The sun set early in the Square, winter afternoons,
angling over the apartments to the west, so that light would bisect
the northern row of dark houses diagonally, the grand houses
that were suddenly not of the last century but of the century
before.
Then the world would seem equally divided, awhile, between
the golden
and the chill, equipoise in a bitter year. When the sun was
completely gone,
we’d turn for home, the dogs and I, and to the south, the two
towers,
harshly formal by day, brusque in their authority—
at the beginning of evening they’d go a blue a little darker than
the sky,
lit from top to bottom by a wavering curtain of small, welcoming
lamps.