In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Sewanee Review 115.3 (2007) 331-334

Pageants
David Havird

From Whitehall to Greenwich

Would that be a senior concession?
I picture myself already
in this vacation's snapshots: overexposed.
No, one adult, I repeat. Especially out
in the glare, I look, graybeard that I am,
as if I am morphing into a snowy owl.
Not sixty? Not, I mutter,
not for another decade, son,
walking upstairs with my ticket. At Whitehall's

Banqueting House, where every angle
is right, whose allegorical ceiling
merits a look, I make with my thumb and forefinger
a collar of sorts for the now taut but slackening skin,
to keep it from stretching. Amid an escort of cherubs
(dimpled toddlers if not for their wings,
the ball and scepter for teething) is God's lieutenant
in billowing russet, James the First
divinely rendered by Rubens. That pageant

unfolding aloft, his heir,
amid its baroque if inaudible brass fanfare,
Charles the First stepped over a sill and bowed
his head to the block. His crown, though gold,
was dross; he reached for another . . . Turning fifty,

one finds oneself away from home,
though nowhere exotic. If you're like me,
an American tourist in London, proceed now [End Page 331]

from Whitehall to Westminster Pier,
from there by sightseeing barge
to Greenwich. A climb gets you nearer the stars,
aloof though they are until sundown,
than even Rubens puts you near Heaven. Inside

the Royal Observatory,
three of John Harrison's clocks,
while only almost seaworthy,
perform a balancing act
of arcs and springs and rotations. Outside

I stood with my feet apart, the prime meridian,
longitude zero, running between my legs,
and set my wristwatch. Nudging the minute hand forward,
I seemed to have climbed from the barge
and boarded a sharp-hulled vessel. Riding the crest,
it promised to teeter come sundown
and when the green swell collapsed into night,
to give its sails to that first easterly breath
which exploded with stars and even still is blowing
the universe out. The other chronometers dancing,

the clock that did find longitude at sea,
H.4, was sitting out the performance,
a silver mollusk whose guts
their circles of teeth had stopped nibbling. [End Page 332]

The Horse on Zennor Hill
In Memory of W. S. Graham (1918–1986)

All is changed, that high horse riderless.

—W. B. Yeats, "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931"

Amid the yellow gorse, which pricked my jeans,
And purple foxgloves and bluebells—
Puddles of hoofprints,
The footpath in places trampled to mire,
And not a horse to be seen.
Even when I reached the granite tor,
And the green high moor, with its boulders
Swept by the wet benumbing wind from seaward,
Widened before me, none to be seen.

Where were the words, the pages whipping back
And forth, in which the poet lies
On Zennor Carn in a bower bracken?
Lies only in words,
Having no bed, much less a grave
Marked by any one
Of these abraded boulders—
Or, better, marked by this, a block
Of granite, the one stone owing its shape to hands,
A monument to those that quarried the site
And dismantled the cairns. Where was the horse,
Wings furled—within which one?

Above the spires of the fox-
Gloves and above the bracken
Tops with their young heads
Recognizing the wind

(The boulders unmindful), a kestrel hovered,
Circled and hovered, its shrill two notes
Lost to the ear, caught by the wind straightway. [End Page 333]

I'd set his words, by saying them aloud,
In stone, in this whose form evokes,
While granite is softening atom by obdurate atom,
A wind with hands to coax the stone
That's stubborn by design to foal.

David Havird's Poetry Has Appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, and Elsewhere.

...

pdf

Share