"The cities we now build," the architect declared,

sipping calmly at his coffee as he walked along

a steel girder two hundred and twenty stories above

the city streets below,

"will make the world gape."

"Should you be walking on that beam?" the reporter asked.

"Gape," the architect repeated.

"Do you read Greek?"

"No," the reporter said, tightening

his grip on the beam beside him.

"Gape. Agape.αγάπη."

" You don't say."

"To love. To marvel at. To be made to feel."

The reporter did not make note of it.

He was feeling and marveling, all right;

but he found himself altogegther unwilling

to remove his hand from the beam

long enough to write anything down.

Later that night at the Thirteen Apostles,

steam from the clattering kitchen downstairs

filled the ancient and secretive gentlemen's club

just off St. James with a Dickensian mist.

Seated at his favorite table

in the Hunter's Nook of the

dining room, the architect sketched

a new London on the 

back page of the Daily Telegraph –

towers, bridges, boulevards.

All new, brilliant, and better.

At last he set his pencil down,

murmuring his thanks  as a

white-coated waiter set

a bowl of soup before him. 

All that his new London lacked,

he realized, was better men.

But they, too,

could be devised;

would be devised;

were even now aborning.