A few years back I had the pleasure of traveling to the Venice Biennale with two women artists friends. During our stay I maintained my daily practice of running, often getting up at dawn to jog through the streets of that ancient and remarkable city. But even at dawn the streets could be thick with tourists, or Venetians off-loading from water taxis and filling the narrow streets on their way to work. So I began to run towards the quieter residential neighborhoods and away from the main attractions.

I began to see remarkable displays of laundry hanging out windows, across the canals or draped alongside buildings. I saw paintings from a 100 and more years ago featuring some of the same buildings, archways and laundry I myself was witnessing. It was quite a wash day! I began taking pictures. When I put them all together, along with my experiences and knowledge of the city, this poem was the happy result.

It’s an example of  turning words into pictures, as I will be teaching others to do this coming July 31-August 1, via Zoom, for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program in my class Words and Pictures: A Weekend Workshop in Creative Writing From Visual Art. More info and a link to enrollment can be found under “classes” on this very page!  

Venetian Laundry

By Nancy Spiller

Dripping culture, legendary as

Atlantis, the city sinks

As these line-caught domestic displays

Wave defiant above the Adriatic’s fingers,

Spirited as the damp flags of Grand Dukes,

Kings and Emperors,

Personal shouts of color,

Cleansed and vulnerable above

This floating catacomb.

Did Tiepolo take his pink

From such tenderness?

This fluttery nonchalance,

Like his Rococo flourishes.

What Italians call sprezzatura,

The art of seeming artless.

Did Laundry Day in the

Dark Ages signal a cleansing hope,

As the city rose like a fortress

From the mud

And marauding hordes?

The same drape of finery

Now slung beneath a courtyard arch,

Impressionist Pendergast painted

As a fresh rinsed insouciance

Drying for more than a century

And Vivaldi’s Spring, 

Is sprung from these

flowered sheets

Blooming amidst the stone.

A row of jeans sags

Below shuttered windows

Like a worker’s dark smile.

They are Venetians,

Do not call them Italians,

These flapping with importance

People long betrayed by the

Need for such public airs.

Striped shirts stretch above 

A gondolier’s head, 

Clothes pin proud heart,

Scurrying beneath the Playboy bunny

Beach towel hung too close

To children’s socks

And a chorus of girly thongs,

In Turner’s yellow desire.

Ah, Venice, spread beneath a numinous sky,

Like a hand-laundered Oriental rug,

A milky skinned concubine waiting

For her dainties to dry.

Your velvet mask fades

To a memoried mist

Of what was worn

And what was washed

And what really never was.

Share on Facebook

Tweet