Date: 2007-12-01 07:24:34+00:00
Keywords: General; Poetry; American
Description: This debut book of poetry from the Plimpton Award–winning author of Census “displays an otherworldly virtuosity . . . coolly seductive and skillfully wrought” (DeSales Harrison, Boston Review). Called “A young genius” by the Chicago Tribune, Jesse Ball has won acclaim for his novels and poetry combining skillful attention to form with a deeply resonant humanity. That same mastery of craft and vision are on display in his first published volume of poetry, March Book. With perfect line breaks, tenderly selected words, and inventive pairings, Ball leads us through his fantastic world. In five sep
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Rights: All rights are reserved

March Book

March Book

Jesse Ball

Copyright © 2004 by Jesse Ball
Foreword copyright © 2004 by Richard Howard

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the magazines in which these poems first appeared:
New Republic: “After a Death”; The Paris Review: “March Book,” “Cares,” and “Secret History of Jacques Rennard”

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ball, Jesse, 1978-
March book /Jesse Ball.
p. cm.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9976-8
I. Title.
PS3602.A596M37 2004
811′.6—dc22                                                                 2003067628

Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

04 05 06 07 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Robert, Catherine, and Abram Ball

CONTENTS

Foreword by Richard Howard

1

Above a Street

Self-Portrait as Brueghel’s Beekeepers

Inside the Stove

After a Death

Listing of Possessions, Meanings

No. 31, Conflict with a God

Diplomacy

Cedar Hill

Cares

A Speech

Remarks on the Plausible

Naming

A Digression

The March Book

2

Anna’s Song

The General

An Etching

Rules

Voice

This Also

Measures

At a Crossing

At Dusk

Poverty Study

Passage

St. Stephen’s Day

Secret History of Jacques Rennard

House of the Old Doctor

3

Manuman Notebook

4

Description

Further Usages

For Once the Libertines Do What’s Best for Themselves

INTERLUDE: A Wager

Parable of the Witness

Lester, Burma

In Part

Untitled

Ship’s Manifest

From a Clearing

March Hour

Diagram

Instructions

In Veils

A Tale

Problems of Warfare

The Principal Avenue

Prairie Hermitage

5

Several Replies in a Numbered Column

Notes

Acknowledgments

FOREWORD

I suppose (though I no longer remember) that at twenty-five one may have actually lived a life of thrilling and terrible adventures like those in young Mr. Ball’s book, which is significantly named for the month when Spring begins—real-life adventures, we longingly called them, reading about these actions and passions in the novels of Sir Walter Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson.

But it now seems to me far more likely that such derring-do and the discourse pertinent thereto—

… For memory’s sake,
drive slowly along the avenue of my name, and call
at every number, saying Jesse,
there are fifteen rules for every day, and you, you fool,
you’ve broken every one, saying, Jesse,
we’ve come to take you,
we’ve come at last to take you where you need to go.

is more likely to be the product of a finely focused imagination, fueled to some degree by fictions like those I have mentioned, or even by such veracious narratives as Travels in Arabia Deserta or other errancies in sufficiently outlandish locales. I am sustained in my quest for plausibility by the overtones of a fabulous past in most of Jesse Ball’s poems, the resonance of Once-upon-a-time so likely to make its presence felt in the work of a young poet (think of Keats, if that is not too daunting an instance). And surely this young poet concedes as much in the close of his “Self-Portrait as Brueghel’s Beekeepers”—

… 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 …
Were I the one to whom this letter came,
I’d keep it folded in my coat
as proof of the world I imagine.

But I stipulated a focused imagination, which is not that state of mind, or of being, which can be achieved by reading old books. A better indicator of visionary gifts is indeed vision, what the poet sees and makes us see through his eyes. And such observation is persistently and vehemently there, or at least invoked, from the very first line of these poems—“And now we see”—and throughout thereafter: “you saw passing / processions of that which might / have been the holy,” “strange to see the search end here / at the edge of the fairground,” “we should all see differently, though of course / some do, some are made to do,” “if strange animals mourn countries we cannot see / then listen when they mutter,” “one could see in the distance the unreal bulb of a water tower,” “in a glass / we have stood to be seen, gone / in the quiet to places we could not understand,” “pair your child with a swan / and have other animals see openly / this intimate act of favoritism,” “observe that someone has altered the scenery. / No longer can we look out on the world we had hoped for.”

