Every time Canaletto painted Venice
he painted her from a different angle,
sometimes from points of view
he must have imagined,
for there is no place in the city
he could have stood to observe such scenes.
How ingenious of him to visualize
a dome or canal from any point in space.
How passionate he was
to delineate Venice from perspectives
that required him to mount the air
and levitate there with his floating brush.
But I have been sick in this bed
for over sixty hours,
and I am not Canaletto,
and this airless little room,
with its broken ceiling fan
and its monstrous wallpaper, is not Venice.
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