I came across this beautiful poem in my beat-up copy of the The New Yorker Book of Poems, copyright 1969, by May Swenson. An excerpt:
Then a tall
tower began to tell “F O U R,”
and another, with different timbre, spelled it
a minute later. Another mentioned it for the third time
in harsh bronze and slow.
Still another, with delicate chime,
countered and cantered it. By now, the sky had turned
della Robbia-blue, the Arno yellowed silver.I stood between the covers of my “book” and heard
a donkey’s particular heels,
like syllables of a clear, quick word,
echo over the Arno. Then came the scrape-clink
of milk cans lowered on cobbles. And with the moon still
there, but transparent, the sky began to fill
with downy clouds–pink
as the breasts of Botticelli’s Venus–foretinting dawn.
(The “book” being the shutters at her window.)