There may be no better place to love someone
than in that courtyard, where light glides down
like a bridal train, lands among Venetian lions

and primrose, Roman mosaic and azalea. Gardner
wedded the past to the past, built a 15th-century palazzo
in America and filled it with Manet, Degas, Vermeer.

Side by side on a stone bench, you looked upon arches
and balustrades that belonged to other structures
centuries before, when your city was still marsh

and estuary. Each fragment was a diamond’s facet,
arranged to illuminate the whole. When the question
was asked, you both knew the answer, but the yes

is for always, the yes is for memory, for a moment
that will hold in time. Yours was the newest life
in the garden, feet from Persephone and Odysseus,

sculpted by those long forgotten. The idea,
Gardner said, was not to know history or artist,
but to love what we see before us. You will

return to that place again, to remember where
you chose each other, to discover how time
has altered its beauty and let it bloom anew.