Governor’s Place

The great house birch with its girth he never quite

could get his arms around, long felled, at last

only its bark like a larva’s husk in grass

leaning neck-high, hollow below mansards.

He does not live in the peeling mansion, but

a more-than-ample keeper’s cottage beyond

rolled lawns and relics of Victorian elms

where he muses in his study alcove. Touches

the ancient coins, silver or bronze, their gleam

on the baize-topped writing table — proud Athena

helmeted; her owl agog beneath. Eternity

glimpsed in the boy ruler Gordian’s profile,

copper green.

                          Trees on guard in browed

dignity now the seething barrack of bees.

Nearby a maple twisted by wind for decades

spirals, a stair winding above the cone

of shade. In his covert the son, reading Herodotus,

Suetonius — staggering run of drachmas,

staters, tetradrachms, glinting in rows.