Sestina: Harvard In A Fictive Light Poem by William F Dougherty

The ivy's white cedillas scale Harvard's
bricks as summer students slouch on green-
swards trim as billiard cloths, riffling pages
veined with enigmas, tyros roused to master
canons, facts, and questions locked in marbled
tomes beyond the pointblank, blameless summer.

Storied halls, stunned honey-red in summer
sun, cast shadows by DeChirico. Harvard
ruminates beside the Charles, its marble
pillars stand as sentinels for lime-green
ephebes; figures of memorable masters—
Santayana, James, Norton—gloss pages

proving Magna est veritas. Pages
encoded in blood instruct the summer
students how casual chance and time can master
bookish sway. The statue of John Harvard
anchors the Yard in day, keeps the blue-green
night when couples saunter out in marbling

light. Incised in Emerson Hall's high marble
(the words begin the psalmist's famous page)
—What Is Man—halted by the ivy's green
dilation, goes unheeded by the summer
scholars laying frenzied siege to Harvard's
stock, and looting legacies of master-

pieces. Greatness of truth tries to master
riotous thought, channel it to marbled
tomes that crowd the archived way down Harvard's
termless coastal-shelf to bedrock pages
fathoms beyond sentio ergo sum-mer.
Vines, shaggy as goats, brace the ivy's green.

The ivy's sheen erodes to dingy green,
like volumes furred with mold; patina masters
metal casts, and lost in older summers
cattle skulls bleach in woods. Ivy crimps the page,
the psalmist's cry, malleted in marble,
What Is Man, the radial verse at Harvard.