Classic Poem

We entered Venice by Casa degli Spiriti
—Constance Fenimore Woolson

Imagine a white horse, alone in a watery meadow.
Or, alone in a watery meadow, imagine
a white horse. The latter increases your need for me,
your relief in my company, as we walk together
down the story’s thin lanes, circling the meadow
and lolling horse, and the gondoliers on the landing
bicker and smoke and shuffle their soft-backed cards.
We have, you as my character and I as your guide,
crossed from Venice on the wide lagoon—
rib-cage deep but for trenches the ships slip through—
and we look toward it now, as one by one
its spires sink through a white fog, that, like your need,
advances.
To keep me beside you, you speak
of da Vinci’s menagerie and the grape skins
best suited for grappa. You would question my friendship
with Henry James—you had hoped, in fact,
for Henry James—but I have grown singular here,
essential to you as our gondoliers, although
they’ve turned silent, fog-erased, and beacon us closer
by nothing but pipe smoke and their cards’ arrhythmic
purr. You would ask of his manner, his temperament,
the nature of our fidelity—two writers enamored
with fiction’s grip—of my life in his presence,
of my life in his shadow,
but are grateful instead
to watch as I pock our trench with pilings
and we feel our way back through the pale lagoon,
column by column, much as the blind
might track the cairns on an ancient path.
You are frightened, I know, in those intervals
when our hands break free and we float
into nothingness. And, yes, I have kept this from you:
increasingly, as the page fills, I am the fabric
of nothingness. You would ask of his voice
and fashion, the nature of our fidelity,
but out from the white fog, here is Casa degli Spiriti,
where up you swing from the swaying boat
and that which remains absorbs me.