March Book

by Jesse Ball

  Der rote Kampfflieger,Berlin, 1917

  1 And if there were arguments in the house where I

  lived, then I was conscious only of argument. I

  sat, listless, on the quiet stairs, mouthing violent

  phrases, swearing myself to vanished causes and

  collapsed moments. I could bear this, because I

  have a stolid face and a grasp of games. I was

  involved in a lie so deep that nothing could be

  proven, not by me or by anyone I knew. All basis

  for deduction was nonexistent. And so I could let

  words stream from my mouth, in a hundred

  misplaced contexts.

  It gets easier, the longer I speak, for you to

  recognize what’s false, what’s mine, what’s

  made. I recognize as I trace the silhouettes of

  famous scabs. There’s something in a nose that

  makes a man cross a picket line. I’ll never

  cross. Scraped-up knuckles, torn trousers,

  scratched boots. It’s only a fight if there’s a

  good chance you’ll lose.

  And so we remain the best of friends, you and

  I, strolling haphazardly across parks, through

  districts. I point to the mountains that loom

  beside this northern city, having sat atop them,

  having sat atop mountains and felt that if the

  sky threatened rain, then it was I who was

  threatening.

  It’s terrible to think I give, never to know how

  it will fare with you. Here’s my hope that you’ll

  have strings to tie up all the trees. Here’s my

  hope that I find you at your best, crouched

  beneath a withered sun, among the last, glad

  to hear any news, even news as poor as this.

  33 What was lovely remained lovely. All the

  vestiges of last week’s rain were present in

  the smallest gesture, a turn of a slim wrist, the

  catcall intonation of voices heard at distance,

  saying things we knew once to be true. They

  are true still, but not for us, so we must search

  these landscapes for new truths, and what was

  once the guide will be a guide no longer. There

  was a scene I saw once in a film—I was passing

  through a room in early evening, eager to be

  on to what was next, but I recall the faces of

  the famous man and woman and how they

  stood. Were they exiled in a foreign place with

  sand for trees, the sun in place of seasons? It

  seemed so, and I took that with me as I left

  the room, took off across the evening city.

  These are clues to how I chose to make my

  life, these faces, not yours, not mine, but how

  I wished they were, how I wished our lives

  were patterned on those lives that were best

  led before. It seems false that we must make

  the same mistakes again and again. I had been

  sorry long years before you took my hands

  and led me through the falling snow to your

  three rooms on the edge of town. I would call

  for that again, no comfort save as satiate to

  an endless pain. Administer yourself to me as

  though I were the boy you met in a dream of

  some possible future. You told me of it once,

  clear eyes and the palest skin. He led you to

  a lake, removed your clothes; he pulled you

  in. What could be softer than those waters?

  Not this, not this, but my heart, but the

  grinding of days, and my heart in your hands.

  67 And though the words of my friendliness are

  not false, they may

  easily seem false, they may easily function falsely

  in many of the worlds in which they appear. I was gaunt and pale, a

  stranger with a hunger for things that were not

  present in my day. And so I spoke of those

  things, and called for them. Though I loved the

  places in which I sheltered, though hospitality

  was the name and signal of my protector, still

  I spoke of what was lacking in my heart, and

  others, seeing it to be lacking about them, and

  in them as well, took their landscapes and their

  homes as false, and went looking elsewhere for

  sincerity, sincerity having then grown to be

  what was lacking, though never would I have

  said, arriving, that what was present within

  each hold was false. I was a lover, of nothing

  living and nothing dead, and what I loved had

  not yet, perhaps would never come to pass. Yet

  it seemed but distanced from me by this wall,

  by that door. Should I win the heart of she, or

  he, should I drive a stake into cold packed

  earth and make a place to live my life … each

  thing became less as soon as it became. It was

  years before a first tentative step could be

  taken toward any comfort. Such years are not

  remembered. Such seriousness is compelling

  to thought but not to memory. Days when we

  can see our lives stretched out in all directions,

  they are themselves ciphers, altitudes on a flat

  map, as lines verge on the obvious, then fall

  again into hazy misapprehension.

  99 To move your hand just so, and conjure for an

  audience that is always being born. A poet can

  afford few tricks, for he is easily seen through.

