by Jesse Ball
“Yes, well, pay up.”
They went into another room.
Joan removed her skirt and blouse
and began to recite from memory
Ball’s infamous Study No. 11.
“That’s good,” he said quietly. “That’s perfect.”
PARABLE OF THE WITNESS
I came to in a canebrake, covered in bruises.
“Oh, Maria,” I shouted, “come carry me home!”
And there she was, that old nanny, in her patched
white nightgown, queer book of stories under her arm.
“You should have been an invalid.
What have legs ever done for you that I couldn’t have?”
“Good woman!” I cried. “To candor, and to witnessing!”
We were off.
The hounds broke around us;
the mad dash drew steam. We escaped.
Oh, sorrow, seventh failure of a vaunted family,
I came to in a canebreak all alone,
and sat for hours, intent on the ground.
Never a word did I speak.
No sign there was of anyone
come to hurry me home.
LESTER, BURMA
For J.Z.
Lester and Burma were speaking gaily. He had encountered her in the hallway. Hello, he said, you certainly are a sight for sore eyes. They proceeded to a room adjoining that hall, where a large window opened onto the street. I would like to have you for supper, said Burma, and took off her dress.
I am appalled, said the doorman to the coachman, and the coachman to the gardener, at the way the young lady disports herself. You would think she had been brought up better than that.
Burma was wearing no underwear, and her slender body looked very nice on Lester’s sofa. He said so. Thank you, said Burma. I swim each day, and use fine oils. Of course you do, said Lester.
What will happen, said Lester’s father to Lester’s mother, when that boy gets to the big city? Who will he fall in with? Will he return in ten years’ time and shower us with gifts and remembrance? Or will he, said Lester’s father to Lester’s sickly uncle, die from the plague like all his cousins? Perhaps he will take to the sea and become a privateer, with a letter of marque. I would like that, said the uncle. I would like that also, said Lester’s father.
A cloud of bees overtook the window and screened the room for a minute. Do you think they’ll harm us? asked Lester. Why, no, said Burma, they’re just curious. Aren’t you ever curious? Yes, quite, said Lester, laying his hand upon her thigh.
The beekeeper paused by his hives. A cloud of bees is missing, he said, to no one in particular. I hope the little creatures aren’t up to any mischief. I hope they return by dark so I can tuck them in their little beds and read them fairy tales.
At any rate, said Lester, we might at least have a look in the bedroom and see what’s going on in there. Yes, said Burma, we might at least do that. Just to know for sure. The bedroom door closed softly behind them.
And when the bees returned to their hive, the beekeeper was there with glad tears and an admonishing word. He read them a story from a fine book he’d just bought, in which a boy and girl go to bed together with no other reason than that it is nice to be in bed with a boy and it is nice to be in bed with a girl and it is nice to wake up midway through a life in early evening to the buzzing of bees in an adjoining room.
IN PART
Sit quiet. Lie still.
Let walls stand, and windows break.
Let fires burn low.
Someone’s set chairs in a circle.
Someone’s wandering asleep in a cursed house.
And the joy that has its home
in the belly at the base of the soul,
let it come, let it go. Let trees be bowed
by weight, let streams race, and moss decay.
The trembling of furred limbs will not cease—
no one’s word, however bold,
will banish this cold. And so, sit for no
portraits, stay for no relinquishings.
There was a moment when I was aware
of beings in the air above my head.
Have they left? Or do they loiter there,
attendant, faithful? Sit quiet,
and let the water be, let the false face
arrange itself or not, as marble basins
fill with rain, fill and empty,
empty of their own accord.
UNTITLED
The villain in the red suit
may be told to go, and he will go.
The girl who stares may be made
to turn away, and she may.
Concerns are soluble,
difficulties mended.
But this—that the tragedy of your life
may lie in wait, disguised as your life.
She told me just last night, dystrophy, saying,
“I’m a fool. I’m such a fool.”
In the dream I had last night,
I drove an ambulance. Everyone
praised me, the doctors even,
for my recklessness.
In the midst of it, I left a patient
forgotten in the van.
The dream shifted;
someone had been saying,
“We’re there. We’re almost
there,” in a comforting voice. Then silence.
