Unsent

Blank postcards and the dreamless dark.

The waiter no longer asks.

Four blank postcards, same address: your mother’s house. The one you went back to.

This is a closed city.

At night I pass churches with windows dark as amber; darker. Dreamless. Wait to see if the woman is there, curled in the doorway. This morning she crouched by the canal, tearing bread into small pieces for the pigeons.

We were lost here once.

I lift the pen.

The bridges here –

This morning the market had blood oranges. I quartered one and the juice ran down my wrist. I thought of the Caravaggio – Judith, leaning away from what her hand is doing.

I thought of you.

What I don’t write: I wanted the city to be ugly. Waterlogged. I wanted to see it again and think it was never that beautiful. But the light. It breaks to pieces over and over.

The waiter stands in the doorway; his cigarette stays lit despite the wind. Through the café window I watch a woman crossing the bridge – her bright umbrella collapses and opens, collapses and opens.

Today it rained. I stayed dry.

Lightning. For a moment the whole city inverts: white stone, black sky, everything reversed and true.

I sign my initial and leave the postcard on the table.

In the morning the waiter will add it to the others. He has stopped asking because he already knows: there is nothing written on them.

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