  Whole generations may be warned against

  him, and still he beguiles those more willing,

  those who see because they care to, because it

  is their freedom to accept what others discard,

  to populate dead roads with the living who

  wander, one question on their lips. And have

  you been fooled? And will you be fooled

  again? I laid a trail in the daybreak woods with

  the carcasses of tiny animals, each of whom

  loved me well. And I was sad to do this, but

  there was grayness to the light, and the killing

  seemed correct. What if the trail ends in

  underbrush, no answer but the crushing

  weight of hot air in the lungs? Where would

  you go next? Where else would you go

  looking for the inspiration that’s driven each

  night through your skull with a hammer the

  size of your life? And there are questions

  leading on to questions…. Who could lift

  such a hammer, who would and why? There

  are reasons only in so much as we have need

  of them, and surely you can see, we have no

  need to know the origin of things. If I were a

  madman, scratching statements in the sides of

  trees with rusty clippers found beneath my

  bed, why, I would write a hundred things I had

  no business knowing, and my business in

  knowing them would be the life of madness.

  What we drove home that night, what we

  drove before us with the force of our

  intentions, was a spirit that was living alone in

  the hills but that now lives off the heat of your

  breath, the factory of your limbs. I had a mind

  to tell you, when we played the cloud game and

  lay for hours inventing—well, I could not see

  the clouds for anything but clouds. Yet I could

  see your mind, and your thoughts, and I could

  tell them to you before you ever knew that
r />   they were yours. How we were in love that

  day, and thinking there was nothing for it but

  to name a place to which we might escape.

  Well, we have escaped. What names will we

  give ourselves now? We may build a fire that

  is so large that there is no standing about it, but

  only standing in it, and we will watch it take

  us, and we will watch it take all that we know,

  and we will call this fire the happiest time of

  our life, and it will be our life, but we will not

  be living it. We will have lived it. We will look

  back upon the living of it. The things we

  cannot anticipate are so pale in memory. I was

  struck by a car, hurled through the air, and I

  do not remember. I was a child then, living

  beside a road. Many years have passed.

  156 And who can weather the contingencies of

  belief, emerging to say, I know why I believe

  what I believe? There are few such, and I am

  certain that they do not speak, or if they do, they

  do not speak to me. It is not for them I write

  these lines, not for them I make an empty place

  at table. And it is not for you, though you may

  sit there at table, though you may read all I write

  and say, may know what I know, have what I

  have. Say this to yourself, there have been

  casualties in this life, who will not see what I

  have done, who are gone off now to compose

  the world that I love, to make of themselves the

  very wind that comes of an afternoon when

  everything living resounds, and everything

  dead sings in empty echo. Say this and know

  that my belief is true, without knowing why;

  join me in the passing of columns along an

  empty grass run road, and act if you can, for

  properly, there is no audience to be a part of, and

  so you are no part of it. Forced to the stage,

  make no complaint about the hour, about your

  lack of preparation, your untrained tongue. For

  the tongue is trained to itself, and taut with force

  of mind, and what you have to tell can truly be

  lost and never heard again.

  We are a species, a splash in the waters of a

  land-bound lake, and we may speak in turn, as

  long as we may, and when we are finished

  there will be no one to speak, or hear, or write,

  or dream. It is of consequence to note the

  passing moments, the manners of our days.

  Allegiances and hands are held in the

  chambered heart, and it is filling itself,

  shuddering great arcs of light, of blood, of

  liquid so heavy with animate that it makes us

  ourselves to move, and moves us to thought.

  “To thought? Toward what?” mumbles the

  chorus, in vague dissent. A row of trapeze

  artists in an empty theater, who rock slowly on

  a central beam, they disagree. It is their slow

  rocking that troubles me most, and the

  awkward angles their knees assume, their

  elbows take: such figures are proof of

  something. It is not given yet to know of what.

  201 But do not fail me—for even now I hear my

  name being called. I turn, arm still stretched

  by the small demands of bandages, practically

  wrapped, as at first, with a torn dress. We’ve

  been through this. No one’s calling. I’m asleep

  on a bench, and it is forbidden to be outdoors

  between the hours of 8 and 9. It is forbidden

  to be curious about the hours of 8 and 9. It is

  forbidden to mention them.

  All of these tricks I employ may be wasted. It’s

  easy to see oneself under one’s own spell. But I’m

  sure you duck better than I. I’m sure you’ve seen

  me coming, the length of the street. (Determined,

  with wild hair, narrowed eyes.) My eyes

  are always narrowed. It is the narrowing of

  myth, and helps me to make out some hoped-

  for importance in the hunching of men, in the

  Saracen mathematics of which we claim control.

  219 But mastery, as we know, is the act of the

  desperate. One doesn’t need it if one has

  flowers, a pinafore, a carved toy, a jackknife

  and trees to hand.

