Afloat by Lawrence Raab

After the interesting guest at the party
declared that Giorgione's The Storm
was the strangest painting ever made,
you flew to Venice to see it. And the canals,
of course, the celebrated light
on the water, all the churches
where someone might be playing Bach
or Vivaldi while off in a shadowy corner
another masterpiece begs to be seen.
So, for a while, yours is a life
of important surprises, which is what
life should be, and usually is
only briefly. You'd like to forget
that Venice is sinking, and no one
knows how to save it. But today
walking across the flooded piazza feels
almost instructive: the mortal
just touching our need for permanence.
So much, after all, is vanishing.
And still the doomed city is afloat,
the water you don't want to fall into
glittering cheerfully as you cross the bridge
to the Accademia, where at last you will find
the enigmatic Tempesta, a picture much admired
by Byron, who in general detested painting
unless it could remind him
of something he had seen
or some day might see.

(Note: Giorgione's La Tempesta, from RAI International)