Little Venice

Theodore Deppe

for Ruth Alsace Deppe (1952-2026)

More than half a century since I met you at a family gathering, you reappeared for a night in Connemara. So little I know of your life, but I’ll remember you for the story you told of the year you lived in London, near Little Venice. It wasn’t easy to be seventy and alone, you said, but mornings, over long cups of tea in a houseboat’s floating café, you read David Copperfield for the first time. Roses in slender vases. Custard tarts. And out the porthole, half the world was reflection. Moorhens swam through images of homes. 

And when you read how the orphaned Copperfield was sheltered for a while in Yarmouth in his housekeeper Peggotty’s upside-down boat of a home you thought the book had been written just for you. Everything once again possible in Peggotty’s black barge with a door cut into its side, and a tiny window where the rudder used to be. In that joy of a restaurant you were inside the novel, and outside everything was water and light. 

True, you would stay in Little Venice long enough to read how that paradise of a boat-house in Yarmouth was destroyed in a storm. Snow fell on London’s canals and then came the winter you were hospitalized with what you called your own inner weather.  

But afterwards, you said, there was respite in Amsterdam where things found their balance again, half on land, half in water. A little radiance gradually returned. You reread Dickens and wondered at the sun on your small canal. Someone at least had imagined such sadness before. And gotten past it. And then created a world where in the last pages things actually flourished.

Image © Europeana

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Theodore Deppe is the author of eight books of poems, most recently Impossible Blackbird (Arlen House, 2024). Born in Duluth, Minnesota, he has lived in Ireland since 2000.