might yet be lived
in the palaces of Vicenza,
so spacious and pure,
with arches that soar
the mind of Palladio.

An ordered life
might yet be attuned,
balanced between the scales
of worship in his Basilca,
of colonnaded galleries,
arching over and over
into the solemnities of prayer,

and the scales of pleasure
in his Teatro Olimpico,
where a breathless sky hangs
over the stage that is forever
Thebes, with a square opened out
into long-columned and statued
streets whose every line
moves and meets and diverges
in the strict cunning
of painted perspective.

At least the illusion
of a life of studied being,
triumph of trompe l’oeil,
might yet be entertained
but for the aqueous light
streaming over the whole
region of the Veneto.
Its watery glow defeats
even the great Palladio
as heart and mind are enticed
from perfection of design

into this realm of light
filled promise, the real
Piazza dei Signori
In the real Vicenza,
where life, loud and laughed
and lived, is made all the more
golden in its beguiling
uncertainties.