Bright daylight sometimes makes
paradise too real to love,
glinting off traffic snarling
through high-rise hell,
flashing lime-green tourists
dodging the defeated, drunken homeless
to admire motor launches always docked
and little terriers in fancy-dress.
But tonight a fairy-mist of fog
dances with surf along seawalls,
encircling the gilded faux-Venetian domes,
making faint the bridge’s curve,
softening the cruel edges
of a soaring condo block
that, like the masts of sailing-ships,
now reaches into Neverland:
The barks of dogs revert to primal howls,
the vestigial memory of oceanic chaos
whirlpools into present time.
With its mysteries re-forbidden,
paradise, for an hour or two,
returns.
SCF Venice — A Literary and Arts Magazine