by Jesse Ball
Tired of such rooms, such doors, I believe
I am sick of human thresholds. Out in the yawning fields
the only danger is the horizon. How it shifts and dances,
how it trails after like a dog with a secret.
If strange animals mourn countries we cannot see,
then listen when they mutter.
Any hint might be a help to we who have no help.
CARES
In winter, we take a cottage on the long bay.
The north wind breaks shutters and moves
through the riddled hulks of Victorian gravesites,
where the still light etches the marrow
of our limbs in marriage. By this strait, the moon
is measurably close. It prefers such places, drifts of water,
old windows, rooms in which the wicked sleep.
Anna, I say, are the terms right? For we
will have many a cold hour in these syllables.
This north land keeps quiet, beneath
truths the sun forgot during many passages,
many erring lives of emperors. We shall learn
the hazards, the wagers, the systems of martingale,
all hours in the rigid March sky. For we are young
and newly come from confidences of the south.
We are young, and we—my bride, myself—
have decided not to know anyone, not to know
any people anymore. For there are circles
within circles, and just as I stitch another
month into a gravid year, Anna has poured
what we care for into a bowl. She will stir it,
standing by the open door in the thinnest of dresses,
a dress so thin I needn’t touch her to know
that of all the things in the world, this is the one
thing we were told we could never have.
A SPEECH
The failure of modernity, said the man in the black coat, is the failure of the machine to act morally. It never intended to. But we were deceived by its sober efficiency. We believed it would do both more and less than it ought to have done. Instead it has done less and more, and brought us to many horrible passes. I suppose we would have reached these awful heights ourselves in time. And yet we have come early, and the only books we know are the ones that we ourselves wrote. They will be no help to us, just as we ourselves can be no help to each other. If someone were to forgive me for the things I did in my youth, even that would be an affront. Those crimes are the only evidence that I have lived.
REMARKS ON THE PLAUSIBLE
I smile in greeting at a well-dressed man.
Almost immediately, he’s curled in a ball
behind a rusted metal fence.
“Is that you?” I inquire. No answer.
This year’s persimmon crop was poisonous.
We who know carry persimmons in our
vest pockets, and give them to mothers we dislike.
“For the children,” I say. Again, the smile.
As if it wasn’t enough to live in this fanciful
world, now we must touch the absurd
the way one shoves at a filthy stray,
the sort of dog that keeps tailors in business.
But oh, we are terribly kind to each other,
we are the kindest in a long line of kind hearts,
holding a door, an elevator, a place in line.
The truth is, I’m having an enormous party—
it will be a huge success. And now, if you don’t mind,
I’d rather you left. All expectations to the contrary,
it seems you were not the fellow named
in this most exquisite letter of introduction.
NAMING
You are a fool, telling me the clouds are mute,
as if I hadn’t heard them
talking during broad days.
They are name-givers, like the sea, their father,
saying each name once.
The wind will not forgive for this.
So it heaves them in great swells,
farther from what they know.
Left here wondering,
rolling vowels in our mouths,
what names have we been given?
Tongueless names that beckon,
even as they fade.
A DIGRESSION
“Elaborations on archidiaconal themes were much sought after
in the year 900. Then commenced a bloody decade,
during which all the most famous artists and musicians
were put to death. In their wake we have seen the rise
of the Contrasouciants, the fall of the Immaterialists,
and the waxing and waning of the truer dialect
of anti-Aestheticism. However, that’s not what we’re
here for, that’s not what we care for, is it?” asked the professor
in a knowing voice. “These midnight sessions, dangerously
arrived at, perilous in dress, tempting to the bleakest
among us: we do not come here to talk of history
or categorization. The family of man has long written
on the parchment of his own skin: ‘The additions
made to life by progress and by the growths
and misgrowths of knowledge are a thorough and
insubordinable deception.’ This is to say—what may be
accomplished in a single life is the matter at hand,
and the imponderable, inexpressible sentiment and
accretion of 27,000 images and the days in which they
fall—no progress can surpass what a single individual,
bent upon his own change, may do if left alone.
