by Jesse Ball
against the glass of windows
and speaking, and treating,
in the tongues of the falling.
AT DUSK
I went out, face covered, through a half-closed
door.
I went to where the boats are kept, to where
my boat is kept.
I set a hooded lantern on the rowboat’s
floor,
cut strips from a blanket, to wrap
the oars.
I pushed the boat over rock, till it lay half
in water.
Two figures came, the one before
the other.
They moved down across the broken wharf,
across shore’s
folded earth to where I stood,
the boatman.
I pushed the boat while two sat
on the cross plank.
I rowed the boat and the larger held
the smaller
by the throat, as we passed tiny islands,
winking in half-light.
To the deepest water, he said. It was
a long blanket,
and we both watched it sink. I rowed.
I rowed.
I pulled the boat back up across the rocks.
I watched
the larger pick his way as streams of night birds
came to docks.
POVERTY STUDY
3 of the 7 children, the smallest ones, of course, were starving. This meant
that the larger ones would become larger still, while the smaller would,
if anything, become smaller. Not a good situation, said Grintha,
who was listening through a keyhole. She suggests we ought to put heavy
weights on the ankles of the larger children, to give the weaker ones
a chance. Of course, I said, that might work, but that might make
them stronger. Then even we, the ones in charge, might be troubled
to make them do our will.
PASSAGE
Instruct me please so long and so well
that there will be no trouble
upon this new plain. I became
foolish with hope and crowds;
I told lies, gathered brittle ornaments.
All around, the affectionate have begun this life’s work.
Their vague features and inconstant touch
are posed like questions over cabinets and keyholes
in the country of my birth. Instruct me,
if you will, for I have come upon
an easing of the way; a correspondence
has begun, as I fall in and out of sleep. I feel it:
soon I will make a language
from the grace, from the disgrace I covet,
with its sickly nature, that coughs like a child
when I throw open a window to the winter street.
ST. STEPHEN’S DAY
At the well, the invalids were cowering
under parasols, as in the distance came
the coughing of hounds.
Oh, you wrens who tremble!
intent upon nothing, useless,
flitting from weakness past grace!
Mumble on in sequestered shade.
The sun comes down; so too I’ll come
around, thick smock below a scowl.
Though two get away, I’ll sing and stuff eight
down the well, where new ink is made.
SECRET HISTORY OF JACQUES RENNARD
In the famous painting
of Giordello at the opera,
a creature is clear
behind the false forest,
just by where the costumes
would be kept. The thing
has a tail, ears like a rabbit,
and the sinuous hands of a man.
Of course, we can’t know that
from the painting, which,
some say thankfully,
was lost in a flood in 1740
when Constantinople
was, for a week,
at the bottom of a lake.
The journal of the great
French master, Jacques Rennard,
has told us most
of what we know about this,
his most renowned painting.
The creature was his,
and appeared whenever he was
sketching. Most disturbing
is the rosary it seems to clutch
reflexively, in Rennard’s
recollection. “It was a very
Christian beast,” he wrote,
“and must be forgiven its habit
of strangling. You must understand,”
he continues, “there is a certain
grace to the strangler
that any painter must admire.”
Is it coincidence that Giordello
was found, neck broken,
at his feasting table, at midnight,
the night of what Carlos Intier would call
“The Immortal Performance”?
In the last month of his life,
Rennard’s maudlin fits
made his journal nigh unendurable.
One who goes that way
with fortitude will observe
on page 896, his seeming confession:
“An artist cannot live beyond
his zenith. Neither should he.
Neither ought he be allowed to.”
Of course, the painting was not
complete the night of the opera,
but had only been sketched
in a long brown book Rennard
was known to carry at his waist.
“At the hour of his death,”
Beauvoir, friend to the painter,
relates, “Jacques was quite
unnerving. He slept fitfully,
occasionally sitting up straight in bed
and shouting, at impossible volume,
‘I have seen this!
I have seen this to be true!’”
It seems thus that it was
generally understood
by others of that era:
either Rennard saw the creature
or was the creature himself.
As no likeness survives,
we cannot compare the two.
It seems likely he acquired the monster,
if monster there was,
during a summer stay in the tropics
when he was only a child.
HOUSE OF THE OLD DOCTOR
What is prefigured by the symbol need not be stated
baldly. The weather was bad, was dry today.
At the hospital terrible things happened
continuously. Meanwhile, the sound of gravel
in the driveway. My visitor, long overdue, arrives
with a single flower pressed in a book of riddles.
We sit on the back steps and stare wordlessly
at the ocean beside which we once lived,
which will never leave our sight. We do not stare
at the ocean. We are far from such an ocean.
It is the forest we see, shadows and the mountain
upon which the forest turns. So many animals
made wild by the dry ground. They approach the house
in darkness, and set their muzzles against the glass.
I do not think they want the things I want. By the window,
I am mouthing names: well water, carvings, apple trees.
We are near a truth, and daren’t speak.
3
Manuman Notebook
1
In a braid, like weeks and days,
wedded by list, married by kind—
the limned impressions, the mind.
Differ from me, things that I do.
Be in severance, severance’s pay;
watch the gated manor
where my old wants are met.
Beyond these thoughts of place,
in clean space
we are seen and met.
2
The last hours of exhausted life—
we have returned to within sight of the place
where once we were born.
Captivated by folly, entranced by indifference,
what little reason we are given to smile—
is it not always enough?
At a terrible pass, the compromised
are singing “Fare Thee Well,”
invisible, like sheets of rain.
If we agree to the premise,
then mustn’t we abey, mustn’t we
slip sidelong to a tented place?
