When a joiner made the oak frame of this
long sash window, when a builder set it
in the wall, when a glazier puttied
in the panes that keep the weathers in their place,
all I would have seen were hedges, fields, ponds
and grazing dairy cattle – before the rise,
the decline and the fall, in a hundred
and sixty years, of so many empires.
When I stand on the back doorstep and search
for the stars amid the urban glare and the overcast
and then look down I see me silhouetted
in the gazebo’s windows – like the figure,
in ‘Las Meninas’, whom we see through
an open door, having paused climbing the stairs
to briefly watch paint capture majesty.
I think of Xerses, anticipating
victory over all of Greece, the world,
watching his armies cross the Bosporus
into Europe, suddenly weeping,
knowing that none of them would be alive
a hundred years from then – and longing
for the pillars and for the gardens
of Persepolis. A century or more
later, Alexander the Great will scourge
the city’s entire populace. Only
artifice will remain.