Two Weddings
(Venice; South Carolina)
Venice is a city stuffed full: flowering plaster and crumble, blank postcards and dry pens, women talking and tatting falls of lace, knotted bead-strings hung from hooks, gold-sprayed paper masks, vegetable peels floating on oily water. Showrooms full of glass blown, spun, molded, and pulled, sparkling chandeliers heavy with baubles, and how could you possibly choose only one? Beneath an arched bridge, the produce sellers tie boats loaded with knobby mandarins, glossy bulbs of fennel, earth-crusted potatoes, stubby carrots.
On a certain auspicious afternoon, an important man—his identity changes—rows a narrow boat into the Grand Lagoon. The crowd, gathered on sidewalks and bridges, waits patiently, knowing what to expect but still interested. The man in the boat raises his arms high above his head, pauses, and, with great ceremony, drops a golden ring into the water. The crowd cheers: things have gone off just as they should. Venice and the sea are joined, wedded, and for centuries the doge has rowed to the middle of the water and done exactly this. Cynics claim he ties a thread to the ring, and after dropping it into the water for the benefit of those assembled, he fishes it back and saves it for next year. Who can say whether these things are true? The ceremony continues even today.
Venice on a cloudy day is a lover certain of being spurned, just shy of sullen, gnawing her wrist and staring dully out the window. But inside a fire burns behind the grate. The mosaic floors of San Marco buckle and swim; every year the heavy church sinks a little on its ancient pilings. Brass bands play out-of-tune marches in the middle of footrace routes, and lean runners with numbers pinned to their chests dodge between the slouching musicians. At midday, people wander into cafés, eat polenta dark with salty squid ink, drink tumblers of black wine. Above them mourning doves bank and sweep, stroking swift through the sky. And these daily things make a marriage: not what I expected—few grand gestures—but sometimes the savory smell of sage and butter reducing, sometimes stewed tomatoes, sometimes soap and a clean-swept floor.
Months pass. The sea laps gently at the canal walls, rises, filling the cobbled streets. Townspeople walk to market on temporary pathways made of banquet tables. Their soles drip; at home, pairs of stockings decorate radiators, drying. Slowly the city sinks, and the water swirls higher, covering the dark mold marks on the piers, flooding the low-lying shops, until the earth tilts away from the moon and the water drains through sluices covered with iron grates. And on the appointed day, a man again weds the water. The lagoon bottom piled with old love-tokens. The water above them unmarked as ever.
Say I wedded the place I love, late at night and alone, one pledge, one ceremony not to be repeated. Say I cut the clay with a sharp spade and planted there a slip of weed; say I buried my shoes, the soles slick from much walking, split past repair. Mark a line on my body and let the blood run down, for marriage calls for something more than a gold ring; marriage calls for the blood of a woman. The question is not, How much will it take? but How much will you give? Say I turned the spade and the earth was red already. Not the first lover, not the last. And so every day I pay my due, calling things by their rightful names, taking into my body the elements (water, light) of life, every day falling more deeply into debt.