Poem-A-Day: Joseph Brodsky in Venice (1981) by Campbell McGrath

March 5, 2014 Joseph Brodsky in Venice (1981) by Campbell McGrath     La Serenissima, in morning light, is beautiful.  But you already knew that.  Palette of honeyed ochre and ship's bell bronze,  water precisely the color of the hand-ground pigment  with which the water of Venice has been painted for  centuries,  angled slats of aquamarine chopped by wakes to agate,  matte black backlit with raw opal  and anodized aluminum, rope-work of wisteria, wands  of oleander emerging from hidden gardens. At noon,  near the boat-yard of the last gondola maker, a violin echoes from deep inside an empty cistern.  Lo and behold. Ecco.  A swirl of wind-blown ashes from yet another cigarette  and for a moment you see December snow  in Saint Petersburg, the Lion's Bridge, crystalline halo crowning Akhmatova's defiant silhouette.    Sunset: bitter orange and almond milk,  sepia retinting the canals with cartographer's ink  as you study the small gray lagoon crabs  patrolling a kingdom of marble slabs  descending into the depths; rising almost imperceptibly,  the tide licks at, kisses, then barely spills  across the top step's foot-worn, weed-velveted lip  in slippery caravans, dust-laden rivulets.  So another day's cargo of terrestrial grit  enriches their scuttled realm,  and they make haste, like drunken pirates in a silent film, erratically but steadfastly, to claim it.        Copyright © 2014 by Campbell McGrath. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem  "On a visit to Venice a few summers ago, I happened upon a historical marker noting that Joseph Brodsky had lived for a time in a certain palazzo. Brodsky had been my teacher at Columbia back in the 1980s, and the image of him smoking his cigarette with Russian intensity amidst Venice's shopworn beauty seemed at first paradoxical, and then strangely logical. And so I simply imagined him into being, watching the lagoon crabs go about their business. Given his rigorous poetics, it seemed impossible to write a poem about Brodsky without some formal component, and haphazard rhyme was the least I could do. Let me add, as a postscript, that conceiving this poem brought to my attention Brodsky's own memoir of Venice, Watermark, a slender, lyrical, deeply delightful book." --Campbell McGrath   Most Recent Book by McGrath In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys (Ecco, 2012)               Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day Archive.     Photo credit: Emma Dodge Hanson   Campbell McGrath is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys (Ecco, 2012). He teaches creative writing at Florida International University in Miami.   Related Poems The Barcelona Inside Me  by Robin Becker This City by Liam Rector  In Paris by Carl Dennis  __________________________ Love reading Poem-A-Day? Help support it today.     Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

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