Camminare a Venezia: A Poemoir
by JC Reilly

Prosecco
In Venice, every walk ends in a glass of Prosecco. As this one does. It’s the only way to cope with turning down another wrong Calle and finding a bank where you expect to find a book shop, a church where you meant to find a jazz club. Twice today you end up at Schiavi—once on purpose, the other an accident of misdirection, or weariness. (You are thirsty; the wrong way deserves a glass as much as the right way does.) “Un secondo?” “Sì.” The barkeep does not look at you, just pours the pale gold wine that fizzes like canal spume, carries on his conversation with a red-haired goddess. You drink Prosecco and eat crostinis with ricotta and pistachios or sundried tomatoes and mint (five Euro for the lot) on the bridge over the Rio di San Trovaso, catty-corner to a gondola factory. Three gondolas, like sleeping cats, dry in the sun. Black lacquer gleams like spoiling bananas. A man—not the barkeep—gestures as the tourists tramp over the bridge, signals you to move along. His hands slice through the humidity and lacquer fumes like fine paddles. A short distance from the bridge are stairs that lead to the canal; you sit here, gulp down half a glass, recoil when a water taxi zips and splashes you with green jade water. Your skirt and shoes soaking, but your drink untainted, you pick up to move again. Another walk, another bar, another Prosecco at some point. Venice sways in the boozy afternoon like wind chimes.
Piccioni
In Venice, pigeons in Campo San Stefano are circumspect about your visit to the bench on the south side of the Chiesa until you prove yourself worthy of attenzione. This morning one pigeon, a purple swath across his breast like a Lenten veil, makes the rounds, strains for bits of bread among the disappointment of cigarette butts and paper flecks. You’ve brought GrissinBon toast rusks (le fresche biscottate con farina integrale) from breakfast—what in America you’d call Melba toast, nothing that interests you—and you’ve crushed it in its pack to make it easier to throw. You open the wrapper, toss a large crumb to the one pigeon, and he looks at you as if he’s not sure that your offering will please, but he snags it in his quick arrow of a beak, coos encouragement, “più, più.” You toss a handful of crumbs over a wider field. He wobbles after them. His head bobs the way the prows of gondolas bob on the waves on the Grand Canal. A few pigeons scuttle as morning commuters barrel towards the #1 or #2 water bus. They fly from other areas of the square, land before you, wait till you throw more. You do. They grab what they can out of each other’s way, sometimes flapping their wings at each other in warning. No manners among them. “Più, più,” they demand. It’s always more with pigeons. Some larger pieces have fallen into the hem of your skirt. A fat white pigeon, the one all week you’ve called Lorenzo, eats from your skirt. Stiff as the monument of Doge Franceso Morosini in the center of the square, you think of the white pigeon your sister caught in chubby toddler hands when she was three. He was Lorenzo too. You want to give him more, but there is no more. No more Melba toast, not until breakfast tomorrow. You no longer interest them. The pigeons leave one by one, then in a curtain of gray. Vabbé.
Molti
In Venice, all the plurals known to me end in i--amanti (lovers), gatti (cats), ponti (bridges), musei (museums), scrittori (writers). But this I is alone, walking as I am from the hotel to the Ponte dell’Accademia to the Rio Terrà Foscarini, to the Fondamenta Zattere, the southern edge of the peninsula (it is a peninsula in my mind, like a distorted lower-case cursive s, or a devil’s thumb). I pass a gated house and garden with crepe myrtles and geraniums and take a picture of the sign: Brodskij Iosif (1940-1996). Grande poeta russo. Amò e cantò questo luogo. I neither love this place, nor sing of it—though, poetry is a song of sorts, and I will write it into a poem. Were we due, I, like Brodsky, would ask you this: “Who needs a fish when you’ve got caviar?” (We’d rather the fish, though, if we were a we, a plural.) But I am singular (mostly)—few others are out this morning: three Veneziani unloading supplies on a flatboat, a man dragging a small brown cigar butt of a dog. A woman leans against the Punta della Dogana di Mare, an art museum in the old customs house, though it is too early to enter and I do not know it is a museum. She is taking pictures, or will, her camera hungry, snapping at the air like a mouth desperate to locate the correct panorami for her collection. As I round the point from Zattere to Salute, I turn up at the Basilica, or rather, it turns up at me, white and rococoed and immense. There are a dozen turisti on its steps, with notebooks, cameras—burdened with guidebooks and bags. I sit a moment on the steps and eat a handful of apricots. I will go inside—but not, if you were here, to pray. Instead, we’d roll out what we remember of art history, study the dipinti (paintings) from the 14th-17th centuries, and comment on the flaking paint of croci (crosses) and Vergini (Virgins) like know-it-all Americani brutti. What do we really know but that this art is holy, huge, and many? But you are not here to know this. Sono sola e reverente. Alone, I am reverent.
