Wearing Venice I have taken to wearing Venice on my wrist. Beads of glass with foil hearts dangle from my hand as I move around my geometrical landscape ruled by science and not art. I have crafted a bracelet of glass to wear a city water whisks around, echoing through airy loggias, sloshing on slimed stones, reflecting on the ogee-arched windows out of which they hung corpses and golden flags. A world winks on my arm, mysterious as San Marco's horses. Beads green as the tree in a piazza click a rosary of longing for improbabilities that rise luminous out of the sea. Venice shimmies up my forearm and a sighing Venetian crosses a bridge. In summer, when gondoliers pole black boats down water-canyons, pushing down on fathoms of muck, you sink into a spell, surging around the cloud-colored city on this wave and that. Then Venice wears you, a swinging bauble of glass and light.

Rachel Dacus

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