throbbing light machine

Stanley Plumly
The Kenyon Review, 1993

Conan Doyle's Copper Beeches

In the story they're in a clump at the front
hall door, as huge as an extinction,
yet Holmes, the literalist, ignores them,
focused on the options of the case.

It's Watson, his Boswell and naturalist,
who makes them beautiful, if only for
a moment, "shining like burnished metal
in the light of the setting sun" - Watson,

soldier, biographer of adventure.
The woman, Miss Hunter, is alone and
will be saved by deduction, then action,
and always the same conclusion - the lives

that were interrupted will go on, lives
that were broken will heal or go under,
like all the other stories an elegy
of the century, the country, the seasons.

The beeches, though hardly mentioned, suggest
the melancholy of the piece, the weather,
mood, the sense of failure in the house -
they're like a background for the color of

the clues: bright blue dress, copper coil of hair,
the bone-white starving of the dog. They
link the past, medieval to the modern,
the leaves still dark in summer, bronze and

butter through hundreds of falls and winters.
They're what's left of a larger thing. Watson
knows this, accepts his friend's insulting him
as one for whom the art is for his sake,

who loves embellishment, the odd detail,
Miss Hunter's face flecked "like a plover's egg,"
who's disappointed such beauty will
be dropped back into private life as just

another aspect of the landscape,
one on whom nothing once was lost - Watson
the memorist Watson the lover,
writing from the heart, aware that his friend

is isolated, suicidal bored,
perfectionist misogynist, genius
of the obvious, a man made of glass.
The beeches turning in the wind are glass.

As for the evil parents now children
of their servants, as for the prisoner daughter
now free to marry, gone to Maritius,
as for Miss Violet Hunter, gentle, gone -

Watson understands the resolution,
how the gray cathedral ruminating
tress display their power within a human
emptiness, letting a few leaves fall.