Venice

Let’s begin with the paintings,
Marc Chagall’s Rain,
a surreal portrait of a farm
in a Russian village—
with strange dreamlike
childlike forms
of humans & animals—
where Chagall
came of age, with white
clouds overhead,
one in the shape of
a human figure, or is it meant
to be God, metaphysically
flying over the barn, as if
to protect it in the black night.
Salvador Dalí’s Untitled,
a naked woman lying
on the ground chained
by beads to the branch of a tree,
why is she restrained?
& maybe my favorite,
Modigliani’s sad-eyed
Woman in a Sailor Shirt—
a woman with black hair,
bangs falling over her eyebrows,
oval face, dark background
projecting her pale pink face forward—
who was she, this woman
whom Modigliani imbued
with the full cry of the human,
a great man once claimed
as necessary to embody
in the making of art.
        We slowly wandered
through the Peggy Guggenheim museum—
inspired by the collection, a group of us,
travelers from different lands,
joined by our mutual vocation,
preoccupied by deliberations
of what we saw, who we were,
what we wanted to make manifest—
& suddenly halted by a plaque,
a dedication, as it were,
to Peggy’s daughter, Pegeen Vail,
who took her own life.
My darling Pegeen,
who was not only a daughter,
but also a mother, a friend
and a sister to me—her untimely
and mysterious death left me
quite desolate read her eulogy
mounted on the museum wall.
There was no one in the world
I loved so much. I felt all the light
had gone out of my life . . . for years
I had fostered her talent
and sold her paintings.
        More curious
Peggy’s own grave marker
outside on a plaque
and next to it another:
Here lie my beloved babies,
a list of her many dogs’ names & dates
of their births & deaths,
one of which Peggy named
Pegeen after her daughter.
Pegeen’s paintings,
also at the museum,
in a back room,
magical & melancholy
& childlike, one a fantasy
of a young girl’s bedroom,
the girl depicted
with long eyelashes beneath her eyes
that could also look like tears,
with the colors of Matisse’s
pastel palette. Why had Pegeen
taken her life, we wondered
(as if we could ever know)
& reflected on that adage
that wealth doesn’t bring happiness
& one of us suspected
that her relationship
with her mother was surely complex.
        It was a hot & bright day
in Venice & once we left
the museum we took
a crowded ferry
to the Biennale & though
I held my bag strapped
tightly over my chest,
I discovered later,
enjoying Aperol spritzes
at an outdoor café facing
the water to cool down
after a long day,
when I went to pay our bill
that someone on that ferry
had reached inside
& stolen a small zipper purse
that held my passport &
a few hundred euros.
I wanted to scream.
        It must have happened
when the ferry bumped
up against a wave
& we were jolted
against each other,
as if in a subway car.
Suddenly the canals,
once dancing with the light
of the sun, seemed dirty
(they were dirty),
only I had not noticed before.
Beauty & desperation
so close at hand & though
we were in the city known
as Queen of the Adriatic,
City of Water, City of Masks,
City of Bridges, The Floating City,
City of Canals with new friends
who felt like old companions,
the day darkened as the sun
fell behind the crumbling buildings
that one day would sink
like boats into the water.
        Back to my room
in the hotel that was once a monastery—
so simple & clean, a bed, a desk, a chair,
a bureau, & Jesus on the Cross nailed
above the bed I longed to take off the wall,
put it under my bed—such
was my own darkness
& disbelief & desire
because when I thought of the Cross,
I also thought of the Jewish Cemetery
where my comrades had been buried
—but I did not want to vandalize
a symbol that held trust to the citizens
of this city & that was part
of the hotel monastery
where people once prayed.
        Wherever you go &
wherever you are you will
always encounter foreigners—
they/we are everywhere . . . 
no matter where you find yourself,
you are always truly, & deep down
inside, a foreigner,
explained Adriano Pedrosa,
the curator of the Biennale
called Foreigners Everywhere.
I read from the brochure
I took out crumpled
from my purse & indeed
the artists of the exhibition
(queer, outsider, Indigenous)
were all to a certain degree
strangers in their own land.
        I woke up the next morning,
calmer, once I figured out how
I would get a new passport,
for indeed I was a foreigner,
even if it meant a trip
to Rome to the American embassy.
Had the person who had stolen
my small zipper bag
felt any remorse
discovering inside my passport,
my photo with my private details
that belonged only to me?
I thought of poverty &
the reason people steal,
& my own naivete & trust
& the nature of humanity,
& poor Pegeen, who made
such lovely paintings 
& our poor selves,
artists striving
to make meaning
out of the ash
of our existence,
& the mind-blowing art
we spent days looking at
in the halls & rooms
of the Biennale—
some of which made us cry.