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

by Jesse Ball

  It kept me warm through first

  one winter, then another; I

  became grateful, and so the anger went away.

  I sought it again, with thin hands,

  a hypnotist’s assurance.

  I was told do not provoke it, and I,

  I listened well. I took my fists

  to the glassworks where the lovers

  I once became with a trumpet call

  were arrayed in fine rows, two by two.

  They were astonished,

  they who had gone apart so long.

  Come back to us, they cried, their voices

  thin like old glass. Come back, you fool.

  SO I TOOK THEM TOO beneath my coat

  and called it precaution.

  Autoptic: 3

  I loved a man who was a scholar of war,

  and I hated war, and loved it

  even as I hated it. For there are places

  where the dust is entertaining like a clavier

  each mote abrupt like a struck and filigreed note,

  there and then gone, where horsemen,

  mercenary, intent on the several work of death,

  gallop through books upon the table,

  laying siege to centuries of imaginings,

  as men in armored lines advance,

  their spears like spun cloth.

  Autoptic 4: House Up-Hill

  I stand, gray and wan, by the stove, boiling tea, and trees climb down

  through the winter hills to bring me news.

  They whisper through the tiny window kept for just this reason

  in long syllables that reach to my long ears.

  A woman is living in a hole, they say, a hole buried in the ground,

  and birds are fools who talk of nothing,

  or little, not both. The wind is vain, and furthermore blind, wanting only to be thought

  of in kind ways. In this

  it is often gratified. Yet still, the fury. And too a boy wandered upon

  a deep part of the wilderness. He can’t come out.

  He is unharmed but very sad, and you would, they say, you would

  take pity if you saw him, such a small boy,

  so sad, and hungry. He won’t last more than a day. He’ll die of

  exposure, as children do in books.

  He’s just that way, through the trees. That way.

  I smile at such ruses; steam rises from the kettle. Not for nothing

  did I go once to the forest’s heart, there to learn my ample secrets.

  Belie, Belie

  Belie the page upon which this pen sits

  like a craven monarch whose kingdom

  is as utter and as useless as his fool.

  Belie the doldrums that assail

  the wizened faces I once bore

  in sickness as a raging child.

  Belie the becoming and the knowing

  of what little I might become, when set

  beside that lathe, the sea, and all it does.

  Belie the dastard clock, the vagrant

  calendar, the leash of seasons, the stunted

  grace of graveyards.

  Belie the waltzes, the saddened mazurkas that infect

  even the joyous as they dance.

  Austromancy

  And so, in the afternoon I am often

  caught feeling as though I’ve gone missing

  from the life I was to lead.

  This is the chief pleasure, I tell myself,

  of young poets.

  I followed a Ribbon

  I followed a ribbon that trailed from a hand

  and it led through the grazing of crowds upon pavement,

  through laities and simpering voices in evening,

  past lives that might be given me in confidence

  and confidences that cannot be given in life,

  through the drawers of perished infants, where the bed

  linens still keep the traces of tiny bodies,

  and beside ladders upon which men stand

  as on a willful pride that harms all those beneath,

  all down, all down at last, to the harbor

  where such ribbons trail the water in a hundred places.

  I cannot find my own amidst so many,

  but I pretend to, and taking up an oar I leap

  foolhardy into a passing boat.

  “Do you need an oarsman?” I call out needlessly.

  As if there were anything left to do but row.

  Autoptic: 7

  Prussian blue, the coat

  I thought to wear, but cannot,

  down into the morning town.

  I am a great anticipator, building

  my empire with such things as

  coats and colors, unexpected visits,

  dogs that take their leashes in their

  mouths, and gentle-eyed rascals

  who follow each other

  up through the limbs of trees.

  Auturgy Refrain

  Brown cotton, and how we have all forgotten

  so much that we had promised.

  Aching then where light

  plays upon long floors

  in the cleverest rooms of the skull,

  I proceed to become

  that which I have admired in

  those many I admire.

