Riposa

There’s a decision that has to be made, to truck with illusion or to deal with the real magic, gritty as it gets. I live in New York, not Los Angeles, and for good reason. New York loves you, but it doesn’t give a damn how you feel about it. Los Angeles, on the other hand, wants desperately for your love, but it’s incapable of returning it. But Venice. Well, Venice is a different story altogether. It is a hall of mirrors. Just you, over and over, reflected and ensorcelled. I still find pieces of you everywhere, no matter how much time passes or how much I clean. A receipt tab with your existential scribble on it bookmarks a page of The Passion—something about working through ego: Only a drama will do. I am looking for a quote, and out it falls, pinning my wings to the wall. And then the feeling comes back, stinging nettles beneath my skin. Venice. A masquerade. It was some afternoon in late October in the early part of the century. You were sleeping as I slipped from our sunset-colored flat to follow the canals. I wanted to be lost, but I know my way too well around water. I wanted to be found, to exhaust my own ego through repetition. I was travelling in circles. Just trying. Harder and harder. It was always the way with us. But the pigeons and the orange tabby were aware of my comings and goings, all perched along a narrow archway above a retaining wall—looking down upon me as I passed—a periodic disturbance in the afternoon riposa. Rotating thresholds, time transforming into meaning. By evening, I’d found you 13 times. You awoke, and we went to dinner. Later, a gondola brought us home. I remember now the green color of the sky meeting the lagoon, a low fog cover, the post-tourist haze, a city on the edge of sinking, returning over and over again to itself, like me, ready again for sleep.

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Previously unpublished draft which later became part of Still, the Sky, 2022, Ransom Poet Publishers

© 2018, Tom Pearson

*Quoted text is from The Passion by Jeannette Winterson