VENICE, CAMPO SAN NICOLO' DEI MENDICOLI.

A warm winter Sunday.

Breaths in almost

suspended droplets.

Muffled silence by the church,

the Sunday silence of dampened steps,

air testing its own hazy indulgence.

I sweat after the walk. Sirocco fills me.

The swollen sky’s cheeks.

Here the city ended once,

stretched in front there was only

the lagoon expanse

in patches of sandbars.

Bare flatness

and flourishes of ripples.

And oars dipping in

and the boats’ wood whining

in the clouds maybe more than now

slow, big and palpable.

In silver grey

just after the rain.

Something merging

with the spreading forth

of a birth, the utterly strange

and the utterly familiar.

And now I know

I could perspire myself

into what’s next.

WINTER GARDEN

Earth carrying the silence inside and beyond.

It’s a rainy winter afternoon,

the turf spongy underfoot,

the trees have been pruned,

branches become thick stubs the colour of smoke,

neat and naked in the sky’s pearly wait,

tall, lush trees that had been towering

beyond the roof, their bareness now,

their countenance, like wrists and fists

pointing at some high dot in the distance,

calls us back to order, necessity,

the spare tune of roots and soil.

Tall trees. And the new ones

just planted, the cherry-tree, the fig, the apricot,

with all their promising, budding future

now just thin, flimsy things, a silhouette of twigs,

I gaze at the grey earth mound with at the centre

the hole they have been stuck in.

The rain falls,

the vast and close stare,

breath of air.

It will be evening soon, then

the future.

I won’t see many of its fingers

but some are already here, just underfoot.

And low clouds over the silence.