Poetry Monday

Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning

by Richard Wilbur

          I can’t forget

    How she stood at the top of that long marble stair

    Amazed, and then with a sleepy pirouette

Went dancing slowly down to the fountain-quieted square;

      Nothing upon her face

But some impersonal loneliness, -- not then a girl,

      But as it were a reverie of the place,

       A called-for falling glide and whirl;

      As when a leaf, petal, or thin chip

Is drawn to the falls of a pool and, circling a moment above it,

      Rides on over the lip –

Perfectly beautiful, perfectly ignorant of it.