The ivy's white cedillas scale Harvard's <br />bricks as summer students slouch on green- <br />swards trim as billiard cloths, riffling pages <br />veined with enigmas, tyros roused to master <br />canons, facts, and questions locked in marbled <br />tomes beyond the pointblank, blameless summer. <br /> <br />Storied halls, stunned honey-red in summer <br />sun, cast shadows by DeChirico. Harvard <br />ruminates beside the Charles, its marble <br />pillars stand as sentinels for lime-green <br />ephebes; figures of memorable masters— <br />Santayana, James, Norton—gloss pages <br /> <br />proving Magna est veritas. Pages <br />encoded in blood instruct the summer <br />students how casual chance and time can master <br />bookish sway. The statue of John Harvard <br />anchors the Yard in day, keeps the blue-green <br />night when couples saunter out in marbling <br /> <br />light. Incised in Emerson Hall's high marble <br />(the words begin the psalmist's famous page) <br />—What Is Man—halted by the ivy's green <br />dilation, goes unheeded by the summer <br />scholars laying frenzied siege to Harvard's <br />stock, and looting legacies of master- <br /> <br />pieces. Greatness of truth tries to master <br />riotous thought, channel it to marbled <br />tomes that crowd the archived way down Harvard's <br />termless coastal-shelf to bedrock pages <br />fathoms beyond sentio ergo sum-mer. <br />Vines, shaggy as goats, brace the ivy's green. <br /> <br />The ivy's sheen erodes to dingy green, <br />like volumes furred with mold; patina masters <br />metal casts, and lost in older summers <br />cattle skulls bleach in woods. Ivy crimps the page, <br />the psalmist's cry, malleted in marble, <br />What Is Man, the radial verse at Harvard.<br /><br />William F Dougherty<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sestina-harvard-in-a-fictive-light/
