I’m certain that morning I heard wasps droning
beneath each floating, sunlit surface.
The billowing high-peaked tents staked virgin space
as if they were the early outposts of an empire
on the rise. Here was a scene nothing in Chaucer
or Blake or my continental tours had prepared me for.
How unlike the bored bewitchment I’d glimpsed in that pigeon-eyed
Chancellor of the Exchequer, his gaze drifting out across the ice-
locked Thames––now white as a mirror mildewed with steam—
toward the Blackfriars Bridge where sundry Londoners
miraculously stood, swilling gin mixed with wormwood
inside the honeyed smoke of roasting oxen. I remember
questioning my senses while testing the urge
to skate along that entrepreneurial shore,
to escape, as it were, the trick of my next life, how it should begin
and when. In the distance, draped in icicles, St. Paul’s dome appeared
a popish embarrassment. In ecstasy below, the tents
rippled out in faery rings, blistering against a frost
that had grappled with the river god
and won. At the far edge of Europe, on an island
now the center of a new, unreasoning, mechanized might,
the Chancellor shut his eyes to pray. Everywhere, the sun
was hewing wasps from the amber of our unguarded fears
and hopes. As I was pretending to be about to step
onto that brittle stage—one last act of Napoleonic
verve!—the morning when it happened,
when what occurred, occurred.
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