Modern Aristocrats
All Gordon-Lenox heirs are named Charles.
All Lenox-Charles heirs are named Gordon.
I can’t live with someone else’s ideas the Dowager Duchess
of Devonshire said, and god knows I believe her.
When it comes to pheasants (that “h” is important)
she said I love the idea of needing shooting.
Yet the Tenth Duke of Richmond insists
I am not just some hunting, shooting, and fishing old bluffer.
They are frank, the moderns, if they’re not Charles
or Gordon. Nowadays heirs have to tango with
the masses, open up their grand houses, sell a Holbein
or object d’art now and then to feed the elephant.
Instead of fifty bedrooms they must settle for twelve.
But there are silver linings, like being able to find
the kitchen late at night with Binky, Consuelo, and that
Gordon-Lenox younger son who’s always glum.
Outside in the black morning, the topiary is hungry.
Beneath it, masses of agapanthus shudder in Spring’s
brisk wind; the lean stalks look a bit like pitchforks.
Crosby Theatre
I am here, at the Directorate of Time.
The impulses are flying in, flying out, an image of your face
wafts just out of grasp as someone shoves my shoulder,
says Move out of the way, claiming soon after
no offense intended.
Is there forgiveness enough in the world
to power an eight-inch taper? A firefly?
Stationed at this place, I could say the men wearing bandoliers
are from another time, but they would disagree, slowly
sliding rough thumbs over their metal cylinders, a lilt
at the tips of boots and at the corners of their mouths.
Patience is a tax love pays.
Let oak limbs grow low almost barely
over the tables at La Fonda where we might
have a couple beers to balance all that walking around.
You’ll always be here, Padre—it doesn’t take Rigoletto
to bring you to me, but tonight the house
was open on all sides, it let the Sangre de Cristo in;
those views carried altitudes to us
on July’s baked wind.
A good gift horse it was, to sit in the blackness
of the house, listening;
to glimpse a pale flash of the conductor’s hand
waving from the well, knowing you were there
and now are here too, and in what futile beauty.
Kathleen Winter is the author of Transformer, I will not kick my friends, and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past. Her next collection is forthcoming from Texas Review Press. Kathleen’s poems have appeared in The New Statesman, The Adroit Journal, Yale Review, Agni, The New Republic, Sixth Finch, Southword, and Colorado Review. She was granted fellowships by Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Maison Dora Maar, James Merrill House, Vermont Studio Center, and the Heinrich Böll House. Awards include the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Prize, Ralph Johnston Fellowship, and Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award.