Torcello

Offshore, the Apocalypse

stays contained

to one island and its church.

Venice's ruler's out wedding

himself to the ocean

while I'm ankle deep

in the Adriatic,

eyes raised to a book

unencumbered by words: A Bible

that reads from East to West. Guidebooks

want only

to see it as ceiling—the Basilica

San Marco,

where Christ's hands open on wounds

embedded with rubies, and priests

hold back the sea with brooms.

I'm taking on incense,

bowing at altars dragged out

of Constantinople,

sloshing across marble

sacked from Jerusalem.

Offshore, the sea's a bride bought

with a fist full of diamonds

the Doge throws into the deep—

a sign of his true and perpetual dominion.

Then why does walking into this church

mean stepping into the ocean?

The sea is a dog—

Priests throw in bones just to placate it.

The year's nearly 2000,

but the millennium already hit once

on the island Torcello,

a kind of plague the Venetians contained.

999 years,

and the dead still crawl from dirt

towards their radiant bodies,

they still gather up

missing limbs: arms, legs, hands

sharks and beasts keep regurgitating.

We do what we know—

But Christ never wanted to manage

resurrections in Venice.

Underdressed in the flesh

from dead civilizations,

he moves among us in Byzantine skin.

I'm getting close to this God

worshiped only by tourists.

He picks at the wounds

on his crucified body, the injury

scabbed over with jewels.