Erica Jong - Venice, November, 1966 lyrics

With his head full of Shakespearean tempests and old notions of poetic justice, he was ready with his elegies the day the ocean sailed into the square. 'The sea,' he wrote, 'is a forgiving element, and history only the old odor of blood. She will come to rest on the soft floor of the world, barnacled like a great pirate ship, and blind fish-mouthing like girls before a gla**- will bump, perhaps, San Marco's brittle bones.' Pleased with these images, he paused and conjured visions of a wet apocalypse: the blown church bobbing like a monstrous water toy, Doge Dandolo's bronze horses from Byzantium pawing the black waves, incredulous pigeons hovering like gulls over the drowning square, mosaic saints floating gently to pieces. Then he waited as the wind rose, as gondoliers were rocking in the long furrows of their boats and small waves licked the marble lions' eyes. But still this most improbable of cities hung on, lewdly enjoying her own smell. Learning later how Florence, with her brown bells, her dried-up joke of a river, had played the ark to all his fantasies of flood, he felt a little foolish. He was walking in the gallery then, thinking of the doges: how they tread on clouds which puff and pucker like the flesh of their fat Venetian who*es; how thanks to Tintoretto's shrewd, old eyes, they saw themselves amid the holy saints; how shrewd, old Tintoretto, for a price, painted his patrons into paradise.