The Governor's Glass World
His window opens on a wizardry that glistens with enchanted brittleness- his park translucent under sorcery glass leaking from the trees, a glitter of generals upon their pedestals with stiff white epaulets, the Senator with a casual scarf of snow, and Edgar Allan Poe become a laureate of ice.
Beyond the damask draperies he sees the crystalline confection of the elms. the frozen gloss of hollies and magnolias, the slick white glaze of bricks burned in the sky's cold cauldron, the plume of a fountain caught in splintering arabesques of ice.
His world of ice begins to shake and move in the smooth fracturing of icicles, the bones of water softening, flushing down all the gutters in the sun. The herringbone of red walks reappears, bristles of grass poke through the rotting crust. Is there some ukase he could phrase to hold this sparkle in his park, to lock its hard fragmented iridescence in this frame? No, even Canute could not command the tides, so let it go, prismatic, musical, glissando. How clean decisions of the weather are and irrefutable!
