The four-storied courtyard weather is always Lair.

If these oils live, then the potted flowers are wild,

But neither here bleeds or dies. They are, and stare,

Only somewhat less boisterous than the visitors.

One will keeps everything here from coming loose

On its hook, out of its frame, off its peristyled

Still point in time. One woman could reduce,

And did, Byzantium, Athens, and Rome to stock,

One of a kind, all priceless, nothing for sale.

The buried pulse of this iron and ivory creature

Holds time's invisible jewelled gears in track

Stopped .

And for the past sixty years the main

Marble mosaic that was an empress's floor

Has sunk, an inch a year. What in our nature

Lets fall the mid-pavement of a life's level,

And not a wall crack, but even the colors gain,

Rooms wear together, re-arrangements complete

And make famous the palace to which admirers travel?

That in us colder and hotter than cold and heat.