"Stillness - At Kykuit" - Poem by Peter Karoff; commentary by Phil Cubeta

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Stillness - at Kykuit

by Peter Karoff

Sequestered high, a great corner room,

Leaded glass windows, the river

Distant and still. Lights on the far shore

Soften in the rose colored mist of dawn.

The castle keep of a storied house.

Something here wants to suspend time,

To pronounce the word tableau, pastoral,

Rolling hills, headland, river like a sea.

I sit at a writing desk on a raised dais,

A woman's portrait in a silver frame

Gowned in brocade, a brilliant evening

Begun and ended long ago.

Something wants to call the question.

Could that possibly be snow? No,

Only the last silent fall of leaves

Blanketing the garden paths below.

Something here wants to call my name

As though I am ordained to answer -

Meaning, still beauty, hallowed ground.

Go forth - take the river to its source.

I am now the only air in the room.

What force of will made this house

Dispersed now where, what remnant

Of huge ambition, what atonement.

If I take it all in, argue the devil

His due, spend the bearer bonds

Of legacy down to my last breath.

Would that do, and for whom.

It is too easy here, too safe.

Something wants the silence to end,

Come chaos, a cacophony of voices

Descend. I sit, a tightly coiled spring.

November 2002

Kykuit is the great house at Pocantico, the Rockefeller Estate high above the Hudson in Tarrytown, N.Y. (Poem copyright by Peter Karoff.)

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Commentary by PBC

Compare "Stillness - at Kykuit" to Ben Jonson on Penshurst, the country estate of the great Elizabethan poet, soldier, and courtier, Sir Philip Sydney. Jonson as befits an aristocratic age harks back to Virgil's pastoral poems to idealize the Sydney family, and to make of their estate a little Eden, beyond avarice or envy, where the country people come in fellowship, and all is well for all, from the unlooked for guest, King James, to the lowest peasant or country clown. Such is the tradition to which the Rockefeller's Kykuit harks back, as does their public service, their philanthropy, their support for the arts, and their sense of civic responsibility. In that spirit, another poet, Peter Karoff, sits in a high room contemplating the scene, his role, and the august tradition of which he is a part. He is not over-awed, but restless, for in this aristocratic setting, so isolated or "sequestered," something is missing, end-stopped or elided. America is not the England of Queen Elizabeth or King James, much less of King George, or of Virgil, Maecenas, and the Emperor Augustus. We were born in revolution against all that. What is missing here, what has been silenced, is the "cacophony of voices," the turbulence of democracy. Something wants to call that question, the role aristocratic wealth and excellence in a democratic society. And so our poet sits at dawn like a tightly coiled spring. I suspect, despite himself, he is thinking of sleepwalkers. He is asking how he can perform his duties as wise counselor to a truly noble family - true friends of his and of our country - while stifling.... what? The poem does not quite say. But I suspect that The World Want is Peter's turn, or return, to a civic impulse that cannot be exhausted in service of wealth, no matter how enlightened or idealized. The world we want is not that of Penshurst or Kykuit, though we might go on tour, and pay our penny at the door. Where and how then can we meet not as Lords and Ladies, Courtiers, and Clowns, but as fellow citizens? May the world we want create such an open space in many towns and cities. If a Rockefeller, Soros, Omidyar, Skoll, Casey Foundation or whatever were to fund it - how nice and perhaps how necessary. And yet a part of us rebels. We are not the country clowns come bearing hams and plums to Kykuit. The cost of our meeting can be born by each one paying his or her own way, or chipping in dollars and dimes. We want the Lords and Ladies of our ownership society in attendance, but not necessarily on terms of deference. We are all equal - wasn't that the difference before and after our Declaration of Independence? The formal decorum of Kykuit might stifle a  democratic revival. Isn't that why the poet sits, restless, like a coiled spring? What is the role of courtier today? May we not stand up tall even in the presence of our betters?

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