  Is it enough that this ambition holds

  one moment? Two would be

  miraculous, and three, as good as true.

  I count the blemishes

  that stain my good name.

  But who can count so long?

  A good name — what use is it

  but for causing jealousy in idle hearts?

  No, I was not made to bear a tool like that.

  I was Awake a very long Time

  Not a carnival but loud

  unexplainable noise. The sound

  of someone being chased.

  Dogs waiting silently beneath hedges.

  A man sifting flour on a park bench

  no reason given.

  Autoptic: 8

  Grief, do me no favors. I have grown my hair long,

  as you bid me. I have learned to roll

  a coin below my knuckles. I have written down now

  years of dreams; much of my life has passed in writing

  down these books of sleep. And so you see that I can

  no longer turn only to what’s true

  when I speak of my experience. Sainted men

  wander in forests that have been set to rows.

  And here, today, already I have found a stone

  shaped like a day I passed in a life I can’t claim as my own.

  The wind calls water what it wants to call it and passes

  overhead. But water names wind from within,

  as storms proceed in hinges, all through the captive

  captive, captivated light. Therefore, I show my face boldly

  in a portrait of my great-great-grandfather. In reply

  a deep breath in my lungs, and the room about me

  actual as nothing can be actual. My hand is badly cut,

  and I cannot say how long it has been bleeding.

  And yes, I’m sorry, but that hardly matters now.

  Speech in a Meadow

  Leopold and his benefactor pause beside a hill on the benefactor’s estate. In the hill

  there is a door. The day is cold, and bright.

  IT WAS this door, years ago, you understand,

  that prompted me to begin a wayward life.

  Behind it I imagined a tidy room, a hearth,

  some bespectacled, bewhiskered creature, conversant

  with the courtesies of our times. Strange, but with

  things to tell me. You understand.

  Later I thought it to be a long and lamplit hall.

  And lately I’ve imagined my portrait hanging there,

  quietly, as the lamps are covered,

  one by one. The angriest man I ever saw />
  broke his own teeth with a hammer. For as he said,

  It’s dark as night inside the sun,

  and that is where we’re told to wait. But this

  was years ago. I imagine things are different now.

  Yet still no answer from the Captain,

  not yet, young Leopold. We awkwards

  must go wandering, and tend in our lives

  most happily to

  doorways set in hillsides upon which we made

  human departures and human trade.

  Speech in a Chamber

  In this book birds are taught their flying

  by that which would make them fall

  were they not to fly as had been taught.

  The book is roughly bound, and left

  open on a couch. The page is illustrated

  and, lifted to the light displays

  a moralizing scene: two children have tied

  a third to the wheel of an enormous carriage.

  A group of elderly women look on with pride.

  It is a scent of such astonishing strength,

  why, Leopold, there are flowers hidden

  throughout the room. There must be for I

  cannot sleep without the noise of a bouquet,

  and gently, gently, sir, you know

  I sleep most gently in this small room.

  Speech Confided

  A sheaf of worthy papers, set in a wheel and made to spin

  may be enough to give

  shape to a hundred ill-set lives.

  I declined the first, as it was not freely given.

  I declined the second, as it was scarcely a ribbon

  bound about a child’s throat.

  And that I do not care to lead.

  The third was charity.

  The fourth came with my fame.

  Yet sadly I relate, I could not deny the fifth.

  For she spoke so clearly of things I have desired.

  And so she sits, even now in the rooms above

  plotting when she weeps and weeping when she plots.

  A thought came yesterday that pleased me, my young friend.

  When I die I shall send her a note, inviting her to join me

  where I’ve gone. I’m told the dead can leave notes,

  on the backs of leaves, in the brims of hats, on the inside of a lady’s glove.

  Oh Leopold, the notes this shade will send. .

  Speech by a Window

  For the sightless, shapeless hope is vision,

  cast back by the long thrower like a discus,

  heavy like a discus, ridged, impacted.

