Dukedom

He folds me in his dukedom,
draping its commemorative hills and forests
round me, casting his dukedom wide
till he's down to his very last caprice.

He folds me in his septembers worked
in ivory silk, in his seascapes of living memory.
He wraps me in his dukedom
of windfall, goldfinch and peach.
He inflicts his dukedom on me like dew on a fountain,
like a year of consents,
like a lily merchant.

He brings me a list of colours ranked in order of sleep.

With a smile taken at random
from the world's stockpile, he unfurls
his meridians, temples and folios,
folds me in his coastline, refractive and just,
doubles round me
in a popular uprising of emerald and jade,
surprises me
with his momentous green democracy,
fields, pastures.

He demonstrates by storm the properties of his echoes,
by example the heaviness of his spiders.
He wraps me in his art du bonheur,
in his protocols and grammars,
his guilds of water, in the gallantry
of his mistakes, and in the diagrams of his purgation.

He shawls me in a déshabillé of orchards,
in the armour of his thoughts and bones,
encircles me
with his dukedom of doors, porches and portals,
its neighbourhoods of counterpoise, ellipse and hyperbola;

he flies about me
in circumnambient marvels,
wrinkles and smoothes his maps expectantly,
swathing me in views of bridges, sheepfolds, boundaries
and elevations:

he cloaks me in leisurely lakes shining from pillar to post,
in lunar versions of his dukedom,
then pulls me into the thistle
down of his physics,
his atoms pulsing.

He also makes known to me his Concept of the Round.

He lures me with his sugar factories,
tempts me with the silence of his herbarium,
its perfume-chimérique.
He wraps me in his protégé clouds,
in his skies dark as the mica sunk in granite.

He fastens his dukedom
round my throat,
the weighty balsams of its silver and gold
exciting respect, a collar of pertinence:
he plaits his dukedom into my hair,
anchorages of ruby, scruples of pearl,
adorning me with all his inferior and superior mirages.

He whispers a thousand dowries in my ear,
testing my arithmetic.
He floats his shipwreck museums up to me
from the depths.
He ravels me into his dukedom's conchology.
He brings me a list of colours ranked in order of aimance,

his dukedom minding its own business, he says...

draping its commemorative hills and forests
around me, casting his dukedom wide
till he's down to his very last caprice,
and must turn reclusive,
lie among his riches
no louder than his own lullaby,

his dukedom no bigger than a visiting card.

~Penelope Shuttle