by Jesse Ball
comes the vaguest song, but it is, I think,
known to you, muttered in your aging heart.
For if we all do not know a thing,
then no one can know it. It is not given us
to have that which is not instinctively
present in the world. On the softest grass
imaginable, I lay my head. It is quiet
and the path has been lost.
The path, I say, has been lost.
It is lovely to say things in a human voice
and hear in your mind or in the air,
and hear in the forest a human reply.
Grimoir or the hole beside the millstream
Little Teag was sleeping on a bed of moss. Just then up crept a satyr, the cruelest, most straying, canceling satyr of them all. He stripped poor Teag down to the bone with his sharp teeth and left the little skeleton for someone else to find. Such a delicate skeleton. I came upon it while walking. I pointed to it with my hand, and went to it with my feet. John Spence, who was along, did not come closer. He said it wasn’t a proper burial. I said we should give it one. And so we had my little sister out with us next day dressed up in ribbons and lace, and I wore my high collar and Spence had a good cap. We wrapped the little fellow in a clean sheet of linen and brought him down to a hole we’d dug by the millstream. I said a few words then, like a deacon, I said, “IF it was a satyr that did this, or a lamb, neither will I worship. Braver than the soil is the flesh that lends it breadth.” And through the woods then the satyr came, galloping on its hind legs. We hid in the grave ’til it had gone, and only then emerged to lay upon the ground in the groggy afternoon, listening to the brook. Before we left I filled the hole, spreading the earth flat enough for any boy to walk upon. John Spence marked it with a stone, in case we should ever again need a hiding place in that part of the forest.
Casuist’s Aside
And being wrong about the colors light takes in the eyes of my animals,
I wonder now what many failures
of difference I have made,
trying to map the catchments of other lives
with brown scenes from this single self.
Missive in an Icelandic Room
RITA KEPT LAZARUS IN A CHINESE BOX & FED HIM PEPPERMINTS UNTIL HE NO LONGER KNEW WHO OR WHAT HE WAS. THEN SHE GAVE HIM A PAPER CROWN AND A JAR WITH A TADPOLE AND BADE HIM SIT BESIDE HER.
And If They Should Tell You
That I have debauched the youth of this town. That further, I,
a youth of this town, have been
debauched, have helped in the debauching of others. Have helped
myself in and to the debauching
of the others, well. . I would not be overly troubled at the news.
For you see, I have a new
project in mind. Imagine a house, a shack rather, in some flyspeck
town. Within the house, a trap door.
And beneath the door, an entire realm of wickedness!
He who first spoke of it
has promised we will meet there, and I must confess, I look now
often at the map he left,
look often upon those impressions his thin and supple fingers
made in oily remark.
Missive in an Icelandic Room 2
Harangued
by the ring
master, the
paper circus
fell to
muttering.
Johan wrung
his hand
and stroked
the elephant’s
thick skin.
“How will
we fathom
the mind of
the audience,
if we cannot
name it truly
our oldest
and deepest
foe?”
The First Mime
A young king is unhappy. He takes
to going out with a false beard,
sackcloth robes, a long knife, a leather bag.
He soon becomes known about town in this capacity,
and liked. He takes a mistress. He spends time
in common taverns, in playhouses.
No one knows his secret, save a palace guard
his own age, who lets him out of the castle each night.
One night the disguised king
returns to the castle, only to find the guard,
now also disguised, ruling from his throne.
Before the King can speak, the new King orders him seized
by palace guards who cut out his tongue
and cart him away to a nearby asylum.
He is heard from no more.
The new King despises his children
and has them strangled. On the other hand,
he takes great pleasure in his association with the Queen,
who has guessed nothing.
One day it is announced before the court
that a madman is at the gates, claiming to be the King.
The King grants him an audience, at which time
the madman tells the court the story
that you have just been told, this time
through a series of hand gestures. Naturally,
no one is convinced. The King, however,
takes pity on the man, and allows him
to take up service as his jester, in which capacity,
I may happily relate, the man excels.
Word of the mute jester spreads,
and soon the court of this King is spoken of
throughout many lands
as a place of enlightenment and culture.
Version
She wanted desperately to know
what was in the green box.
A green box on a coarse black cloth
in a burnished-gold room.
She leaned in close,
her soft hair falling across
both our faces.
If only, she breathed,
I could dream my way
into that citadel
and wake, the green box
clutched in my hands.
Antonym of My Name
It was a dull play about a boy whose pet calf was being slaughtered.
Apparently no one could stop this thing from happening.
The butcher was played by a florid man with a huge beard.
Somehow having a beard made him likely to kill a calf.
I felt sorry for the calf, which was an actual calf,
and must have been on sedatives. It let everyone drag it around
on a little tether of worn rope. I wanted to write a review
for a major newspaper saying, “the little sedated calf
stole the show in Sunday’s performance of Johan’s Gift.”
Instead, two hours into the performance, the boy has his feeble
arms wrapped around the calf which isn’t breathing.
Someone is singing a lullaby, trying to make him fall asleep
so they can take the animal to the block. The butcher
has a surprisingly sweet voice. Nine tawdry little urchins
dressed in sparkly tutus do a dance around the boy. This is his dream
beginning. Each boy has a sedated calf in his arms.
The butcher sneaks in the window and is reaching for the calf
when the dream-urchins draw swords and stab him to death.