In all these citations, as in many others later in the book, vision is one term of a dialectic with what will not or cannot be seen: to observe something is to posit what escapes observation. This is the tension that generates most of Jesse Ball’s poems, and it is a fruitful anxiety.

Of course, no one writing in our moment, when so much has been taken away, can escape the toils of modernity, even a poet so young as Jesse Ball, even one so receptive to the rhetorics of old time. Why else would there be so distinct a temptation of prose—such a high prose quotient—contesting (as I see it) these remarkable verses? For it is prose which persists, which continues until it leaches into the sands of discourse and disappears, just as it is verse which ceremonially returns (reverses), recuperating its formal commitment until it establishes vision as the visionary. That there should be such a proportion of prose in this poet’s work (which is, however, never prosaic) is the index of a struggle for “the sacred truths” he has had to wage against the exactions of his moment. It is a tally of his triumph that he can versify the question of his combat in this high fashion:

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?

May it be an appropriate close to this responsive note if I cite the young poet’s engaging mea culpa (“The failure of modernity … has brought us to many horrible passes”), which is “A Speech” he makes in front of a curtain, costumed, precisely, as the young poet obliged, he acknowledges, to speak in prose if in his own person:

… 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.

—Richard Howard

But now thou dost thyself immure and close in some one corner of a feeble heart.

—George Herbert

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.

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.

RULES

Never repeat what someone else has said,
not even in jest. Never linger in foyers,
or hang coats on chairs. Don’t drink
anyone’s health if the weather’s bad.
Neither answer doors on the hour.
When a tree is hit by lightning, have it
made into a chair. When a man drowns
in a shattered boat, fashion the boat
into a bed. Make pillows with the down
of stolen geese. Pair your child with a swan,
and have other animals see openly
this intimate act of favoritism.

Communicate at first with letters,
though later, perhaps only in person.
Refuse to speak with distant relatives,
for they will give you nothing but mass cards
and notices of aberrant sensibility. Build
rooms in terms of the hours of day
and light and give short shrift
to well-borne-out opposing thought
on this and other crucial matters. Bide
time in alcoves, prefer hooded clothes.
Remember one building completely
and use it for memory’s sake. For memory’s sake,
drive slowly along the avenue of my name, and call
at every number, saying, Jesse,
there are fifteen rules for every day, and you, you fool,
you’ve broken every one, saying, Jesse,
we’ve come to take you,
we’ve come at last to take you where you need to go.

VOICE

In the failed township, maypoles riddle the coming of spring.
Small crowds resolve themselves, disperse.
I look on, thinking falsely,
thinking: I was once one of you.

THIS ALSO

I am walking in what appears a desert. On second thought,
it is the canal of the hopeless. I’m sure I don’t belong here,
but I cut quite a figure, with my close-fitting suit,
my weighted cane, my powdered forehead.

Yes, it is a lovely day in summer. Breezes ruffle the fur
of the passing herd. As one, it makes happy stamping sounds.

In turn this pleases me, and I make a happy stamping sound.
Am I observed? Do I displease the Queen by acting so?

Yes, I know, these are the last days of an age, of a pitied era.
I’ll die any day now. That’s why they sent me, for a cure,
here where everyone is much smarter than everyone else,
and so no one has any peace. Driving now, with the rain,
in a cast-iron train car, I observe that someone has altered the scenery.
No longer can we look out on the world we hope for.

Comprehension comes, therefore tears. Such small mistakes
we make. It’s cruel to mention them at all.

MEASURES

I took an hour in the measured water.
I left my clothing on the bank and dove
and drew my body after me.

Cautious with anger,
I took an hour
in the river water and went
six ways if I went one. The sun was
boiling on the water’s surface,
and the divers sat in quiet groups
on the river floor. Their flat eyes
betrayed them, betrayed me to them,
and I could not sit long for knowing
that if I went anywhere, it was
in fear of love, and if I did a thing
that was good, if I did a great thing,
it would be in the service, in the fear of love.
And all the drowning lungs,
flopping like fish on a dock:

before the curtain of this theatre
fails beneath disgust and omen

I will find out for myself
are there any
deserving of life’s reward.

