Live Webcam: Ponte delle Guglie, Venice; March 2020
Just two people, now three, and a dog at
the end of a leash. I keep waiting for
something to happen. A bomb. A bullet.
Two cross the bridge from opposite sides, dog
hanging back for a pee at the canal’s
concrete edge. Ordinary. I may have
been there once, eating pastries, drinking cold
bitter sodas with my mother on wrought
iron chairs they put out so we could watch
the sun die each day. I could be there now.
In the grain of the camera’s eye, their masks
could be imagined, which is what I’m trying
to do: imagine. I want to see how
close they will get to each other, how close
I can get to them. I come back later,
surprised it’s night, one old lady pulling
a small cart of groceries. From the corner
of my screen, an empty water taxi
crosses the place where lamplight makes a school
of steel minnows against the surface. I
am trying to be present here. I
am trying to remember she is real,
the woman in the red shirt who just now —
this exact second, I tell myself — walks
back into the shadow of the alley
and disappears from my brief sight. Have I
never cared for anyone but myself?
And look what it took for me to know that.