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CHAPTER 1
ABOVE A STREET
And now we see that your permissions and the great banners of your admittance are lost in the midday fog.
Your coat is forgotten in the workroom;
your umbrella, nose down, was set in a stand from which you had not the time to retrieve it.
For through the window you saw passing processions of that which might have been the holy, clad in feasting
gowns, replete with bells, indiscriminate with cheer, fingers fat with rings,
heads bowed beneath plain cloth,
and so you ran out in the noon street,
shirtsleeves rolled, and hurried after that which might have passed.
Strange to see the search end here,
at the edge of the fairgrounds,
on a day when there's no fair.
You look around, shocked again that your life continues to proceed in fragments that couldn't possibly
add up to anything. Whatever you thought you saw, it's gone now.
You must walk back along the avenues
as a fierce sun resumes the work of morning, burning through fog bit by bit, until there's nothing between you
and the suddenness of age, nothing between your life and the blued violence of the burdened, calamitous sky.
SELF-PORTRAIT AS BRUEGHEL'S BEEKEEPERS
In the foreground, a beekeeper pauses on a slope.
Another will soon pass him. Behind them, bees,
other beekeepers, a tree and in it a man, legs wrapped
around a branch. There's the building where they sleep, the baskets in which they keep the hives, as if it were possible, this life with bees.
None of them has a face, not even beneath their woven helmets. If they have hands, then those rarely go ungloved. One wonders what they talk about
during long evenings. It's plausible to think they were never children, but simply arrived one day on the fringes of this place and took up their tasks,
seamlessly, with no recognition that things had not always been thus. Equally plausible: they are children,
and their father sits them down in a ring at night
and tells stories while they tremble, not bearing to touch one another for fear they will be stung. What perfect letters they must write, hazarding news, stray thoughts:
The bees in the south pasture grow in number. They sense cold days coming, and if they speak or gather, as once they used to do,
then they do it now in secret, in places to which we cannot go.
Were I the one to whom this letter came,
I'd keep it folded in my coat as proof of the world I imagine.
INSIDE THE STOVE
Inside the stove, he found a passageway, leading to a set of stairs.
This caused him a great deal of worry as well as elation and gladness of living.
He did not, however, venture into the oven, but sent his little brother in in his stead. This seemed at first a good idea, but when the brother had been gone three days, he began to second-guess the wisdom of his rash choice. He'd go in after him,
he decided. But the passage had shrunk by then, and no normal-sized person could fit through. Yes, that's it,
I sent him in because, from a purely physical standpoint, I myself could never have gone.
And besides, he mumbled to himself,
it's probably nice in there.
AFTER A DEATH
His wife waits by the gate. The afternoon meal is all but finished. What will you say to her,
which of the speeches, long prepared, will fall
trippingly from your tongue?
The village center's just a short walk. The parson is a clever man, and fancies himself a puppeteer.
You watched him play out Luther's amazement
with a small stringed toy. Still, the point is made.
We should all see differently, though of course some do, some are made to do. So it seems,
Lynn, so it seems (and here you pause,
thinking better). Well, let's go for a walk.
I've been inside all day. The train must have been dreadful. But nice to leave the city?
Lynn's clothing is severe. She speaks
using her hands, and says she didn't expect any of it to happen. It's just chance,
the chance we take. Yes, you say,
yes, Lynn. We took it. And you don't, or can't,
touch even her arm. And she won't, can't,
grimace, laugh. It happened on a roadway,
you say, in a German landscape. All of a sudden,
where God wasn't, God was. We should be so lucky.
LISTING OF POSSESSIONS, MEANINGS
The ottoman stands for servitude.
The pearl earrings, desired purity.
The set of jacks means hope spurned.
The medicine chest: ambiguous.
It could and does mean any number of things, like statuary.
Clocks bespeak a morbid fascination with death. Candles mean callow intervention, laughter.
The curtains are altruism,
the martlet, loss. The shrouded piano is all too obvious:
anticipation. The film of the faena and the looped recording of the fado by the blind have meaning in sorrow
or something like it, since sorrow itself stands for mastery, and mastery for wounding. It's all very
confusing, and is, of course, why we receive guests in the garden, and never let them enter our house.
NO. 31, CONFLICT WITH A GOD
1.
Somehow, I'd always thought the swans were watching me.
(When it broke through the underbrush,
great wings wild with the sun,
I was delirious and didn't think to run.)
2.
Act begets act. Pinned beneath him in the grove,
I gave Helen to a world of suitors.
Too many suited her. The city fell
the day she burst from that egg.
3.
Still, I might have dropped the baby down a rural well,
or taken my own life.
At the god's approach
the ground rang like a bell.
4.
I might have asked him something as we fell.
So many things need answers.
But his feathers were cold, near metal.
Though soft, he hurt to hold.
5.
His eyes are everywhere —
truth, even if it isn't true.
