From the Fire Hills

Waterwalkers

III 35 WATERWALKERS Erecting catwalks and scaffold over the piazza at high tide, city workers glide in orange-red smocks at the gates to San Marco, transforming everybody into waterwalkers: the tony waiter wading the lagoon his patio resembles, or the Japanese couple in a menagerie of pigeons, even the masses in the atrium under the shattered sky of a million tiles in a Byzantine mosaic. In perspective’s zero, before creating depth, we were all split in two. Jesus in the Jordan’s vortex, for example, all bone and angle: there must be another side to this rendering, to the curious gold pounded into sweat at his nape, the water swallowing him whole, until the other self, incarnate, disappears. So it is at the edge of the Western world, this disappearing city, which renders water that much larger that much longer, one more fragment freighted out on the back of the sea. 36 Here, anyone can be beatified, anyone with extra socks can cross the cramped sea of tourism and mourning, float above the sunken piazza, San Marco’s warped floors, and wonder at their bodies made numinous, no matter how mortal they tried to stay. ...