HOUSE OF DANCE

Once, in Venice, a day was thick with storm, and beneath every bridge, ever vendor umbrella, every café awning, people clumped together, waiting out the rain. San Marco Square was a lake and the canals were overflow. The pigeons couldn’t lift high, for the saturation of their wings. Boats went about like floating bathtubs. When finally the clouds cleaved from each other and the sky was blue, there was a breeze, and along the Giudecca Canal, at a wheezy bar, someone with a guitar began to sing. Old Italian songs of which even the smallest boy in the gaining crowd had a most familial knowledge.

So they danced. The old, elegant woman and her husband, each with a glass of wine high in one hand. Two barefooted passersby, in grunge. The little boy who took the light post as his partner, and spun and spun and spun, his hat smashed onto his head, his hat doffed off again. The sky soaked to purple after blue, acquiesced to crimson, to a bruise, and all that while they danced, and this is Venice to me now, soul gone spontaneous after storm.