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.