A View of the Water

Abstract

A VIEW OF THE WATER / Larry Kramer You want to come here the ancient way, by water, up the sUting mouth, over the years of false loves and newspapers, then not to stay long, to see something of yourself in abused grandeurs, in softening patrician faces, in the murk of slug canals, in new pleasure crafts yanking at their pulsative sea. It's far away still but you can imagine: dirty and oppressively sad Uke all exteriors of old age and promise fulfiUed. Evenings surely you can hear the bronze intonations of its hours, the sea gods in their corroding fury spurting ropes of water and the present voices, nude, of youths bared to the sun, thieves about prince's door. Its foods wiU undo you, or else the hiss of your common feet upon the beU marbles of an entrance floor. What is the story you suppressed but this one that impresses by its extravagant poverty, tyrannies finally lived out, and painted loves remembered as angels in the tarnished ceiUngs and running nymphs blinded and soaking on the festered walls? The marsh you rose from is reclaiming you, the loaves of the depressed winstone steps, the gnomes the defiant piUngs have twisted to, and the tUting blankness of High Renaissance windows. It's just a vacation view of the water you're coming to. Along the sea waU toward afternoon the horizon wiU bulge, darken, the fine weather wiU give way, the eyes blacken and where you hoped for calm a storm wiU rise without Ughtning, a desperate boat uprooting in the slop of the harbor. Still to saU here is everything, to know yourself once in Casanova's mad chambers: when a terrible man asks the time you in your mercy wiU give all you have. The Missouri Review · 155 ...