Thus history, the history of ages, is not the true history.
True history is simply the arc and span of your own life.”
Here the professor rolled up the enormous map he’d been
referring to, and put it in a special sealed tube.
Everyone watched this operation with great interest.
“This map,” the professor said, “was brought by Alexander
into the cribs and complications of many a Persian
palace. In such a palace, near long-ruined Persepolis,
Alderson Oren, the famed archaeologist, came upon it.
In my inadvisable youth, he was my sometime mentor
and left me the map when he died.” One of the girls rose
and went to the window. “The rain’s stopped,” she said.
The others came over. Someone opened the window.
One could see in the distance, the unreal bulb of a water tower
rising out of the green-gray hills. Fog stood
in a narrow line where the river ran. From the house,
and the hill on which it rested, the farther bank
was cloaked, but the nearer was just barely visible.
“What’s that?” someone asked. “What’s that by the shore?”
The professor came, with field glasses, but could give no definite answer.
“It seems,” he said, handing the binoculars to another,
“to be a man carrying a man upon his shoulder.”
“Yes, yes,” the student concurred, peering intently into the dark.
“There must have been an accident on the river.”
THE MARCH BOOK
Before dawn a light came
as if to be dawn. A man had gone
out a door, into a field. And how
he had used to go
out of a day, dog at his side.
And how he had used to fetch
crows down from blackened trees
with a good gun
and the comfort of shells.
He looked to the yards, the fields
flat with March.
He looked to the disheveled
shelf of the farmhouse roof.
And of it all, how the light
maintains upon th
e surface
of these things.
In a turning bore, the March Book
numbered its pages and metaphor
took no part in its sweet decisions.
The light that had grown, crept back.
The man became abstract,
absent from the field.
We will wake once, in the night;
we will recall much that must
have come before, though nothing
came before. As a dream
where long history
is written in a moment—we will rise
and retire, surrounding, surrounded,
seen in a glass from far off,
seen through a glass. In a glass
we have stood to be seen, gone
in the quiet
to places we could not understand.
And how we will wait there.
How we will wait
without sound, without sight.
Blank is the sun. Blank, all light.
2
ANNA’S SONG
Suddenly it isn’t the day we thought it was.
Not the day, nor the hour, nor the season.
I am dressed in gingham, you in close-knit flannel.
There are no appointments to keep. And so I leave
My dress at the edge of this day, beside your coat and trousers,
And I say, John James,
We are circling and circling—
Come stand with me on this shadowed incline.
The grass continues, so too the trees,
So too the stream and its talk of distance.
We will not be overseen. Come lie here prone
Where my loose hands cup your name,
Where the soil is dark and difficult and cold.
I’ll tell you what’s to come.
THE GENERAL
Third night on the frontier:
watch fires burn as if to contain
the coming massacre. Far to the west,
by the river Ko, the sun is setting:
whose feet pace the orchard there?
Strewn like gobbets of flesh, the barbarous
flash steel: they have come to know
these plains. Even I am not certain.
Old campaigns stretch endlessly
before this old campaigner.
In autumn, from the orchard wall,
the sea is visible, unceasing.
And so I gathered men and came
here where the lines must hold.
Who among us can name his home,
can speak without fear and stand
resolute outside the haze of his own life
when the mountains come,
disguised as horsemen, sending
their weight in waves before them
shuddering over the cold ground?
AN ETCHING
Huntsmen prowl the edges of the King’s woods.
One comes upon evidence of a poacher.
He calls to the next, the nearest, who turns,
gun in the crook of his arm, bright eyes narrowing.
The dogs are summoned, the horses brought.
“Winslow will catch him for sure,” the men say.
“Winslow has taken an oath. Every poacher
must be hanged.” The King’s justice is a wild thing,
bold and curious: it sinks its teeth in ankles,
climbs into laps. It buries its nose in drink
and, overcome, makes declarations in public
that others will regret. The hounds are loosed,
the tracks followed to their terminus:
the foot of a tree. Winslow, Lord Winslow,
arrives with the foresters, and a length of rope.
