Postcard from the Sinking City

Looking out over the misty Grand Canal, sipping a caffè corretto at il Ponte dell’Accademia, I am shooing away a pigeon who comes back and back and back to beg. I know it’s the same one because he’s missing a toe. I am not as naïve as when I first arrived and accepted a rose from a man on the steps of the Rialto, an offering that felt like a confession, not a snare. I fled by ferry to San Michele and witnessed the pile of pink pointe shoes scuffed into supplication on Diaghilev’s grave. It is possible to die, I’ve learned, of a floating heart. I took the long boat back, around the isles, the sparkling marshlands, the ruins. I searched for the hat you requested, but it is not in season. I tried to get lost in back canals, but I kept falling onto familiar paths. One bridge over, I was sure a stranger smiled at me, but her boyfriend was just behind me, taking a picture whose frame I will forever haunt. How do the Italians say que sera, sera? Ciò che sarà, sarà, I’m told. A local called this place Serenissima: another sales pitch. I think of it as the City on Stilts. The water and woodworms slowly erode the briccole—I have seen them, gnawed bone-clean and beached on the cobbled street—but many of the original piles that prop up the palazzi and piazze remain pristine. Sixteen centuries after being pounded into the submerged, uncertain soil, they are sturdy as stone pillars, petrified still, I believe, of those ancient barbarians. There is a type of stability that feels like loneliness. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. To be safe, I will kiss this just before I send it. By the time it reaches you, it too will be petrified.