Two Poems by Colm Tóibín

Small Wonder

I am in Venice during the pandemic,
Here to pay homage to aftermath,
Afterthought, to what hardly matters.
I shrug as I pass the Bridge of Sighs
And will not go near Piazza San Marco
Which is deserted anyway, unused.
Gondoliers stand idle at minor bridges.
No one is sailing up and down
The Grand Canal or standing in the Frari
Staring in awe at Titian’s Assumption.

I am looking for a broken tile,
A plaque that has become indecipherable,
A piece of slight sculpture attached
To a wall because no one knew where else
To put it. I move through the empty city
And forage for brick half-exposed,
The tiny window, the gate, the dead end,
The mangy cat, the little yapping dog,
The middle-aged shopper, the half-empty vista.
The shop that sells ordinary electrical goods.

Titian, in his own time of plague, as he worked
On his great Pietà, with his son close by,
Made a minuscule image of them both and placed
It at the bottom right of the painting.
It may be a modest token, a small sign,
To be seen only by those who come
With an eye for such defenceless gifts.
But who can say that in a future when truth
Is back in vogue, this will not stand alone
As something true a man once made?

In his Annunciation, now cleaned up,
Veronese put a glass bowl on a balustrade.
In weak light, it is close to not being there,
Unimportant against the breathless angel
Arrived to surprise the cowering woman. 
The bowl breaks the brittle symmetry
Of the architecture and the two figures,
Its pale white smudge, its tear of light,
Unspeaking, unnecessary, begins as whim
And becomes what binds the image to the air.

The study of St Augustine by Carpaccio hangs
In Venice in that room-like gallery, empty now,
The woman at the door almost grateful
There is a visitor. In the painting, I let my eye
Stray from the saint – his robes, his mind
Pausing to find a phrase, his desk, a little dog –
To a single discarded book on the pink floor,
And then to the shadows, all dense, making clear
That as light settles uneasily outside, and water
Licks the stone, what prevails is solid and alone.

Ritual

The upper air is sweet, celestial.
But why should that bother us below
Where the noise of the world is muffled
Drum sound and last night’s wind and rain?
Yes, the woman sings; her song
Will be used to waken the heavens
When the chance comes, but it might never.

In the book that points the way,
I found words and signs that served only
To mystify me further. It is not easy
For anyone being in the world,
And yet I remember how fiercely he held
On to life, struggling for one more
Gasp, his eyes tenacious in his head.

Hard to know what to call it:
Ritual, maybe, or ordeal, like
The children’s mass at five o’clock
On Holy Thursday in Enniscorthy.
And although the search is for completion,
It is not death; it opens rather
Into brightness, soundlessness.

Colm Tóibín is the author of nine novels, including The Master and Brooklyn, and two collections of stories. He is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of Humanities at Columbia University and Chancellor of the University of Liverpool.