AT A CROSSING

If I traveled across the unconcerned waves
and found that old path through the wood
where often prophets stood, I’d be assured
of little.
And so I am suspicious of that old path.

Therefore tell me not: you will meet
a dark-haired girl who cannot speak.

Tell me not: you will wander for days
in a stupor and arrive at a friend’s threshold
at the moment of death
to watch a soul rise
along the thousandth ladder, the prime
upon which all is shuttling and weaving,
borne and bearing, as pathed as a garden,
as trafficked as a river.

FOR I have seen this friend’s
soul take a quiet turning
in the space of an afternoon
and climb a distant ever-empty stair
where the apple trees are brushing
against the glass of windows
and speaking, and treating,
in the tongues of the falling.

AT DUSK

I went out, face covered, through a half-closed
door.

I went to where the boats are kept, to where
my boat is kept.

I set a hooded lantern on the rowboat’s
floor,
cut strips from a blanket, to wrap
the oars.

I pushed the boat over rock, till it lay half
in water.

Two figures came, the one before
the other.

They moved down across the broken wharf,
across shore’s
folded earth to where I stood,
the boatman.

I pushed the boat while two sat
on the cross plank.

I rowed the boat and the larger held
the smaller
by the throat, as we passed tiny islands,
winking in half-light.

To the deepest water, he said. It was
a long blanket,
and we both watched it sink. I rowed.
I rowed.

I pulled the boat back up across the rocks.
I watched
the larger pick his way as streams of night birds
came to docks.

POVERTY STUDY

3 of the 7 children, the smallest ones, of course, were starving. This meant
that the larger ones would become larger still, while the smaller would,
if anything, become smaller. Not a good situation, said Grintha,
who was listening through a keyhole. She suggests we ought to put heavy
weights on the ankles of the larger children, to give the weaker ones
a chance. Of course, I said, that might work, but that might make
them stronger. Then even we, the ones in charge, might be troubled
to make them do our will.

PASSAGE

Instruct me please so long and so well
that there will be no trouble
upon this new plain. I became
foolish with hope and crowds;

I told lies, gathered brittle ornaments.

All around, the affectionate have begun this life’s work.
Their vague features and inconstant touch
are posed like questions over cabinets and keyholes
in the country of my birth. Instruct me,
if you will, for I have come upon
an easing of the way; a correspondence
has begun, as I fall in and out of sleep. I feel it:

soon I will make a language
from the grace, from the disgrace I covet,
with its sickly nature, that coughs like a child
when I throw open a window to the winter street.

ST. STEPHEN’S DAY

At the well, the invalids were cowering
under parasols, as in the distance came
the coughing of hounds.

Oh, you wrens who tremble!
intent upon nothing, useless,
flitting from weakness past grace!

Mumble on in sequestered shade.

The sun comes down; so too I’ll come
around, thick smock below a scowl.

Though two get away, I’ll sing and stuff eight
down the well, where new ink is made.

SECRET HISTORY OF JACQUES RENNARD

In the famous painting
of Giordello at the opera,
a creature is clear
behind the false forest,
just by where the costumes
would be kept. The thing
has a tail, ears like a rabbit,
and the sinuous hands of a man.
Of course, we can’t know that
from the painting, which,
some say thankfully,
was lost in a flood in 1740
when Constantinople
was, for a week,
at the bottom of a lake.

The journal of the great
French master, Jacques Rennard,
has told us most
of what we know about this,
his most renowned painting.

The creature was his,
and appeared whenever he was
sketching. Most disturbing
is the rosary it seems to clutch
reflexively, in Rennard’s
recollection. “It was a very
Christian beast,” he wrote,
“and must be forgiven its habit
of strangling. You must understand,”
he continues, “there is a certain
grace to the strangler
that any painter must admire.”

Is it coincidence that Giordello
was found, neck broken,
at his feasting table, at midnight,
the night of what Carlos Intier would call
“The Immortal Performance”?

