Around me architectural mastery:
sycamores, embankments, enduring ionic pillars.
I round a walkway bordered by trees,
enamel thawing, gliding off their low leaves.
Beneath the late-May’s pounding sun,
through the glittered trees’ reaches,
a gazebo crackles into sight.
Children in their prime, sunbathers, a wistful portraitist
encircle it carelessly:
a leisured chimney; the billows of life.
The foliage escapes into the river,
purplish, palpitating, cyclic creases
receive the dewy notes.
Kayaks licking acacia-gum-edged
ripples sputter and slip
through reverberations
of leveled white-water terraces.
Blackcurrants in clotted cream
slide on the plush lips of a young passerby.
The 8 above a doorway
dances motionless, silent in my periphery;
“Nicolas Cage just sold the spot”
pops from unknown lungs
inside the Circus crowd.

Unacknowledged, half-proud
hands built the Roman baths
alone, closed-in by such grace,
forgotten, then as now.
I wander these ancestral lanes
more or less alone, the same.