And if watching doesn’t please us,
we must whisper a reminder of the truth—
acting, even action never frees us.
3
As if we knew, upon arrival,
that all the indulgences
were given out in decades
ended long before our births,
we made camp upon a hillside
and sat to watch the fires
take the town.
I believe you were
the prettiest of your kind,
and I never begrudged you
your ribbon, nor your fanciful air.
But we are through with
accomplishment, and gone
past all indemnity.
Our chaplain has laid out
a blanket with six knives.
He is impatient to see
how well we have shed
the costumed acts
of our second nature
4
Like cloth we rose
in momentary wind
and she was small
where small things begin.
5
A GAME OF HIDING
The parson hid in the pantry
as the children searched the other rooms
and like sardines they came
to him in the low room
one by one, a tightening grip
like a lamp or a saw blade,
like a parade ground
in the contractions of the mind.
Soon there was but one left,
the youngest child,
whose footsteps came and went
through the several rooms
in a quiet as difficult as proscription
in a weakness as binding.
6
A witness is a frail thing:
unfailing, unkempt, effete.
A broom sweeps through
these days of our inconsistence,
marking what?
a misplaced hammer?
a purse full of coins?
the shadow of the chair in which you sit?
Not without reason are our long musters
ranked among the terrible, the infinite
species of learning and forgetting.
For the sound a mouth makes
is twofold—
bent in arriving, stooped in the hall
in a corridor of doorways, each sound
is the servant not of the will alone,
not of will, but of the quieted
intents we have forgotten, that left us
at the moment of waking,
making their way, in cold determination,
along the brittle roads of our sharpest sight.
7
Don’t think the consensus is arrived at easily,
for there are many golden arms
flashing beneath the sun,
many painted carts pulling by
in the thin light of a winter afternoon.
Don’t calm yourself with the powder of ashes
or turn too often to an empty room,
for the sky is itself a wheel
like the graven mind, and the ground
is taut as fabric across two hands.
Which faded print will you choose,
knowing the names of days
in which it will be this across your back,
thinner than a match, this
that keeps you separate
and far from recognition
in the arms and homes of those
who without thought
would do you gravest harm?
8
With an intake of breath, the escape begins.
The frantic business of survival
indentures itself to the night.
With a glad shout we are off
into the space beyond the wall.
Who knew the cannon crash of assonance
would send our lives reeling so?
I was deceived and took
a smarter man’s thoughts for my own.
But is it not always so?
A trading of selves,
a rush of blood,
a yellow cap left on the grass?
I swore our houses would be set
in a row on this darkest path,
and told you we would live
without a doubt, in grace.
Here, beyond the sentence of cordoning
or calumny, the long river motions.
We must obey.
Trees stand at the banks
lifting their pale hands.
AND what if the wind
were not a force, but a flag—
broad flag of a world
we may never see?
4
DESCRIPTION
1
In the yellow vault of antiquity, beneath
the cast hollow of pleasant hours
where we have hoped to live our lives,
a scribe is copying out the March Book.
He makes long strokes across
thin paper. He flares the intervals
of swelling words and seizes pauses
in narrow paragraphs, constricting space
with the calipers of lettered ink.
He says each word out loud
and remembers,
in sickness at the filthy
market edge, where atavistic
fragments could be bartered
and bought, his first time
reading the March Book, seeing
his name in the fragile, torn pages
and knowing he would spend
six decades copying the text.
All his daughters have left him.
One by one, they stood
at the door and called to their father.
He would not cease his work.
2
Under this sun, the March Book
spreads like another sail
raised to an ungoverned height.
It’s been ages, I tell you,
beneath the ground,
where withered geography
serves for reason. The scribe
stands, pushes his chair in.
The table is empty. His mind
is flat with the weight
of process and repetition.
In a rainstorm, the March Book
crossed the sea,
though he could not follow.
Through the doorway of his hut
the land curls and ends
in water—he is thinking
and thinking still. The book
arrives on the farthest shore,
where tiny birds, too small to see,
constitute the wind,
spreading the word
of what’s been done.
FURTHER USAGES
Though we knew that the earth was flat, yet also we knew
that our captain was in commerce with the movements
of the evening sky, and could tell all manner of fortunes
and dreams and direction, that his metal tools, carefully kept,
his astrolabe, his sextant, mustered in the closeness of his cabin,
would bring us once again to dry and solid ground.
Therefore there remained only the difficulty of dead time
and the dread of waves that is in the heart of even the gre
atest sailor.
On we went, on and on through starvation and the telltale lands
where misery is the keeper of joy, and not, as it is with us,
the other way around. At the edge of an arabesque, a cloud pit,
a fog, the ship stopped. There was no more ocean, nothing further.
Our captain stood beneath this display, and we could see,
like us, he was confounded. To have come all this way,
to have arrived at the very doors of a paradise beyond
all hope of recollection, and to find that simply, that truly,
our failing is that our minds are not big enough to trap
the seething pattern of the actual, that there is no sense
simple enough for these, our pathetic uses of comprehension.
FOR ONCE THE LIBERTINES DO WHAT’S BEST FOR THEMSELVES
He took the
apple and tore it in half.
She took part,
and fed it to a stray.
He gave the rest
to a swallow,
over a period of days.
These two confessed,
when they were able to
speak about the matter:
they would rather
have been left alone.
INTERLUDE: A WAGER
He took a tiny bell out of his pocket
and shook it three times.
Doors began to open out of trees, walls, beds, bottles.
The premises were soon crowded.
“I didn’t know they lived here,” Joan said meekly.
“I thought they all died in the London fire.”
