A NEWS DAY IN VENICE

Overgrown with tall grass
with pawns on a chessboard
August directs you
to a paper cut and iodine
after reading the Venice news
when laughter from the comics
even fails your word's mood
by a new sky writing line
keeps me awake as the wings
of the beckoning gulls covers
over my blank verse metamorphosis
and interpreting my day dream,
waiting for the heat wave
to assign you to a bluish sea
filled with seven swans
we're diving off familiar docks
by the flying gulls
in the home harbor quay
near the tourist ships
on a weekend holiday
we survive on the ocean's barge
floating at the highest tide
to encircle my kayak journey
assembling a large tube by my side
from a feverish sandy beach
knowing in the news
in a Seventies time of images
a reporter will publish texts
or a camera  showing
their T.V. secret sightings
of us on rope's lorries
back to back
or trying my sorry hands
at poker
as certain as I'm playing
the blues next morning too
so you play your guitar
near a motioning tourist boat
brooding near the rocks
by the jacaranda plants
silence covering us
from the shouting faces
by runners on their marathon
races by as the sunset leaves us
until the curling stars are out
as a my neighbor Diana
the actor in my last play
disappears as a huntress
with her understudy proctor
as the goddess hovers by
covering me with secret kisses
with favors for our late afternoon
reads me back my poem
until it is regretted to be late
with birds flying in the winds
in Venice's twilight of the moon.