The End of the Life of Giorgione da Castelfranco, Venetian Painter

He doesn’t mind the fleas, calls them

our pets, their marks merchant kisses.

In my letters, I tell him to keep away.

In the Rialto it is forbidden

to sell rotten fruit. A strange orange

pulses beneath my arm.

In my neck, a warm egg. Fever.

The mattress leaking straw.

Some nights he sits on the iron stool

across the room, staring.

When I ask what he’s up to, he answers,

Composing. As if I’m supposed to understand.

Perhaps I do. As a girl, I watched for years

the ships float toward their long detention

on the Lazaretto, imagined galleys full

of peacock feathers, pearls. Fine pepper

and myrrh. When one departed

it was as though the entire sea

was cockeyed, and it was

almost painful, that hollowed space.

I would close my eyes

to fill it, like matching color

to the scent of persimmon tree

floating across the lagoon.

Dolorous eyes, he says I have those.

He says many things

in this close capsule, sometimes comes

just to talk. We each have our own art—

I bring flesh to life; you bring life

to flesh.

Venice needs both. He believes

this. I trace his sloping nose, my sincere one.

Some evenings it’s as though a gate swings open

and I can nearly step from the pain. He’ll play his lute,

describe the Queen of Cyprus stout and hopeless

on her horse.

But the Republic suffers.

Only ghosts walk the sea-fields.

These rooms have heard every secret.

What men won’t tell their wives. One wakes

from nightmares—he’s drowning in a well of silk.

One has begun to make a fortune

selling shovels. His visits more

and more frequent.

We hear each rumor, too.

How we got so sick. Some say

a cloud of death rode the sirocco

from Cathay. (The red wind

will return soon, with its rising tides.

I must tell the other girls to raise their beds.)

Great earthquakes, others believe, let loose

some sort of fermented air. That God tires

of us, has sent his own

searing arrows.

How many sailors have followed a false star

to their end?

I am no bright compass.

I will lead him to the grave.

I know my own is across the water.

It is deep. (I’ve heard how they stack us.)

So I’ll never be lonely, I tell him. Laugh.

He says he will carry me as Aeneas did Anchises

out of burning Troy. These names only names

and already I feel flames rising

around this bed. The fire falls in flakes

like snow. Thirst. Fleas. The page is a sea of ink.

Stench so thick it shimmers.

I am too tender for what he wants,

for what he pays. Where I’m going

his money is no good.