NO MERE METAPHOR

From my childhood horse-mattress bed I could look out through a screen door that opened to a paint-flecked wooden staircase that led to the foot of a green Connecticut hill.

At eye level I could see an ancient root cellar door leading right into that hill,

A hill with a rickety windmill of the kind I would know from movie Westerns.

But right here in my room I had a recurring dream in which I walked up that hill and from it saw a gleaming city –


A feeling that would return when in the Met I viewed El Greco’s Toledo… from a river boat spotted a gleaming temple in thick jungle… from the top of the Arboretum in Roxbury came upon Boston’s late 20th century skyline.