They were just pretending to be dream-urchins. HA!
Missive in an Icelandic Room 3
Clever remarks were no good,
Elizabeth realized. A sparrow was a sparrow,
and would never be a proper friend,
nor make up for the legions
of her childhood who’d abandoned her,
and left her to drift in this half-haze,
this country holiday without end.
And that there is
at the core of all the great artists, all the great thinkers, some severe misunderstanding, arrived
at in childhood and never disclosed, never brought to light. Such a generative force propels imagination, skews thought, forces realization. And since it is, at heart, a mistaken conception, buried deep in the artist’s past, one cannot hope to emulate that mind’s growth, nor even to find out what it was about which that child was wrong.
In a Glass Coffin Beneath Alexandria, in Alexander’s Dusty Skull, One Image Still Trembling
Darius, in a beggar’s filthy robe, passing
in the street below, a guard of six
beggars about him.
A faint frustration
like a candle’s negligible smoke:
Alexander’s many thousand troops seized
all the beggars of Issus.
But none was Darius.
Bestiary 8
I am watching a girl draw in her notebook.
She draws a little broad-shouldered fellow
with big eyes. Beneath it she writes,
“A WORM BORES INTO FYODOR’s BRAIN.”
Then she draws the worm. As she says,
it is indeed boring into his brain.
In no time the little chap will be insensible.
While there’s still a moment left, I intercede
on Fyodor’s behalf. “At least put a doctor
on the scene. At least that.”
She draws a doctor on a corner of the paper.
He is wearing pajamas.
“I had to get him out of bed,” she says. “He hates that.”
In the cafe, men are playing at cards,
smoking and drinking. A large moon has risen
over the cantina wall. In every direction,
the world is rising out of itself, stretching
like a healed animal. And I too am part of this.
Rising, I say to the girl, “Let’s go to the lake.”
Bestiary 9
Up she gets. Her things go into a cloth bag.
No one notices us leave except a yellow cur that follows us
for miles across the filthy blackened landscape.
Not This But The Truth
A YOUNG WOMAN IS AT THE DOOR. SHE ENTERS,
CROSSES THE ROOM AND OPENS A LOCKED BOX.
INSIDE IS THE POET, JESSE BALL, CURLED UP ASLEEP.
SHE RUNS HER HAND THROUGH HIS HAIR SLOWLY,
CAREFUL NOT TO WAKE HIM, FOR IF HE SHOULD WAKE,
SHE MURMURS SOFTLY, THEN WHAT WOULD
BECOME OF ALL OUR SECRET AND IMPLAUSIBLE HOPES?
Bestiary 10
The sadness of colored glass bottles stands in rows in the disused pharmacy.
I went there once
thinking to play a trick. Oh what a trick.
Two Dogs
As if these true books were given up
in guttural jest,
in flawed and flawing laughter—
And how, upon the road this day
at a line of shadowed yards two dogs
turned their heads and beheld me.
Could I but have called to them by name
we might have gone on, saying,
Evening crouches like a banister,
our famed poverty the steps beneath.
A Bargain
A trail of clothespins held my dress on
as I wandered in the wilderness.
I wandered for seven years
and each year I grew immeasurably
more beautiful.
How many, I ask you, how many
lives can there be that pass
without a glance to right or left?
I made a bargain with a mill-stone.
I said, “Be my lover.”
And it replied,
“Better you had died.”
And in the Hollow Tree There Was a Note That Said:
Not Satan, but some other
more shrewd impresario
created Music with a cunning
beyond good, beyond evil.
Therefore Music, like certain
other human tongues,
is not a source but a mutiny.
Bestiary 13
My mother lives by the smallest road
you could possibly imagine. She walks up it
each day, and down. I think sometimes
that such a road changes our possibilities.
By this I mean, you will never see this road
because I will never tell you
where to find my mother.
Forty-Year Soliloquy
Was there a way we were taught
to talk in doorways? Occasions,
I have always felt, should be the guide
to best propriety: a form for speech
while walking; a way to converse
surprised; a method for
engaging someone whom
you have embarrassed. These
and others would be part
of that manual I wish I had created
forty years back. Forty years
might be time enough, if the work
had been addressed by all,
for those now living to know
how to speak not just their minds
but also what they hope.
A Setting
At the Ambassador’s house the women took up
precisely half the space they ought to have
in order to be pleasing to the eye,
and everyone said savage things to each other,
in hopes they would be overheard.
But I was not amused. Consider this:
My cat had passed away just hours before
on a little plot of grass in the front yard.
In fact, I was carrying it over my shoulder
in a sagging gray canvas bag. And there I was,
there, there, there, as if anything could be solved
by foolish scripted action or the eyes that follow it.
Bestiary 14
Before he left, he passed me the knife
and I used it to cut my bonds.
It was a very dull knife
and the cutting took years.
Guards would wager on my progress.
“Sooner or later,” they’d say,
while washing the changing fashions
out of their thin and cunningly braided hair.
Bestiary 15
Her picture came to when I threw the water
over. Its eyes began to follow me.
No notion I had then, such as is in me now—
what it can mean to wake a thing that’s past.
Bestiary 16
Cardinal Piccate, famed priest-turned-skeptic of the 15th century:
we are somehow present at his denunciation. The pope
declares the excommunication to a crowd of hundreds