I woke and realized how far I am,
how very far from the world.
The girl who stares may turn away.
The red-suited man may go, may stay.
Can’t we refuse life’s claims?
Isn’t that what honor tells us?
I saw a speck on the horizon, moving
as if to overtake the sun. And so I say:
“In these unruly days, even prayer may be true.”
Though it has never been true, in these
unruly days, let prayer be true.
SHIP’S MANIFEST
The best of us have retired our skepticism
and bury letter after letter
in the salted ground of a parricide yard.
This is to say, we address the unknown
by shouting after the uncompromised.
FROM A CLEARING
I was set upon by three men.
I felled the first with a word,
the second with a blow.
Beyond them the pale city
Fortune beckoned.
But the third, oh, the third.
His face was hidden.
And in his hands he held
parchment twisted
like the bones of my throat.
MARCH HOUR
I gave the child a coin; it promised not to speak.
Beyond the shallow lake, a leak had come
through the ceiling. Paint ran, and the face
the crowd had worn was now become
wholly new. For instance, the servant girl, staid,
in severe linen, now wore her coyness like a bell.
“Remember, keep quiet!” I said, hurrying off.
If I got to her in time, she might yet remember
some past we might have had, in a nameless Welsh room.
DIAGRAM
Everyone I know is asleep right now.
I’m in a room full of strangers.
The door unlocks to admit another man
I’ve never seen before. It should
be morning soon, though I can’t say
how long I’ve been here. All I know is
we’ve been telling lies, trying
to hurt a man we’ve tied to a chair
in the center of the room. He’ll believe
anything. I tell him he’s part
of an enormous experiment, that his wife
is a scientist and cares only for numbers.
He nods and mumbles, “I suspected
as much.” Someone comes up with the idea
of keeping him in the box where we raise
flies.
“He’ll be uncomfortable,
I’m sure of it.” Heads nod. No one knows
where the man came from, where
we came from, when we’ll be allowed
to go. “I think we need to convince him
of something,” says a man whose face
is entirely covered by old bandages.
“Let’s use the garden hose,” murmurs
someone’s cruel son. “Let’s shave
all the hair off his body.”
In the next room, a child prodigy
is playing piano. We all strain to listen.
The man we’ve tied up taps his foot
in time with the music, hums the tune.
“I’ve always loved Ravel,” he says,
to no one in particular. The old man
who holds the door grimaces, glares.
“That was Schoenberg, not Ravel.”
“Quite right, I was mistaken,” says the man.
“If only you knew,” I said, smiling.
General laughter, then silence.
INSTRUCTIONS
Presently he happened to think
that perhaps what was required of him
would not be precisely
what he had been told.
He thought about that. Yes,
in fact, it was quite likely that
what he was told would have
very little to do with what was intended,
with what was supposed
to occur, and as he was the only one
working toward that end, influencing
these most particular of events, then surely
his instructions must have been
incorrect from the start. The question,
therefore, was twofold: one, to what end
would he have been given
a false set of instructions and, two,
despite all this, what should he do
in order to finish the work as planned?
He took a few steps back
and pondered the problem.
Of course, in a matter of minutes
another shift would start. After all,
the whole thing was the foreman’s fault.
He really oughtn’t do
more than he’d been told to.
In fact, such a deviation might
be fatal, in other circumstances.
Yes, yes, it would be best for him
to leave the work undone,
to walk briskly about the factory floor,
seemingly busy,
until someone else, another employee
in this ridiculous enterprise,
should come to relieve him. Of course,
if no one came, if no one should ever
come again, then he would have
no choice but to finish the work,
in whatever manner seemed possible, hoping
that by chance he would please
someone with the power to grant him
the sort of life he’d wanted as a boy.
IN VEILS
An argosy, arriving at a port of call, may find
the city emptied of all save the sentinel
trees that watch over stretching avenues,
may find, stacked beyond city walls,
the famine-ridden, the dead diseased,
in piles of color.
It’s then we know it’s time to turn our ships around
and trail off into the trial of evening, toward home,
and hope that what we return to we will find
untouched by the pestilence of the other shore.
And our return to the home city! Our reception
at the hands of the populace. The kissing of rings,
the praising of prayer and merchant. Yet somehow
we are blamed for turning back. For it was our word
alone that named the sea impassable. Years pass.
