The knights support Duke William
And The Bastard supports his king.
The crypts support the halls
And the halls support the nave.
At Coutances, moving up the tower,
The square becomes the octagon,
The octagon the arrow.
Holy is our architecture ,
The marriage of human aspiration .
We love our art and god.
So the historian of another age
Or planet, who unearths the statues
From what was once this world,
Might find among the ruins of commerce
On earth there lived a people with wings.
Sue Standing
WATERLILIES IN THE MUDDY RIVER
Waking to riverlight and pulse of traffic
on Storrow Drive, you go to the window
and see that, almost overnight, green discs
of waterlilies have spilled into this inlet
of the Muddy River, part of Olmsted's
nearly vanished Emerald Necklace.
These are not Monet's
NymphCas,
rising and dissolving into air:
