At the Bureau of Divine Music

Celebrant

54 Celebrant Here is a realm of swollen chestnut trees emptying their hands on the Great Lawn, where figures enter toward 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 55 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. ...