On a shelf I have three small glass bottles. One contains flakes of opal collected from the dusty roads and mullock heaps of Coober Pedy. Another is full of garnet found just below the surface of the desert, north-east of Alice Springs. The third contains pieces of broken glass from Venice, Italy.
Sometimes a friend will notice this bottle, shake it and look inside and I’ll explain. They’re from Venice... You know that island Murano where they make all that flamboyant, tentacled glass ware. It’s been a glass-making island for centuries. Well bits of glass wash up on the beach like shells... and I collected some.
By now the sea glass is tipped on the table: another random arrangement glittering in the sunlight. There are chunks of amber; slivers of ruby; an emerald; a light green twisting, tubular creature. There are many hues of blue: a light blue shard; an ink blue finger nail; a tiny sapphire; an ice-blue block, almost translucent; and another piece stained psilocybin blue. A finger uncovers a black and white opaque piece, a speck of orange and a milky pearl. Venice contained in glass.
After a while they might say, ‘And what is Venice like?’
And you stare at the glass and try to say beyond:
It’s beautiful
It’s watery.
It’s decaying.
It's a labyrinth.
There’s lots of pigeons
You get lost.
I think — a map can’t replicate its complexity: the multiplicity of tiny alleys and squares and humped bridges; the reiteration of church and well in every campo around every corner; the glimpses of curved, walled canals. It’s a city repeated in time and space like the tides, which lick the seaweed-steps.I search for individual perceptions, not knowing if they really are.
‘I never saw so many weddings.’
‘Old women chant the churches alive.’
‘What?’
‘You know. Old women are the religious ones. They sit and pray aloud waiting for the priest to make his appearance.’
‘Even the clouds are baroque.’
‘You know, after a number of days I felt I was moving gently like a ship at sea. The moon was waxing and the tides grew higher, seeping into San Marco, into the sanctum of the golden mosaics.’
Until I’m back, squatting at the sea’s edge. A black cloud wobbles and conglobes as if a giantess, skirt hitched up is paddling in the lagoon. But the crescent tide-mark where I find my treasure is lit by the sun; fragments which cost nothing and will fit into the corners of my bag. And I make up a tanka, a rather Japanese thing to do, before the rain comes and the boat arrives.
A Venetian Tanka
Waiting for the ferry
I collect tide-tumbled glass
on the sea-shore.
Coloured jewels come and go
On the sands of Murano.
Tide-tumbled-glass —First published in Yellow Moon 1997
© 1997 Julie Constable