Five Days in February

Day 1

Unsayable time. Your quarried cheekbones. Milonga of footsteps clicking over the bridge outside my window. Two ill, in the Civil Hospital. Mainland towns in lockdown. My Whatsapp group of amiche silent.

On the bridge on the Fondamenta Nuove that overlooks the northern lagoon, a woman wearing a meringue of silk skirts and sequinned masque poses for a photographer.

The vendor at the newspaper kiosk tells me he’s from Bangladesh. I tell him my friend Sofi is from a Bangladeshi family. Bangladesh is a beautiful country he says but politics va male.

I don’t tell him that Sofi’s uncle was imprisoned in Bangladesh for criticising the government, nor that Sofi is currently organising a protest in London against the CAA laws in India; that she is asking artists, poets, film-makers and writers to contribute texts and images that she will print on samosa packets.

The news vendor’s name is Roman. He has another name he says, much longer, but it’s too complicated for Westerners. I tell him my name changes to Rachele when I’m here.

Day 2

Time vibrates. Between us, particles of seconds so small we cannot say them, think them. We are never ever quite together. Knowing we share that distance brings us closer.

In the afternoon, it’s announced that carnival will be cancelled. Universities, schools, museums and churches all shut, My Whatsapp group mute. The city sealed in a ceramic blue shell as if inside a paperweight.

Before supper, I email V, a friend who is an artist in Delhi. Tell her I’m thinking of her while her city is in the grip of the violence against Muslims. V sends me a Twitter link to a boy being beaten. She writes: It will make you howl in pain - not sure you want to see this, but as the writer, perhaps. I am so sorry.

I reply with a photograph of two rowers gliding down the canal alla valesana with crossed oars, moving like rhythmical gymnasts, the water a skin of teal cellophane. Tell her that the violence in India has been eclipsed by the Coronavirus. An opportunity for governments and criminals to do their worst

Day 3

Our imaginations individual as fingerprints.

I wake early to go to the supermarket because I am fearful of panic buying. The sun burns a nervous blue sky onto my retina. I think of the Renaissance painters. The popes and dukes who were their patrons. An age that believed faith was a matter of the eye as much as the mind.

Why did I think the Venetians would surrender to fear? They’ve lived through wars with the Turks, the French, the Austrians. They’ve suffered floods of tourists and tides that nearly subsumed them. The aisles are fully stocked; a handful of customers picking up milk, oranges, pasta, serene as fish feeding on coral.

Walking home, I feel guilty I have not bought my fruit and veg at one of the small fruttivendoli. So many have closed in Venice because of the supermarkets. I do my best to support them. But this morning, I was anxious not to be out on the streets too long.

Light hitting the canal like a flock of silver humming birds. Venice makes you observe differently - the beauty of the offset, the crooked.

Me to V: Shared your Instagram post of violence earlier – gets far fewer likes than a pretty picture of Venice.

V to Me: I had to turn my commenting off. Such nasty messages coming in

Day 4

There is no shape more beautiful than absence.

Perched on a column that flanks the door of my local church, a marble statue of the Madonna receiving the Annunciation boasts skirts that fold around her body like origami. Could the stonemason have seen Japanese paper, dreamt of its pillowy resistance in his hands? The Venetian galleys nosing out of the Bay towards Syria, Lebanon, Egypt. Marco Polo setting off.

I look at the Madonna and think of your assessing gaze, stonemason eyes.

In ancient Egypt, a sculptor was considered “one who keeps alive.”

I postpone my flight to the UK. Lots of reasons for this. Increasingly my country feels foreign to me. I never expected I would hear a Prime Minister who referred to people as ‘piccaninnies’, instigated an immigration system that would have excluded my own great-grandparents from entering due to their lack of skills.. Young women beaten up in a bus because they are a same-sex couple. Posters in stairwells forbidding residents to speak anything but English. Not my green and pleasant land.

Sofi is posting pictures of the samosa packets on Instagram. One bears a poem by Ruth Padel. Entitled Breaking Stone, it begins “The letter writer cross-legged on a shawl/in shadow of the unfinished flyover/writes I have health over and over again./I am sending the money home. /We are breaking stone for the motorway./I will come home when work is done.”

Day 5

Dangerous of course to draw parallels / Yet more dangerous to write/as if there were a steady course, we and our poems protected, the individual life, protected (Sunset December 1993, Adrienne Rich)

Postscript:

Thanks. It will work fine on the packet. Some parts may get hidden in seams and folds, but that is how the real packets are. (Email from Sofia, March 7 2020)

A version of this poem appeared in PN Review 254, Volume 46 Number 6, July - August 2020.