In the last month of his life,
Rennard’s maudlin fits
made his journal nigh unendurable.
One who goes that way
with fortitude will observe
on page 896, his seeming confession:
“An artist cannot live beyond
his zenith. Neither should he.
Neither ought he be allowed to.”

Of course, the painting was not
complete the night of the opera,
but had only been sketched
in a long brown book Rennard
was known to carry at his waist.

“At the hour of his death,”
Beauvoir, friend to the painter,
relates, “Jacques was quite
unnerving. He slept fitfully,
occasionally sitting up straight in bed
and shouting, at impossible volume,
‘I have seen this!
I have seen this to be true!’”

It seems thus that it was
generally understood
by others of that era:
either Rennard saw the creature
or was the creature himself.
As no likeness survives,
we cannot compare the two.

It seems likely he acquired the monster,
if monster there was,
during a summer stay in the tropics
when he was only a child.

HOUSE OF THE OLD DOCTOR

What is prefigured by the symbol need not be stated
baldly. The weather was bad, was dry today.
At the hospital terrible things happened
continuously. Meanwhile, the sound of gravel
in the driveway. My visitor, long overdue, arrives
with a single flower pressed in a book of riddles.
We sit on the back steps and stare wordlessly
at the ocean beside which we once lived,
which will never leave our sight. We do not stare
at the ocean. We are far from such an ocean.
It is the forest we see, shadows and the mountain
upon which the forest turns. So many animals
made wild by the dry ground. They approach the house
in darkness, and set their muzzles against the glass.
I do not think they want the things I want. By the window,
I am mouthing names: well water, carvings, apple trees.
We are near a truth, and daren’t speak.

3
Manuman Notebook

1

In a braid, like weeks and days,
wedded by list, married by kind—
the limned impressions, the mind.

Differ from me, things that I do.
Be in severance, severance’s pay;
watch the gated manor
where my old wants are met.
Beyond these thoughts of place,
in clean space we are seen and met.

2

The last hours of exhausted life—
we have returned to within sight of the place
where once we were born.

Captivated by folly, entranced by indifference,
what little reason we are given to smile—
is it not always enough?

At a terrible pass, the compromised
are singing “Fare Thee Well,”
invisible, like sheets of rain.

If we agree to the premise,
then mustn’t we abey, mustn’t we
slip sidelong to a tented place?

And if watching doesn’t please us,
we must whisper a reminder of the truth—
acting, even action never frees us.

3

As if we knew, upon arrival,
that all the indulgences
were given out in decades
ended long before our births,
we made camp upon a hillside
and sat to watch the fires
take the town.

I believe you were
the prettiest of your kind,
and I never begrudged you
your ribbon, nor your fanciful air.

But we are through with
accomplishment, and gone
past all indemnity.

Our chaplain has laid out
a blanket with six knives.
He is impatient to see
how well we have shed
the costumed acts
of our second nature

4

Like cloth we rose
in momentary wind
and she was small
where small things begin.

5

A GAME OF HIDING

The parson hid in the pantry
as the children searched the other rooms
and like sardines they came
to him in the low room
one by one, a tightening grip
like a lamp or a saw blade,
like a parade ground
in the contractions of the mind.

Soon there was but one left,
the youngest child,
whose footsteps came and went
through the several rooms
in a quiet as difficult as proscription
in a weakness as binding.

6

A witness is a frail thing:
unfailing, unkempt, effete.

A broom sweeps through
these days of our inconsistence,
marking what?

a misplaced hammer?
a purse full of coins?
the shadow of the chair in which you sit?

Not without reason are our long musters
ranked among the terrible, the infinite
species of learning and forgetting.

For the sound a mouth makes
is twofold—

bent in arriving, stooped in the hall
in a corridor of doorways, each sound
is the servant not of the will alone,
not of will, but of the quieted
intents we have forgotten, that left us
at the moment of waking,
making their way, in cold determination,
along the brittle roads of our sharpest sight.

7

Don’t think the consensus is arrived at easily,
for there are many golden arms
flashing beneath the sun,
many painted carts pulling by
in the thin light of a winter afternoon.

Don’t calm yourself with the powder of ashes
or turn too often to an empty room,
for the sky is itself a wheel
like the graven mind, and the ground
is taut as fabric across two hands.