They say all of a god's strength is mind. The physical gives way.
I was the world, burst in a day.
DIPLOMACY
The ambassador comes, and it seems like a parlor trick,
one that's a little frightening, for which the children are dismissed from the room. The unease that's wed to the sleight of hand should fade, the cruelty fall away in a welter of smiles. But no one can smile.
The linden tree creaks beyond the farthest windows of this enormous house. Delegates line the walls,
sternly dressed, coats buttoned to the throat,
monocles, spectacles glaring. Hands trained to stillness are immeasurably still. The ambassador ascends the stairs with a racket of hooves. The door swings open,
and he is in the room. A threat clings to his skin,
to his lupine eyes, to the taut veins of his shorn skull.
He settles his long coat over the back of a chair and turns with a hideous bow to address the quorum.
All his motions seem to proceed from a stretching of limbs that ought not to do the things they are called upon to do. Everyone can feel it:
the ambassador is insane. And yet, and yet they have sent him to barter at this late hour,
when the slightest chicanery, the hint of a fist,
is certain death for everyone involved.
CEDAR HILL
Those raised near deep water understand death as drowning, understand the lost as drowned.
Patience is inherited, bred in centuries that overlook the sea,
in cemeteries, cramped houses, safe harbors.
Tired of such rooms, such doors, I believe I am sick of human thresholds. Out in the yawning fields
the only danger is the horizon. How it shifts and dances,
how it trails after like a dog with a secret.
If strange animals mourn countries we cannot see,
then listen when they mutter.
Any hint might be a help to we who have no help.
CARES
In winter, we take a cottage on the long bay.
The north wind breaks shutters and moves through the riddled hulks of Victorian gravesites,
where the still light etches the marrow
of our limbs in marriage. By this strait, the moon is measurably close. It prefers such places, drifts of water,
old windows, rooms in which the wicked sleep.
Anna, I say, are the terms right? For we will have many a cold hour in these syllables.
This north land keeps quiet, beneath truths the sun forgot during many passages,
many erring lives of emperors. We shall learn the hazards, the wagers, the systems of martingale,
all hours in the rigid March sky. For we are young
and newly come from confidences of the south.
We are young, and we — my bride, myself —
have decided not to know anyone, not to know any people anymore. For there are circles
within circles, and just as I stitch another month into a gravid year, Anna has poured what we care for into a bowl. She will stir it,
standing by the open door in the thinnest of dresses,
a dress so thin I needn't touch her to know that of all the things in the world, this is the one thing we were told we could never have.
A SPEECH
The failure of modernity, said the man in the black coat, is the failure of the machine to act morally. It never intended to. But we were deceived by its sober efficiency. We believed it would do both more and less than it ought to have done. Instead it has done less and more, and brought us to many horrible passes. I suppose we would have reached these awful heights ourselves in time. And yet we have come early, and the only books we know are the ones that we ourselves wrote. They will be no help to us, just as we ourselves can be no help to each other. If someone were to forgive me for the things I did in my youth, even that would be an affront. Those crimes are the only evidence that I have lived.
REMARKS ON THE PLAUSIBLE
I smile in greeting at a well-dressed man.
Almost immediately, he's curled in a ball behind a rusted metal fence.
"Is that you?" I inquire. No answer.
This year's persimmon crop was poisonous.
We who know carry persimmons in our vest pockets, and give them to mothers we dislike.
"For the children," I say. Again, the smile.
As if it wasn't enough to live in this fanciful world, now we must touch the absurd the way one shoves at a filthy stray,
the sort of dog that keeps tailors in business.
But oh, we are terribly kind to each other,
we are the kindest in a long line of kind hearts,
holding a door, an elevator, a place in line.
The truth is, I'm having an enormous party —
it will be a huge success. And now, if you don't mind,
I'd rather you left. All expectations to the contrary,
it seems you were not the fellow named
in this most exquisite letter of introduction.
NAMING
You are a fool, telling me the clouds are mute,
as if I hadn't heard them talking during broad days.
They are name-givers, like the sea, their father,
saying each name once.
The wind will not forgive for this.
So it heaves them in great swells,
farther from what they know.
Left here wondering,
rolling vowels in our mouths,
what names have we been given?
Tongueless names that beckon,
even as they fade.
A DIGRESSION
"Elaborations on archidiaconal themes were much sought after in the year 900. Then commenced a bloody decade,
during which all the most famous artists and musicians were put to death. In their wake we have seen the rise of the Contrasouciants, the fall of the Immaterialists,
and the waxing and waning of the truer dialect of anti-Aestheticism. However, that's not what we're here for, that's not what we care for, is it?" asked the professor in a knowing voice. "These midnight sessions, dangerously
arrived at, perilous in dress, tempting to the bleakest among us: we do not come here to talk of history or categorization. The family of man has long written on the parchment of his own skin: 'The additions made to life by progress and by the growths and misgrowths of knowledge are a thorough and insubordinable deception.' This is to say — what may be accomplished in a single life is the matter at hand,
and the imponderable, inexpressible sentiment and
accretion of 27,000 images and the days in which they fall — no progress can surpass what a single individual,
bent upon his own change, may do if left alone.