Chiuso
In Venice, the shops are nameless, and sometimes numberless. You guess locations by the bridge count, and hope not to find yourself stranded in an unexpected strada, knowing, as you do, how they all look the same. I cross four bridges, I think, to find the little shop off Campo San Barnaba on the Calle Botteghe Dorsoduro (although there are at least two alleys with this name, the one I live by clearly not the one I seek). One map calls it Calle Pedrocchi Dorsoduro, and another names it not at all. A dislocation. The first time I look into the dark window, I see the glass cat brooch, its head glancing over its shoulder green as seafoam, in a tray with other Murano trinkets, a menagerie of cats and panda bears and foxes and a snake so long you could only wear it on a coat lapel. My Mother has promised to buy me a gift; it will be this cat, when I can enter. But at seven p.m. one does not expect the shop to be open and I vow to come back. The next day, earlier, around ten, I find myself near Campo San Barnaba again; I cross the square, cross the Rio di San Barnaba (the same canal which Katherine Hepburn fell into in 1955’s Summertime), and find it locked again, despite “Aperto” listed on the door. No one answers my knocks. A third time, closed. A fourth time, closed. There are no published hours on the door. The last time is the day before I leave, it’s nearly six, and the alley is wet with rain. The door is locked. The cat stares over its shoulder as if waiting for me.
Aperto
In Venice, you can never be sure that the wet of bricks or cobblestones is canal, or cleaning, or piss. In some ways, it’s all the same—unwanted on your shoes, a reminder that everything will dissolve, become water green as wine bottles. This ancient city—the Titians, the piazzas, the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute—will all succumb to sinking. On the Ponte dell’Accademia, there are locks that lovers have left along the handrails—that I might have left, tossing the key into the Grand Canal, to keep our love intact, impermeable to change, did I but know the symbol, as all these other lovers know. “Per gli amanti, per gli amanti,” says a man, as I riffle through some locks: M + L 2013 and Jeana <3s Alan, others uninscribed. If Venice is for lovers, why are you six hours in my past? Why don’t you wander with me among the tourists, the gondoliers, the women tugging their children along or rolling their dogs in prams? Our love, like this city, is being pulled down, we are always under water it seems, sinking, sinking. When I get home, someone will ask me about the time here. Someone will want me to say that I loved this place, its timelessness, but I see only slow sinking and murky water, treacherous and sharp as venom, and all those locked loves. The locked ones will sink someday too. Ours—unlocked, untethered—wastes no time.
In Venice, every walk ends in a glass of Prosecco. As this one does. It’s the only way to cope with turning down another wrong Calle and finding a bank where you expect to find a book shop, a church where you meant to find a jazz club. Twice today you end up at Schiavi—once on purpose, the other an accident of misdirection, or weariness. (You are thirsty; the wrong way deserves a glass as much as the right way does.) “Un secondo?” “Sì.” The barkeep does not look at you, just pours the pale gold wine that fizzes like canal spume, carries on his conversation with a red-haired goddess. You drink Prosecco and eat crostinis with ricotta and pistachios or sundried tomatoes and mint (five Euro for the lot) on the bridge over the Rio di San Trovaso, catty-corner to a gondola factory. Three gondolas, like sleeping cats, dry in the sun. Black lacquer gleams like spoiling bananas. A man—not the barkeep—gestures as the tourists tramp over the bridge, signals you to move along. His hands slice through the humidity and lacquer fumes like fine paddles. A short distance from the bridge are stairs that lead to the canal; you sit here, gulp down half a glass, recoil when a water taxi zips and splashes you with green jade water. Your skirt and shoes soaking, but your drink untainted, you pick up to move again. Another walk, another bar, another Prosecco at some point. Venice sways in the boozy afternoon like wind chimes.
Piccioni
In Venice, pigeons in Campo San Stefano are circumspect about your visit to the bench on the south side of the Chiesa until you prove yourself worthy of attenzione. This morning one pigeon, a purple swath across his breast like a Lenten veil, makes the rounds, strains for bits of bread among the disappointment of cigarette butts and paper flecks. You’ve brought GrissinBon toast rusks (le fresche biscottate con farina integrale) from breakfast—what in America you’d call Melba toast, nothing that interests you—and you’ve crushed it in its pack to make it easier to throw. You open the wrapper, toss a large crumb to the one pigeon, and he looks at you as if he’s not sure that your offering will please, but he snags it in his quick arrow of a beak, coos encouragement, “più, più.” You toss a handful of crumbs over a wider field. He wobbles after them. His head bobs the way the prows of gondolas bob on the waves on the Grand Canal. A few pigeons scuttle as morning commuters barrel towards the #1 or #2 water bus. They fly from other areas of the square, land before you, wait till you throw more. You do. They grab what they can out of each other’s way, sometimes flapping their wings at each other in warning. No manners among them. “Più, più,” they demand. It’s always more with pigeons. Some larger pieces have fallen into the hem of your skirt. A fat white pigeon, the one all week you’ve called Lorenzo, eats from your skirt. Stiff as the monument of Doge Franceso Morosini in the center of the square, you think of the white pigeon your sister caught in chubby toddler hands when she was three. He was Lorenzo too. You want to give him more, but there is no more. No more Melba toast, not until breakfast tomorrow. You no longer interest them. The pigeons leave one by one, then in a curtain of gray. Vabbé.
