Helsinki Drift. Douglas Burnet Smith. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Douglas Burnet Smith
Издательство: Ingram
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Поэзия
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781770706460
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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