  No vision is given once, nor given

  only to one man, one woman, though legends

  would have it so. Most dreams come

  a hundred times in a given city before

  waking the one who will raise it like some new

  roof that men may live beneath.

  Picture it, dawn in this far place.

  The populace beginning to rise. Heads poking

  out windows. Doors opening. Horses

  standing in their stalls, their heavy breath

  expectant. In the street, women with baskets

  pass by house after house. In one

  I myself wake. To me it seems

  that what was true in the night

  is far truer at daybreak. And bearing

  this ribbon, I go out with a heavy coat,

  with burned eyes, trembling hands.

  There is a meeting on the riverbed

  conducted with the utmost grace.

  — these circumstances like a holstered gun,

  that surprises by turn gunman and fool.

  Through such waters others go

  in boots sewn for the purpose.

  Such boots, have I longed for anything more?

  I will wear them in the open air

  while elsewhere I am buried. And you

  will read from Tuolti, who says,

  The greatest hunter can hunt his prey and nothing else.

  Others decide later

  what was his prey, what was not.

  amok book — 2006

  1

  One does not feel throughout one’s life that one is always the particular age that one is. Rather, there are various stations in which one settles one’s identity. As that station becomes unfit, or as one becomes unfit for that station, a new station must be reached. I, for instance, believed myself in many ways to be a child up until two or three weeks ago. Now I feel that I have lost something. But what I have lost is not childhood. It is not the freedom of childhood; that, I preserve. No — instead I have lost the time in which I was free to imagine myself a child. But what of it? I can still wrap a blanket around my shoulders and hide under rocks and bushes. I can still run through the house as fast as I can, run up and down the stairs as fast as I can. Why is it that we all have a tender spot in our hearts for bank robbers? Is it not because banks should be burned, because money itself is a vile creation? The disrespect of property is a religious propensity, and should be regarded as such.

  2 — PERHAPS

  it is best to think of myself as an animal, as a bird with a coat of feathers crouched in the space beneath a bush. A place to live, a way to eat; nothing more. My own entertainments I can provide, and too my own teachings.

  3

  Without knowing, therefore, what I am after, I head once more into the hills. Up a path, up a road, along a wall. I pride myself on the variety of my foolish physical expression. One moment I am sulking, the next capering and taunting storm clouds. I believe that, were it possible, you might one day meet with me and be thus then affrighted by my terrible aspect. That is to say — at this moment, I am a robber set foot in the public sphere. Do you like my pistol? my dagger? Whatever you answer, you must admit, I carry them boldly. Boldly, yes boldly, I go into town any time I please. Not for me to fear the wag of tongues. Oh, sir, do you recognize me from two nights’ past when I erupted from the road to steal your carriage? Well, then, a duel. Let us to it. So you see I am not afraid of CIRCUMSTANCE, and court it with my every gesture. OF COURSE there are those times, those times when tired and empty of myself, I walk past some brightly lit cottage where a supper of some sort happily is being conducted. It’s then that the long years of rascalry sit heavily on my shoulders. OF COURSE it is of no account, for should I choose, there’s many a winsome maid who’d have me in her house and household, setting up and settling up the days and hours. Yes, the peculiar quality of my life is that I allow myself to think that nothing yet has been excluded. Everything is still possible, and in the meantime I take to the hills and prey upon lone carriages and go with my hands gloved in the finest cloth.

  4

  Why are people so concerned with closets? I, of course, have had many but never put anything into them. I save the closet strategically. Often I refer to the closets in passing, sometimes going so far as to offer their dubious services to the person in question, as I myself can make no use of them. WHY YOU ASK DO YOU NOT use your closets? WHERE DO YOU PUT your things? And the truth is, I delight in seeing my few belongings. I hang them in place of paintings on the wall. I lay them out on shelves. My clothing, my writing supplies, my books, my maps, my tools. On what else would my eyes find such satisfaction as upon these gathered items — that which I find most suiting to myself in the world. And you say, put them away sir? Hide them away in a closet? I shall not. I shall never.