The Village on Horseback: Prose and Verse, 2003-2008

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