Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Venice Wood

Posts. Hundreds of posts. Thousands of posts. Millions of posts.A whole city built on posts. Posts driven into the mud, below the surface. More than ten million trees. Posts for buildings. Wood for houses, storage, churches, bridges. Wood for shipbuilding. Wood for docks and levee systems. Wood for heating and cooking. Wood for the glass furnaces on Murano. Wood harvested and brought to Venice: wood from the Lagoon's littoral forests - larch, pine, alder ; wood brought downriver -oak and beech forests; wood from the mountains,from Slovenia,from Istria. Brought to the Zattere, named for the barges carrying the logs, now that long, flat walkway along the Giudecca, next to the water, Fondamente, where Pound loved to walk.
All of those ghosts.