  I’ve spent decades beneath low ceilings just to

  learn vowels, sounds that may be used to warn.

  Much that I needed has passed away, and with

  it the need. Being human means continue.

  Quiet ghosts kneel behind doors wherein the

  pledges they once held are daily broken. And

  I? I have been given cause and speak. Such a

  curious gift—it hurries the passage of time,

  and makes consequent the factories of roads,

  foundries in which the weight of our footsteps

  was once predicted.

  234 You were with me in those years before the

  century turned. Season after season of

  indolence, the play of voices against boughs of

  leaves. The world was screened by a world

  made of cloth, painted with the faces of the

  people I knew. It could be parted with a hand,

  with a gesture, but this was a thing little

  known. And so we grew fond, and made no

  gestures, and saw in this cloth world fortnights

  expire and stretch uselessly on the garden

  steps. And when the party had passed down

  those long steps from the solarium, we two

  were left behind, peering down over the west

  wall into the kennels built below. There was

  disorder in the air. The dogs were passing back

  and forth at the base of the wall, scrambling on

  each other’s shoulders and scraping at the

  stone. I said, half to myself: There will be an

  end to this, that we have always known. A

  messenger came at dusk, and what we know,

  the dogs know. They point like a needle and

  show us the weather that rises even now, in the

  deep places beyond the hills. This gathering of

  things beyond sight—it is my future.

  My hands shook then, as they always have, as

  they still do, and my clothes were simple, but

  there was no death in me. What could I have

  said to preserve that season? What vowels

  could have moved us to a new delight? If I

  sometimes dream of a life without poetry, then

  it is a false dream. I am lucky to wake in this

  body, lucky to wake in this time. Lucky to

  wake with you beside me, listening still.

  267 On film the mummer’s dance seems lethal.

  Against the sky planes hardly move. Context

  both obscures and abuts meaning. Difficulty

  pinions hope. Hope is meaning. I woke every

  day for a week with an image in my head: a

  ring of trees, a picnic, a sundress. I’ve bought

  the wine, I’ve listed the perishables. The cloth

  is folded on a side table. Spring reflects itself

  in shop windows, in the warmth of stoops.

  Like kissing, it seldom is what it is. Like

  prayer, it has an object. Like instinct, it’s a

  thing of skin. Each spring I say to myself: The

  winter is kindness, the spring is grief. We are

  loveliest when
grieving, buoyant in the salt of

  a water that stings at wounds, that does its best

  to drown us in the foreignness of a substance

  that once was familiar. Equally, we choose to

  keep it present. We leave the city and take a

  room in an empty town, just to walk the beach

  at dusk. Under a seat in the old opera house,

  we may find, if luck is with us, a tiny golden

  ball. Though it is not the sun, it is similar, and

  dangerous in the same way.

  290 If there were seven, then I was the eighth, not

  wholly present, disputed, unarrived. Doors

  were barred. Windows were locked. And the

  girl who loved me loved the space beside her

  in the bed, though it went unfilled, night after

  night. When I went to claim it, it was there

  still, and fit me cleanly, taut to my every

  muscle. It was my place and bent when I bent,

  sang when I sang. What makes the fire run

  from house to house? In moments half the city

  is ablaze, and flocks have risen to the sky.

  There is room yet for you in comprehension

  of fire, of wind, room yet for you in the

  watching. Those who counted may not have

  thought of you. Yes, they have left you out,

  they have overlooked you. They do not know

  this better way with numbers that says: I am

  nine, though there are ten present, though I am

  not present; that says; I am the origin of

  numbers, and of numbering, and mine is the

  final count. Never believe admission can be

  denied. Admit what you will, letting gentle

  breezes through the open door. The hat shop

  is madness. Certain birds love raw meat. In the

  dawn, the report of a poacher’s gun travels far.

  If I, out taking the air, heard such a sound, I’d

  never tell. We who carry broken watches as if

  they were sound—we have a contract kept in

  a hidden place. We will keep it there awhile.

  319 What does it mean to be adored? All of the

  table settings have gone astray, and yet we are

  striving to prepare ourselves for supper. The

  door to the street is open, and though it is

  summer, I am forced to ask myself, “What is

  summer, what is a thing for which I have

  waited so long?” There is no food in the

  pantry, just empty shelves. The flicker of

  motion in the street—someone is going home.

  But you are less able than they. You are at

  home. And the terror of the minute hand, the

  long failure of hours, the discrepancy of