Shaking the glory of Heaven from his heels, perhaps an angel 
fled to this earth, this Italy, these Venetian 
lagoons. Where, in the hilarity of escape, he soon 
designed a place to walk in: the piazza, 
spacious as (knowing no other) Heaven's courts were spacious. 
Beneath the bare azure it lay, as immensely empty. 
The piazza was all that was there. 

An angel, too, can be lonely. 
But the runaway knew what do to: he sang 
a Mozartean phrase that peopled the place with doves, 
if emblems of Christ, sacred to Aphrodite. Yet the piazza, 
for all the froufrou of their fluttering, their rou-cooing, glittered 
    in sunshine: 
empty still. He waited. 
Something was wanting there beyond the birds. 

And then he remarked the far end of the square. 
So surely it was that San Marco sprang to life, winged and a lion 
at play with a Byzantine empress, dazzling, 
at the far end of the square. 
Marble dreaming, mosaic blazing, triumphant bronze, 
stone holding ivory's delicacy in derision, 
spire on spire, dome smiling on golden dome, gonfalons streaming, 
power, opulence, gaiety dancing together: 
the vision of a truant angel. 

Then the dark chime of the Moors' twin hammers resounded and 
like a billow in spume dissolved, where refined planets spangled 
    the azure, in the zodiac's golden circle; 
and above it a lion couchant folded his wings 
as if time were no more. 
Almost a rebuke, on the right — the stern campanile. 

Oh, but he needed more than the doves and the dazzle, 
who felt a little the burden of his being 
in Venice, on the Piazza di San Marco. 

He paced the length and the breadth and again the length of the 
    piazza, reflecting, 
till out of his reflections — as palaces 
in Venice rise out of the water — shadows arose, 
and multiplying and petrifying and arching 
elegantly, formed those lofty arcades 
endless and grey as trade, 
yet, with Venice glass iridescent as the necks of doves, 
with Venice lace, as befits a city that is bride of the sea, 
sumptuously graceful. 
But the unearthly stranger, he did not know why, dissatisfied, 
    shook his wings, 
putting the doves to frightened flight, who alighted again 
before the arcades, croodling and strutting and gleaming. 

Then the angel knew what he must do. He sang 
a second phrase, if less than Mozartean, festive 
as a wedding. It was Tischlein-deck-dich on the piazza's 
either flank. Parasols, yellow or red or blue or yellow, hugely 
    sprouted 
like mushrooms in a fairy ring; strings being stroked, plucked 
    strings, 
decanted music like a light wine, glasses were lifted like singing. 
    Above, 
a sky intensely azure. Beneath it, two or three children scattering 
glistening grain to the doves; while at either side the piazza, men 
    and women, 
rosily aureoled, sat at their several tables, in a dream 
of a Byzantine empress pavanning with a winged lion, with birds 
    alighting and flying, with music sparkling like wine, and 
    everyone 
rejoicing in the grandly absurd pinnacled marvel, as in the piazza, 
    immense 
as the courts of Heaven. 

And the soft and the savage voices of wounds were silent. 
Soilure was washed away. 
There was no shadow 
But the slight shadows of the wings of doves, and the colored 
    parasols' flanges. 
As, in love, 
joined pleasures, burning, kindle a universe, 
here earth and Italy, Italy and Venice, Venice and her piazza fused, 
    and from that central splendor shed such light 
as, for an hour, 
blots out the whole world's night.