Aqua Alta

    Venice, for Averill Curdy

    You shiver with the ague of all tourists who
           wash up in this mirror of water: every sight
       flickers, doubles, oozes an ormolu light
            so locals, doing the same things locals do

           back home, look to you like Breathing Art.
    They know what you are, and gracefully (or
                        at least with pointed dignity) ignore
    your feverishly-shuttering camera, wait to part

       the fool from her lire with candycolored glass,
                        gelati, masks, or rides in gondolas.
    You shoot the ladies playing tombola
                   outside the church, the hopscotch-skipping class  

         shrieking like they conceived the game. Each age
    parades its idiosyncrasies, and though
                   yours is a fin-de-siecle American ego
       relying on a photograph to gauge

    if it's "been there," try to disembark
                    for once without a manufactured glance.
        Let your eye polish its own lens, whose essence
                         is water, whose films bear water's mark.

     

    Human Field

          Now it is snowing without sticking, the invisible
                   air given a ghost's body by motes
    fleet as the fireflies' sexual isotopes
              igniting the meadow with little half-lives,

         but colder. A starling flock, disrupted,
                  ascends and circles twice in loose
    precision, high enough to seem the very

              negative of snow; emphatic, demanding,
          warm-blooded, though their bones
                  are hollow and their bivalve hearts
    lighter than a sanded clam shell

              or the whitest pearl.
                                  Winter's revenant
          invites you into it, and there you lie
                  while the bleached sheet, accumulating,
    translates you to an angel in a solitary bed.

              Beat your wings to leave your signature,
               sole mark on the virgin manuscript.
                  Or, still now, the angel weeping on a tomb.

    What are you hiding from, in a body of snow?

              A touch and it melts on your finger.

          Because this is not your element, even if
                  you learn to lie in it, unblinking, and watch it
    falling from a bloodless sky,

              faster now, faster, till all the field is white.



    Bio Note

    V. Penelope Pelizzon is the author of a collection of poems, Nostos (Ohio University Press, 2000), which was selected for the Hollis Summers Prize and subsequently received the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. Pelizzon has published criticism on literature, photography, and film. Her essay "Native Carnivals: Philip Larkin's Puppet Theatre of Ritual" is included in New Larkins for Old (St. Martin's Press, 1999), while her reviews of photography appear periodically in The British Journal of Aesthetics.
     
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