Читать книгу Helsinki Drift - Douglas Burnet Smith - Страница 9
ОглавлениеSky the romantic amber of postcards.
Glassed-in
tour boats churn the canals,
scouring sepia hotels
with glaring spotlights.
Then a houseboat for cats.
The captain, in my jet-lag dream,
confessed
to having had sex with a variety
of farm animals.
And that he’d enjoyed it.
They “did not talk back,”
just shit on the knees of his pants
and his hands.
Black-and-white chaos of a pigeon-feeding station.
Someone, near dark, near the back
of the tour boat, muttering, “Get the gun, Elmo.”
In several languages
the guide recalled the exact measure
of tanks and humiliation.
Sky a stupified ochre.
Dazed in the Rijksmuseum, drawn
deep into still lives.
Vermeer’s The Cook, the woman in placid blue pouring milk into a bowl, a window’s graded light falling on the white plate near her hands— her simple act miraculous. Paint
has become warmth I crave at dusk
in the rainy canals and shivery alleys of young junkies.
Reflected by lamplight—streetcars floating past,
houseboats and bicycles distorted on wavy mirrors—
everything’s a bluish-yellow, a powder
ground between two stones, a moon egg
cracked into it to make a paste
called Amsterdam, glazed at sunrise
because the dark has left in a flushed urgency.
I send you this postcard of the false
bookcase, third floor, 263 Prinsegracht, now
a museum, behind which, for eighteen months,
Anne Frank was hidden.
When I walked through it, schoolkids were clustered around
photographs of the camps, pointing and giggling.
Faces in cattle cars, grim buildings.
I wondered what colour
Anne’s eyes had been,
what hand she had written with.
I imagined her mother
pouring milk into a bowl
while some duteous banker granted a loan
to a man who had informed “the authorities”
about someone buying enough at the market
for two families.
It’s grown almost too dark to write.
In a few minutes I board the train to Ghent
where I’ll see van Eyck’s huge altar:
The Righteous Judges and Knights of Christ.
Everyone knows the streets of Venice
aren’t streets so much as alleys,
some two feet wide, and about as long,
and even those have names,
Corte Sconta, Detta Arcana,
every name stencilled in black against white
rectangles on olive walls, an arrow
pointing to a church,
a fountain.
More than anything, I remember
those signs—more than the canals chopping
at the rose facades that arch San Marco
out of their shadows like seductive eyebrows
over sloe lids. More than
those twin gold robots hammering stiff time
in the bell tower, mangy pigeons flowing
over the piazza, a feathered oil spill.
After compulsory sights—the Doge’s tacky
palace, the Bridge of Sighs—get lost.
Ignore signs. Just walk
until you’re hungry. Fried squid
and a jug of cheap wine in a two-table outdoor café
under a washline of bleached sheets—
these can help you stop dying for a while.
The owner’s one-eared cat will come and sit on your lap
you sip espresso and listen
to a disc jockey’s voice
fade out
of a window somewhere.
You hear the latches of shutters
one by one close out afternoon heat, you watch
a few blackbirds flit
from one obsolete TV aerial to another.
All this is as exquisite
as Titian’s Presentation of the Virgin.
You print addresses neatly
on postcards, mimicking those letters
on the sign for the nearest piazza.
You send a small moment
away, convinced a thing as light
as a postage stamp
can carry the weight of Venetian stone
across water.
For maybe an hour
I had the muddy slowness of the Adige
to myself. Then suddenly
a swarm of preschoolers, shrieking
in primary colours. Climbing everywhere.
A few quiet ones examined
rusted iron rings (for boats)
in the old stones.
Their teacher smiled apologetically
and brushed them across the bridge
inside the church of San Antonio.
The thin pigment of the Italian morning
is beginning to dry.
I have to write this down quickly
before it hardens into memory.
Verona
Piazza Brà, dusk, sidewalk tables. Sparrows
gather at my feet for crumbs. Contemptuous,
waiters sweep small tips onto small plates
with the heels of their hands—
they think that I, with my pathetic
Italian, am another stupid American,
and they have every reason to think so, except
I have less use for the Americans here than they have.
To my right, the arena of Verona
is crumbling, quietly, as it has every evening
for the past two thousand years.
Terra-cotta roofs
glow dull red
with the little of the sun left in them.
The sparrows return to nests
in cracks under leafy eaves.
