A Three-Day Love Affair

I fell for you fast, Venice,
the moment I stepped from the vaporetto
and onto your floating welcome.
Waif-thin as I was, you took me in,
transported me in time. I hunted
the greats who haunted your tearoom—
Byron and Proust, Dickens, Rousseau—
and sat in seats like theirs at the Florian,
sampling biscuits and delicacies, then
walked among pigeons clucking
and scolding as they mobbed
St. Mark’s Square.

That early December was cool.
The canal smelled of fish at night.
In the sinister twists of your streets,
Venezia, every shop hung
with plague-doctor masks.
I was in love with a gay man then—
a short-lived crush. My fingers sought
your handmade papers and journals,
your quill pens and ink…

I fell for you, Venice,
as I have fallen in love with men—
and was beyond lucky. You gave me
a transgressive show—that Balthus exhibit
of awkward erotic girls, a Dobyns’ poem
accompanying each painting—
then Rilke’s early journal with his drawings—
waiting in the Grassi Museum.

I knew you were magic and heathen
when I was swallowed by a costume shop,
six hands outfitting me for Carnevale in red
velvet and gold, too heavy to wear or buy.

I loved even your hawkers, Venice,
touting their fish as fresh, when my nose
said old by three days. Squid ink
stained my lips like a Goth diva’s and
remained till I was back in the States.
That’s how I wanted to be marked.
Some things you don’t want to forget.

Dark, Soft Curve

Writing a poem is like developing a photo
in the darkroom
in the old days. By bathing the photo-paper
in a chemical bath,
the imprint would emerge slowly through
a wavy liquid. You’d think,
ah, there’s her shoulder now and that dark,
soft curve of scarf
and you’d pause remembering the day and
place the picture was taken.

Lifting the photo from its bath, you use
the warmth
of your breath and hands on the paper to hasten
development and
make visible the details all but lost by a too-bright
flash. In this one moment
you can amend your mistakes, use your body
as heater and healer—
as we do in life, often in the darkest of rooms.

Crossing the Blue Ridge

Driving over the mountain and into the valley, I hear a rolling sound
like waves coming across fields that once held the fodder shocks
of ancestors’ labors, a feeling the soul misses—

remembering that the Iroquois Nation tilled these fields and moved
their farming in answer to the weather’s instructions, and even
the deep history when our planet was one big ocean,

and the mountains I love erupted in the Earth’s raw turnings,
and the valley pulled away from the foothills,
where the blue mountain stretches out in the distance.

The Blue Ridge is like my parents. It blends
Dad’s muscular caring with Mom’s mind and pillowy
curves, as if she were lying on her side on the horizon.

Patricia, you know you’re romanticizing, don’t you, pretending
the landscape is human? Admit it. You miss your parents, now
that you’re all grown up and too old to be called an orphan.

Patricia Gray’s poem, “The Taste of a Girl’s Knee” is in The MacGuffin, Vol. 40.1. Four other poems were in the Mediterranean Review. In 2023, she was awarded an Artist Fellowship in Poetry by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and was a finalist for the 55th Millennium Writing Award for her poem, “Morning of Wilderness and Wind.” She lives in Washington, D.C.

Image: The Library of Congress from Washington, DC, United States