Thus history, the history of ages, is not the true history.
True history is simply the arc and span of your own life."
Here the professor rolled up the enormous map he'd been referring to, and put it in a special sealed tube.
Everyone watched this operation with great interest.
"This map," the professor said, "was brought by Alexander
into the cribs and complications of many a Persian palace. In such a palace, near long-ruined Persepolis,
Alderson Oren, the famed archaeologist, came upon it.
In my inadvisable youth, he was my sometime mentor and left me the map when he died." One of the girls rose and went to the window. "The rain's stopped," she said.
The others came over. Someone opened the window.
One could see in the distance, the unreal bulb of a water tower rising out of the green-gray hills. Fog stood
in a narrow line where the river ran. From the house,
and the hill on which it rested, the farther bank was cloaked, but the nearer was just barely visible.
"What's that?" someone asked. "What's that by the shore?"
The professor came, with field glasses, but could give no definite answer.
"It seems," he said, handing the binoculars to another,
"to be a man carrying a man upon his shoulder."
"Yes, yes," the student concurred, peering intently into the dark.
"There must have been an accident on the river."
THE MARCH BOOK
Before dawn a light came as if to be dawn. A man had gone
out a door, into a field. And how he had used to go
out of a day, dog at his side.
And how he had used to fetch
crows down from blackened trees with a good gun
and the comfort of shells.
He looked to the yards, the fields
flat with March.
He looked to the disheveled
shelf of the farmhouse roof.
And of it all, how the light
maintains upon the surface of these things.
In a turning bore, the March Book numbered its pages and metaphor
took no part in its sweet decisions.
The light that had grown, crept back.
The man became abstract,
absent from the field.
We will wake once, in the night;
we will recall much that must
have come before, though nothing came before. As a dream
where long history is written in a moment — we will rise
and retire, surrounding, surrounded,
seen in a glass from far off,
seen through a glass. In a glass we have stood to be seen, gone
in the quiet to places we could not understand.
And how we will wait there.
How we will wait
without sound, without sight.
Blank is the sun. Blank, all light.
CHAPTER 2
ANNA'S SONG
Suddenly it isn't the day we thought it was.
Not the day, nor the hour, nor the season.
I am dressed in gingham, you in close-knit flannel.
There are no appointments to keep. And so I leave My dress at the edge of this day, beside your coat and trousers,
And I say, John James,
We are circling and circling —
Come stand with me on this shadowed incline.
The grass continues, so too the trees,
So too the stream and its talk of distance.
We will not be overseen. Come lie here prone Where my loose hands cup your name,
Where the soil is dark and difficult and cold.
I'll tell you what's to come.
THE GENERAL
Third night on the frontier:
watch fires burn as if to contain the coming massacre. Far to the west,
by the river Ko, the sun is setting:
whose feet pace the orchard there?
Strewn like gobbets of flesh, the barbarous flash steel: they have come to know
these plains. Even I am not certain.
Old campaigns stretch endlessly before this old campaigner.
In autumn, from the orchard wall,
the sea is visible, unceasing.
And so I gathered men and came here where the lines must hold.
Who among us can name his home,
can speak without fear and stand resolute outside the haze of his own life when the mountains come,
disguised as horsemen, sending their weight in waves before them shuddering over the cold ground?
AN ETCHING
Huntsmen prowl the edges of the King's woods.
One comes upon evidence of a poacher.
He calls to the next, the nearest, who turns,
gun in the crook of his arm, bright eyes narrowing.
The dogs are summoned, the horses brought.
"Winslow will catch him for sure," the men say.
"Winslow has taken an oath. Every poacher must be hanged." The King's justice is a wild thing,
bold and curious: it sinks its teeth in ankles,
climbs into laps. It buries its nose in drink and, overcome, makes declarations in public that others will regret. The hounds are loosed,
the tracks followed to their terminus:
the foot of a tree. Winslow, Lord Winslow,
arrives with the foresters, and a length of rope.
"You will come down," he says, "but not,
I think, all the way." The poacher's reply is lost to history. One can't help
but admire this crossing of lines,
this creation and guarding of lines that may be crossed at a certain cost. One pictures the poacher's wife
watching through a window, early morning,
as her young husband passes over the yard and out into the trees. As his hand grazes a branch,
pushes aside the arm of a bush, he's thinking of necessities, possibilities, of the things that he might do that day. Perhaps his passing
disturbs the forest. She'd have seen the birds rise,
and know he'd gone that way, away from the town and toward the King's wood.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "March Book"
by .
Copyright © 2004 Jesse Ball.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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