Incolae Lacunae

Water flooded the basement again:
came through the walls, soaked our books,
the carpet, Leonardo's Vitruvian Man,

which we brought to the boiler room
and nailed to the wall, to dry off.
As the stairwell was welling

with, echoed with rain,
we mopped up the slop
of the sheet bearing motes

and reflecting our lamps.
(Between autumn and spring
the islands of Venice are most

prone to floods, but its princes
don't stop with a mop
much, its Slovenian stone

in the clay and the mud is still
holding up all its sinking lacunae
dwellers, vaporetti, traghetti

plying routes round the islands
of bridges. No-one need evacuate
to Marco Polo International

Airport just yet.) The rain
on the street bleached
the Crown Fried bones, churned

the papers to paste, blurred
the voices like puddles the lamps.
That evening's performance

of The Tempest had sold out,
so I read in my room instead,
and a mother was wishing

a child back into the world,
with desperate metaphor: tides
that may turn and carry

"the darling child into shore."
The cars forded rivers,
their wheels sweeping waves up;

umbrellas lay curbside
drowned, belly-up,
with spines jutting silver and rusty

like the remains of a party
of fishermen, in the flood lights.
The submarine traincars

were trading commuters
with Poseidon outside
as if it were a hostage situation,

we could hear the thin rumble
through the flooded floors (quivering
surface of liquid light), and I could read

the design of the night on a page
of The Merchant of Venice,
a center of trade with its subjects

and objects, electronics and pastries and spices and silks,
floating and bloating and drowning outside,
as a drowned man is nailed to a wall,

wrack'd upon this shore; the piazza
paving; a museum of what we've retained
from the rain... and of what we're missing...