Long rows of cloth,

the city’s riches, whiten

in damp sunlight like claw

marks scraped on the land. Bister

hardens, blue slate glitters

on canted roofs. Wind-blown leaves

flaunt their silver petticoats.

This plain, so painfully flat –

one feels the sea’s approach.

Floating like scum on fertile water,

a thin scurf of wall and roof,

steeple or mill, and rising up,

St. Bavo’s great mass,

size of a thumbprint –

all this dwarfed by the sky –

giant clouds, vestiges

of smoke and bruise, swelling to

some cataclysmic tumble –

the fullness of which we are

only the smallest part.