Home > Poetry Magazine > “The Vision of Saint Augustine”

Poetry Magazine

POEM
RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry.

“The Vision of Saint Augustine”

By Beverley Bie Brahic Beverley Bie Brahic

Carpaccio, San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice

You are amazed to find trees in Venice —

To turn a corner into a campo

Where two or three rustling acacias

Spread their halo of leaves

Over two or three red-slatted benches.

It’s as if you had slipped through a curtained doorway

Into a hall full of dull gold scenes

By Carpaccio — a miraculous light —

Though the rio’s still shrouded in a mist

Compounded of water vapour and smog

So it’s not that the sun has come out, it’s

Something to do with the leaves and painting

In the realm of echoes where footsteps

Reverberate endlessly between two walls

And dawn is the chink of a stonemason

At his reparations, disembodied

Voices irresistible as bird calls.

Yes, you’re amazed to find trees in Venice

Shedding their gold leaf onto the pavement

Outside a secondhand bookstore.

It’s like Carpaccio’s little white dog

Wagging his tail at the feet of Saint Augustine

Who is staring out of the window

Looking for the voice of Saint Jerome.

Beverley Bie, “The Vision of Saint Augustine” from Against Gravity (Worple Press, England, 2005). Published by permission of the author.

Source: Poetry (October 2001).

Biography

Beverley Bie Brahic is a translator and poet whose work has appeared in Field, Literary Imagination, Notre Dame Review, The Southern Review, The TLS, and elsewhere. White Sheets (CB editions, Fitzhenry & Whiteside) was published in 2012. A Canadian, she lives in Stanford, California and Paris.

Beverley Bie Brahic’s translations include Guillaume Apollinaire: The Little Auto (CB editions, 2012); Francis Ponge: Unfinished Ode to . . .

Continue reading this biography