There is now nothing to the east of us. There is
no trade. Ships rot in the harbor. Men once able
fall to dice, find themselves in afternoon, in poverty
beneath the shade of trees. Singers revel
among crowds at the shore pavilion. Watchers
on the cliff heights will see no sails. They sun
themselves on rocks and watch
for cloud banks, vast and unformed. The rain
replies with the curtaining of monotony. Silk dancers
silhouette themselves upon a hundred stages. Courtesans
with smooth shoulders stand alone in gardens. And here,
among the discarded satiates of inconclusion,
we remember the maps we once followed,
and speak of the inchoate godhead that troubled us
in the guise of tide, of fame, of fever.
A TALE
Plangent tones may string
an instrument. How then to string
a soul across the mention of these limbs?
Fables wheel in the pier glass.
The angers of small men infect
even the wells, which center,
cruciform now, on festivals of birth.
Carlos, I have devised a method
by which to build the place
in which I may be happy.
It is difficult, involves altitude
and the early afternoon. A maypole,
a wharf: set against
gray morning in the freight of spring.
What I am told I want
I do not want. This is how
one begins to be happy, by leading
a slow trail through the brazen
chorus of disbelief. The routed
are running still, on an immense hillside
beneath a single yellow cloud.
We are speaking now
at the hill’s edge, where crooked trees
conceal our ugliness.
Do you hear me? We are the routed.
There are no others. Upon our arms,
the scars of proscription. Within our
lifeless eyes, the stamping out of fire.
PROBLEMS OF WARFARE
Lindy tells me another one has washed ashore.
It’s late afternoon, but there’s light yet,
so we walk down to have a look. And here,
she says, is his helmet. And here, his canteen.
He had no gun, or rather, if he had it, it must
have been lost along the way. The soldier
peers up at us, hostile and weak. Lindy laughs
and throws a bit of sand in his face. This makes
the soldier flinch, and one can see he’s trying
to bring his arm up. Of course,
we can’t have that. So Lindy and I, we set
to clubbing the soldier, I with my heavy
stick, she with a rock tied up in cloth. He’s
the third in a week, soon weaker from our treatment
than he was from the sea. “Depart!” I shout, “Fail!”
and strike him heavily in the temple so his face
crumples in a wrong way. I can tell his skull
won’t bear up much more. Snuffling sounds
come unbidden from the cavity
of his nose and mouth. But we shall stay
to hear no words.
Now, Lindy, Lindy dear, let’s head up the hill
and have our supper. The dogs will find their way
and finish this, such as it is, tonight.
THE PRINCIPAL AVENUE
A calliope? A room in the house where I
was born? I was never told. Don’t think
your attendance at some latter-day unveiling
gives the lie to much of anything. A cipher
is second to last in any number of wild lists
made with you in mind. And besides,
I’m starting to recall chords of pure volume,
wide as the principal avenue in some
unquestioned history.
If it was not my name
it was the beginning of my name, a word said
slowly, long ago, having in mind
the whole of this, the entire plain of featureless
days, and how they figure in the play of nerves
across an uncomposed face.
PRAIRIE HERMITAGE
Trappists with beveled faces neglect the lower rooms
of this old house in which they shelter. God keeps
to the rooftops in our town, where men are known
by silhouettes of sun-blanched feature, women
by the motion of fans. Here we are not often called upon
to attend to bells, or to the clarion of visiting voices.
A hundred years ago, when the prairie was the fact
of this place, the Felk brothers, barbers,
were hanged among the limbs of the Great Oak
that presides over New Trafalgar Square.
They were highway robbers, apprehended in their guise
as ordinary men. As such they died.
From this house of worship, the scene opens
with a monk gesturing, calling though not speaking,
as a terrible wind musters in the eastern reaches of the sky.
For weeks a thousand mile storm has grown closer.
It’s clear we shall wake tomorrow to weather as it was
before men knew the causes of the world.
5
Several Replies in a Numbered Column
One does not need to be an aerobatic artist or a trick shooter;
rather, (one has) to have the courage to fly right up to the opponent.
—Manfred von Richthofen,
