A Fine Old House

A Fine Old House

There is a fine old house along the cliffs
Cut slate roofs, corroded green copper flashing
A widow's walk far above leaded glass windows in iron casements
An intricate garden bordered by flowers tended with someone else's care
Kelp rotting in the rocks below, hermit crabs scuttling
Along the shore that runs below the fine old house along the cliffs

An aging jurist paces
Making noble gestures in the purple heart of the night air to no one
Thinking of words, divinations, the shaking of hands after the battle of ideas
An impossible job well done they will say, "A difficult matter, good show!"
Hoping that eloquence might make a difference in the fine old house along the cliffs

Old leather bindings oiled and dusted, each in symmetrical row
A brickwork of tomes of old ideas, ambitions and ruminations
The echoes of old men largely dead and forgotten
A feather quill in a cut glass well and the silence of padded wing chairs
All repress the aging jurist who lives in the fine old house along the cliffs

The fire crackles in the granite hearth unmoved by the cold
Faces in the Walnut burl walls watch and wait and whisper
A child's cry, like flowers, muffled and silenced by long stone hallways echo
Where are the toys, the evidence of youth, the implication of innocence
That disturbs the loneliness that settled long ago on the fine old house along the cliffs

The jurist lights his pipe and paces
The fate of a simple man, an uneducated man, a working man
Rests in hands, his hands, that have known no blood or pain
That have not cracked in the cold of coal and steel
That have never brought forth shape out of molten slag
Or labored into the night to put bread on the table in the fine old house along the cliffs

He turns in his sleepless thoughts, a pendulum before the fire
A sharp rain slants against the stonework
"An eye for an eye!" they cry, "The blood of the man for blood" they demand
Justice, of this mother's son who wants only another day to be
A graying gull, with all his strength, fights against the storm beyond the window
And is torn from flight by the gusts that whip the fine old house along the cliffs

In the next cold sunrise I shall walk, thinks he,
Among the scattered stones that line the path
Shrinking a little each year into the rocky moraine below
All that has accumulated in layers over great periods of time
Changed by weight and pressure to become hardened and useful
For the lifeless moment when I shall condemn the man, thinks he,
A final judgment upon the sand below the fine old house along the cliffs

Rays of the sun will pass weakly on the morrow, thinks he
Through the icy wind turning up collars,
Pulling coat lapels close about the aging jurist who, this night
Listens to his heart that measures
The savage taking of a life against a civilized taking
As each step along his worn and empty path takes him farther away
From the intricate gardens, the laughter of children
The warmth of his fire, amidst the barren cold that surrounds the fine old house along the cliffs

The ivory keys of each footfall in the frozen night air, diminished by the blackened tide
Rise and fall in the cadence of the distant breakers rolling, crashing endlessly
Upon the fractured shore of broken promises, strewn with unfulfilled dreams
The aging jurist walks, counting quietly to himself, subtracting one from the whole
Watching a tiny burst of light in the southern winter sky, the death of a star, thinks he
Its almost microscopic light never to shine again upon the fine old house along the cliffs