Venice Revisited

Redwood 60 x 50 cm acryl on canvas c/o Karin Goeppert

CAMPO DEI FRARI

Ignoring a swarm of super cute Japanese snap shooters

aesthetes come and go talking of Carpaccio, but they

aren’t dragging their surfboards and their knuckles

behind them, because we are not in Venice, Ca.,

we’re in the other Venice, the one where rising water soaks

sneakers in a heartbeat. Shoppers jostle our unquiet appetites 

and we theirs, each of us in a frantic search for artifacts. I buy a pair

of black dress shoes in a shop the size of a closet. I look at pictures by

Titian and Bellini in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. I eat overpriced,

not very good pizza. I think about my apartment in Berlin. Why   

does that basil near the kitchen window smell like cat pee? Why do I feel

that if I just had a row boat all of my problems would be solved?

Because I’m lost, hemmed in by water, that’s why. O Byzantine scribes,

strutting charioteers of the 6^th century, I dream about home

when I’m here and about here when I’m home. Why is that?

Scientists don’t have much to say on the subject. Issues of the spirit

not easily testable, which is why poets and novelists still manage 

dubiously to teach at colleges that resemble Venice

vaguely (here a bell tower, there a loggia) no matter how

   whorish and worldly the template

before the sons and daughters of Nippon posed giggling in its odors and shadows.