Michael Heffernan Celebrant Here is a place of opulent desuetude,
as of swollen chestnut trees emptying their hands
on the Great Lawn where figures enter one by one,
making their way to table for a unison
of need, immaculate as chalices
sipped, wrung dry, shut up, the key in the sleeve,
the broken priest gone home to dine alone.
The tea-things on the trays know why these people
steal in from white skies cursorily breaking gray
above the torpor they behold and bear.
Nothing of what they found by the lakeside
or in the little pinewood trembling there
in specks of shine and shadow offers them
much they can name or note before they rise.
Someone all wan immediacy is peering
through the beveled pane above the window seat
on the garden side of the drawing room
at the monkey puzzle by the folly
the patriarch had built to show the locals
what a great treat Attic architecture
could be to look at in the wintertime—
and the first snowflake actually falls.
The face in the glass is the patriarch’s,
who used to visit the boathouse through a tunnel
unknown to the servants or her ladyship.
A man with a pipe and a woman lost
in a chapter about the son-and-heir’s return
three hundred pages after he was born,
and never heard from until now, look up.
She asks to be excused inaudibly,
leaving the man with the pipe to watch the person
by the window, who has seen thousands of flakes
obscuring the temple of Artemis
so that his own face becomes all there is.
The two of them linger in communion
of a depth they never can begin to deepen.