today

---

All the time.

So fucking boring.
 
***
 
I went to Venice at 30.

First trip to Europe. On scholarship.
 
In a water taxi. Speeding along the Canal Grande. From the Santa Lucia train station to the Peggy Guggenheim museum. 
 
A glorious April day. Powder blue sky. Woolly clouds.

'How did I get here?'
 
***
 
Straight to the American Abstract Expressionists. The paintings and sculptures. That period in New York cultural history.
 
Left my bag at the coat check.

Had so many firsts.

Seeing a Calder. Amorphous puddles of colour hung like lures on fishing rod wisps of silver. The shadow-cast play on white walls. 
 
Jackson Pollock. Willem de Kooning.
 
Do you know the feeling? Having an out-of-body experience. Standing in front of an original.

Something you've seen in books. Or in an art history lecture — dark room, slides shuffling in the carousel.

***
 
I cried at the Musée d’ Orsay. In a state of rapture.

Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. Édouard Manet.
 
Spanish teenagers on a high school trip squeezing in on me. 
 
***
 
Food is good.
 
So is painting. And pottery...music…poetry…photography…movies…theatre…family…friends…bike rides…ice cream…clouds…beaches...trees…bird song...
 
Where does the list end?

***
 
Spent a Venetian night in a convent.

I always thought my grandmother, Theo, made a snug bed.
 
The nuns made getting between the sheets a form of penance. Like putting on skinny jeans right out of the shower. 
​
I went to markets and restaurants.
 
But the first few hours. I still carry in my heart.

***

​Two new-to-me songs from this week.

---

2022

2016