Late in the day it develops 

this certainty 

we will never go to Venice together 

my father and I 

through an aperture fine as a distant baluster 

platinum with sun 

glimpsed through a parapet’s limestone latticework

it materializes  

striates a plain expanse of kitchen wall 

with insistent ribbons  

of pearl butter flamingo apricot coral brick 

aquamarine azure  

seafoam island clouds their taste whimsical and serene 

as a piazza flooded 

with velvets and sighing silks in the dawning

while miles away  

my father distills for me his memory of evergreens 

so it is easy to live 

without the sirocco and the bridges and the cloistered

cedars of Venice 

easy to dissolve with my shadow the lagoon vision

brief fissure

between lightfall  

and a stupendous, stupefying night