“You will come down,” he says, “but not,
I think, all the way.” The poacher’s reply
is lost to history. One can’t help
but admire this crossing of lines,
this creation and guarding of lines that may be crossed
at a certain cost. One pictures the poacher’s wife
watching through a window, early morning,
as her young husband passes over the yard and out
into the trees. As his hand grazes a branch,
pushes aside the arm of a bush, he’s thinking
of necessities, possibilities, of the things
that he might do that day. Perhaps his passing
disturbs the forest. She’d have seen the birds rise,
and know he’d gone that way, away from the town
and toward the King’s wood.
RULES
Never repeat what someone else has said,
not even in jest. Never linger in foyers,
or hang coats on chairs. Don’t drink
anyone’s health if the weather’s bad.
Neither answer doors on the hour.
When a tree is hit by lightning, have it
made into a chair. When a man drowns
in a shattered boat, fashion the boat
into a bed. Make pillows with the down
of stolen geese. Pair your child with a swan,
and have other animals see openly
this intimate act of favoritism.
Communicate at first with letters,
though later, perhaps only in person.
Refuse to speak with distant relatives,
for they will give you nothing but mass cards
and notices of aberrant sensibility. Build
rooms in terms of the hours of day
and light and give short shrift
to well-borne-out opposing thought
on this and other crucial matters. Bide
time in alcoves, prefer hooded clothes.
Remember one building completely
and use it for memory’s sake. For memory’s sake,
drive slowly along the avenue of my name, and call
at every number, saying, Jesse,
there are fifteen rules for every day, and you, you fool,
you’ve broken every one, saying, Jesse,
we’ve come to take you,
we’ve come at last to take you where you need to go.
VOICE
In the failed township, maypoles riddle the coming of spring.
Small crowds resolve themselves, disperse.
I look on, thinking falsely,
thinking: I was once one of you.
THIS ALSO
I am walking in what appears a desert. On second thought,
it is the canal of the hopeless. I’m sure I don’t belong here,
but I cut quite a figure, with my close-fitting suit,
my weighted cane, my powdered forehead.
Yes, it is a lovely day in summer. Breezes ruffle the fur
of the passing herd. As one, it makes happy stamping sounds.
In turn this pleases me, and I make a happy stamping sound.
Am I observed? Do I displease the Queen by acting so?
Yes, I know, these are the last days of an age, of a pitied era.
I’ll die any day now. That’s why they sent me, for a cure,
here where everyone is much smarter than everyone else,
and so no one has any peace. Driving now, with the rain,
in a cast-iron train car, I observe that someone has altered the scenery.
No longer can we look out on the world we hope for.
Comprehension comes, therefore tears. Such small mistakes
we make. It’s cruel to mention them at all.
MEASURES
I took an hour in the measured water.
I left my clothing on the bank and dove
and drew my body after me.
Cautious with anger,
I took an hour
in the river water and went
six ways if I went one. The sun was
boiling on the water’s surface,
and the divers sat in quiet groups
on the river floor. Thei
r flat eyes
betrayed them, betrayed me to them,
and I could not sit long for knowing
that if I went anywhere, it was
in fear of love, and if I did a thing
that was good, if I did a great thing,
it would be in the service, in the fear of love.
And all the drowning lungs,
flopping like fish on a dock:
before the curtain of this theatre
fails beneath disgust and omen
I will find out for myself
are there any
deserving of life’s reward.
AT A CROSSING
If I traveled across the unconcerned waves
and found that old path through the wood
where often prophets stood, I’d be assured
of little.
And so I am suspicious of that old path.
Therefore tell me not: you will meet
a dark-haired girl who cannot speak.
Tell me not: you will wander for days
in a stupor and arrive at a friend’s threshold
at the moment of death
to watch a soul rise
along the thousandth ladder, the prime
upon which all is shuttling and weaving,
borne and bearing, as pathed as a garden,
as trafficked as a river.
FOR I have seen this friend’s
soul take a quiet turning
in the space of an afternoon
and climb a distant ever-empty stair
where the apple trees are brushing
