Nero — Blackbird Archive

← v1n1, Spring 2002

The glint along the water of the canals

Of the few stars still visible as the clouds

Gather blackening the lagoon where the rows

Of gondolas rock side by side in the wash

Of the tide their necks crooked high

Above the narrow dock alongside Julietta's

Bridges as the cats take their turn navigating the city

As the French boy in Julietta's bedroom turns from the window

Where he's been standing the whole while waiting to ask

What do you call the black of those gondolas?

place travel desire

David St. John

David St. John is the author of twelve poetry collections, including The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems (forthcoming from Ecco Press, 2017), The Window (Arctos Press, 2014), and The Auroras (HarperCollins, 2012). He edited The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems (Graywolf Press, 2016), a posthumous collection by the poet Larry Levis, and co-edited American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (W.W. Norton & Company, 2009) with the poet Cole Swensen. He has been awarded both the Rome Prize Fellowship and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the O.B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the George Drury Smith Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry from The Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Foundation, along with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is university professor and chair of English and comparative literature at The University of Southern California. Photo by Stephanie Diani