Molti
In Venice, all the plurals known to me end in i--amanti (lovers), gatti (cats), ponti (bridges), musei (museums), scrittori (writers). But this I is alone, walking as I am from the hotel to the Ponte dell’Accademia to the Rio Terrà Foscarini, to the Fondamenta Zattere, the southern edge of the peninsula (it is a peninsula in my mind, like a distorted lower-case cursive s, or a devil’s thumb). I pass a gated house and garden with crepe myrtles and geraniums and take a picture of the sign: Brodskij Iosif (1940-1996). Grande poeta russo. Amò e cantò questo luogo. I neither love this place, nor sing of it—though, poetry is a song of sorts, and I will write it into a poem. Were we due, I, like Brodsky, would ask you this: “Who needs a fish when you’ve got caviar?” (We’d rather the fish, though, if we were a we, a plural.) But I am singular (mostly)—few others are out this morning: three Veneziani unloading supplies on a flatboat, a man dragging a small brown cigar butt of a dog. A woman leans against the Punta della Dogana di Mare, an art museum in the old customs house, though it is too early to enter and I do not know it is a museum. She is taking pictures, or will, her camera hungry, snapping at the air like a mouth desperate to locate the correct panorami for her collection. As I round the point from Zattere to Salute, I turn up at the Basilica, or rather, it turns up at me, white and rococoed and immense. There are a dozen turisti on its steps, with notebooks, cameras—burdened with guidebooks and bags. I sit a moment on the steps and eat a handful of apricots. I will go inside—but not, if you were here, to pray. Instead, we’d roll out what we remember of art history, study the dipinti (paintings) from the 14th-17th centuries, and comment on the flaking paint of croci (crosses) and Vergini (Virgins) like know-it-all Americani brutti. What do we really know but that this art is holy, huge, and many? But you are not here to know this. Sono sola e reverente. Alone, I am reverent.
Chiuso
In Venice, the shops are nameless, and sometimes numberless. You guess locations by the bridge count, and hope not to find yourself stranded in an unexpected strada, knowing, as you do, how they all look the same. I cross four bridges, I think, to find the little shop off Campo San Barnaba on the Calle Botteghe Dorsoduro (although there are at least two alleys with this name, the one I live by clearly not the one I seek). One map calls it Calle Pedrocchi Dorsoduro, and another names it not at all. A dislocation. The first time I look into the dark window, I see the glass cat brooch, its head glancing over its shoulder green as seafoam, in a tray with other Murano trinkets, a menagerie of cats and panda bears and foxes and a snake so long you could only wear it on a coat lapel. My Mother has promised to buy me a gift; it will be this cat, when I can enter. But at seven p.m. one does not expect the shop to be open and I vow to come back. The next day, earlier, around ten, I find myself near Campo San Barnaba again; I cross the square, cross the Rio di San Barnaba (the same canal which Katherine Hepburn fell into in 1955’s Summertime), and find it locked again, despite “Aperto” listed on the door. No one answers my knocks. A third time, closed. A fourth time, closed. There are no published hours on the door. The last time is the day before I leave, it’s nearly six, and the alley is wet with rain. The door is locked. The cat stares over its shoulder as if waiting for me.
Aperto
In Venice, you can never be sure that the wet of bricks or cobblestones is canal, or cleaning, or piss. In some ways, it’s all the same—unwanted on your shoes, a reminder that everything will dissolve, become water green as wine bottles. This ancient city—the Titians, the piazzas, the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute—will all succumb to sinking. On the Ponte dell’Accademia, there are locks that lovers have left along the handrails—that I might have left, tossing the key into the Grand Canal, to keep our love intact, impermeable to change, did I but know the symbol, as all these other lovers know. “Per gli amanti, per gli amanti,” says a man, as I riffle through some locks: M + L 2013 and Jeana <3s Alan, others uninscribed. If Venice is for lovers, why are you six hours in my past? Why don’t you wander with me among the tourists, the gondoliers, the women tugging their children along or rolling their dogs in prams? Our love, like this city, is being pulled down, we are always under water it seems, sinking, sinking. When I get home, someone will ask me about the time here. Someone will want me to say that I loved this place, its timelessness, but I see only slow sinking and murky water, treacherous and sharp as venom, and all those locked loves. The locked ones will sink someday too. Ours—unlocked, untethered—wastes no time.
JC Reilly is the author of the chapbook La Petite Mort (Finishing Line Press) and a 25% co-author of an anthology of occasional verse, On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year. She has had work published in or forthcoming from Dirty Chai, Flyover Country Review, Kentucky Review, Cortland Review, Apeiron Review, and others. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and cats.
A 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee, JC's essay can be found in Issue 10 of Glassworks.