. On some islands the women make lace, punti in aria - stitches in air - Materializing the spaces between things.