Venetian Vespers

—After Anthony Hecht

The boatman’s basso barcarola brings

a sudden, somewhat deeper blush upon

our evening waterway. With a roseate

glow afloat on their canal, the little boats

attend our slackened afternoon. And look

how each adjacent villa also bears

a rosy glow. For a moment, I don’t

know where I am—or, briefly, I forget—

which mercy proves to be relatively

fleeting, as, in time, I find my wits and,

with them, I find my bearings bearing down.

Where did I begin? How did my late trek

commence? It must have been with my waking

late, thereafter staggering downstairs

to a nearly eucharistic caffé

e panino. Just so, the languishing

spirit is summoned back to life, called back

to what might pass for life, a passing life,

and quite passable should you care to know.

The boatman is patently on to me, but keeps

the pathos of his song intact, in time

with our slowly rocking progress, which may

as well become a late, dimming—one might

say an evening—retreat. So it may.

In my Eastern church, the vespers often

can acquire, in their language and their tone,

a deep sense of lament, an all but Lenten

sadness accompanied by a subtle,

latent joy—a modest joy attending

to the promise of our consolation

biding in the nous, where one might yet obtain

an uncommon calm, unassailable.

The boatman’s barcarola acquiesces

to an unsurprising coda holding

yet some repetition of the theme. Time

itself has slowed and stilled, has filled the air

with space, with peace, a rising expectation.