Morning drew a damask curtain
across the lagoon. A sketch
would have offered more of the scene,
those hours in Venice, when the snow

tore off the Dolomites, a whitish haze
blinding the edges of the paper.
Weren’t we, too, drawn as if
with blunt pencil into the empty margins,

soon to be rubbed clean
with breadcrumbs? We stood in the museum
off the Piazza San Marco,
coarse snow whipping the glass

as you traced the scribble of a dog,
done two or three centuries past
in a moment of inattention as the artist
sat at coffee and watched

the crowd pass
along the piazzetta—the scrawl
no doubt forgotten,
perhaps consigned to household trash

used by a scullery maid to light the kitchen fire.
Perhaps even the artist himself did not think
the ragged dog worth preserving,
though obviously someone had.