Digital Rabbit Hole

I want to share today, my recording of Robin Saikia’s poem,
‘Song For A Dying Gondola.’ The first time I read it, I fell in love
with it. Many of you now know, that I admire the poetry of Robin very much. I am a fan who devours every new poem he posts:)
He actually said to me, in a comment, he would enjoy hearing me read this one…so here it is Robin, to the music of Marc Corominas Pujadó

                                The Storm Clears, watercolor by Katia Margolis.

Now in the twilight shed of the squero,
where resin dreams and sea-salt dust collect,
they ease you from your stilts,
old swimmer of the city’s veins,
and let your spine uncoil.

For years you slipped along the brackish dark,
a long black marine animal,
half-seal, half-syllable,
sounding the soft grammar
of tide against tarred ribs.

You bore the tribes of Venice,
shopkeepers, mourners, lovers, liars,
your lacquered hide reflecting
the untranslatable sheen of their days.
You once carried Byron rehearsing his vanity,
Hahn and Melba stitching moonlight into song,
Stravinsky drifting toward the quiet island.

Eight woods composed your body:
lime for its calm, oak for its conscience,
mahogany for the dark vowels of water,
walnut and cherry for ornament’s pulse,
fir, larch and elm for the patient bones
that remembered every correction of balance,
every deft asymmetry the masters learned
from centuries of listening.

You were obedient,
not with the obedience of servants,
but of beings perfected
by attention:
a craft shaped by equations of faith
and the slow mathematics of hands.

Now your prow,
once a silvered jaw
biting softly into the night canals,
rests dull on the carpenter’s bench.
Your flanks, crusted with barnacle ghosts,
exhale the perfumes of spent voyages:
salt, varnish, funerals, flirtations,
the whole Venetian gospel.

They will unmake you tenderly.
A few good boards
will be carried off to serve again;
others will crack like old metaphors
too tired to bear another century.
Your rust-mottled ferro will hang on a nail,
a fossil of the lagoon’s long memory.

But listen:
in some future tidepool of the mind
your outline will skim by,
ever a black syllable of grace,
teaching the living what it means
to be built for purpose and pageant,
for ceremony and simple errands,
for carrying a city without complaint.

Sleep now, long creature.
Your voice is already ash and echo
in the green throats of the canals.
Let the lagoon decide
what remains of you tomorrow:
a ripple, a reflection,
a brief obedient brightness
crossing the shoal of time.

Footnote: Robin’s blog can be found here: https://robinsaikia.wordpress.com/