Which faded print will you choose,
knowing the names of days
in which it will be this across your back,
thinner than a match, this
that keeps you separate
and far from recognition
in the arms and homes of those
who without thought
would do you gravest harm?

8

With an intake of breath, the escape begins.
The frantic business of survival
indentures itself to the night.
With a glad shout we are off
into the space beyond the wall.

Who knew the cannon crash of assonance
would send our lives reeling so?
I was deceived and took
a smarter man’s thoughts for my own.

But is it not always so?
A trading of selves,
a rush of blood,
a yellow cap left on the grass?

I swore our houses would be set
in a row on this darkest path,
and told you we would live
without a doubt, in grace.

Here, beyond the sentence of cordoning
or calumny, the long river motions.
We must obey.

Trees stand at the banks
lifting their pale hands.

AND what if the wind
were not a force, but a flag—
broad flag of a world
we may never see?

4

DESCRIPTION

1

In the yellow vault of antiquity, beneath
the cast hollow of pleasant hours
where we have hoped to live our lives,
a scribe is copying out the March Book.
He makes long strokes across
thin paper. He flares the intervals
of swelling words and seizes pauses
in narrow paragraphs, constricting space
with the calipers of lettered ink.

He says each word out loud
and remembers,
in sickness at the filthy
market edge, where atavistic
fragments could be bartered
and bought, his first time
reading the March Book, seeing
his name in the fragile, torn pages
and knowing he would spend
six decades copying the text.
All his daughters have left him.
One by one, they stood
at the door and called to their father.
He would not cease his work.

2

Under this sun, the March Book
spreads like another sail
raised to an ungoverned height.

It’s been ages, I tell you,
beneath the ground,
where withered geography
serves for reason. The scribe
stands, pushes his chair in.
The table is empty. His mind
is flat with the weight
of process and repetition.
In a rainstorm, the March Book
crossed the sea,
though he could not follow.
Through the doorway of his hut
the land curls and ends
in water—he is thinking
and thinking still. The book
arrives on the farthest shore,
where tiny birds, too small to see,
constitute the wind,
spreading the word
of what’s been done.

FURTHER USAGES

Though we knew that the earth was flat, yet also we knew
that our captain was in commerce with the movements
of the evening sky, and could tell all manner of fortunes
and dreams and direction, that his metal tools, carefully kept,
his astrolabe, his sextant, mustered in the closeness of his cabin,
would bring us once again to dry and solid ground.
Therefore there remained only the difficulty of dead time
and the dread of waves that is in the heart of even the greatest sailor.
On we went, on and on through starvation and the telltale lands
where misery is the keeper of joy, and not, as it is with us,
the other way around. At the edge of an arabesque, a cloud pit,
a fog, the ship stopped. There was no more ocean, nothing further.
Our captain stood beneath this display, and we could see,
like us, he was confounded. To have come all this way,
to have arrived at the very doors of a paradise beyond
all hope of recollection, and to find that simply, that truly,
our failing is that our minds are not big enough to trap
the seething pattern of the actual, that there is no sense
simple enough for these, our pathetic uses of comprehension.

FOR ONCE THE LIBERTINES DO WHAT’S BEST FOR THEMSELVES

He took the
apple and tore it in half.

She took part,
and fed it to a stray.

He gave the rest
to a swallow,
over a period of days.

These two confessed,
when they were able to
speak about the matter:

they would rather
have been left alone.

INTERLUDE: A WAGER

He took a tiny bell out of his pocket
and shook it three times.

Doors began to open out of trees, walls, beds, bottles.
The premises were soon crowded.

“I didn’t know they lived here,” Joan said meekly.
“I thought they all died in the London fire.”

“Yes, well, pay up.”
They went into another room.

Joan removed her skirt and blouse
and began to recite from memory

Ball’s infamous Study No. 11.
“That’s good,” he said quietly. “That’s perfect.”

PARABLE OF THE WITNESS

I came to in a canebrake, covered in bruises.
“Oh, Maria,” I shouted, “come carry me home!”

And there she was, that old nanny, in her patched
white nightgown, queer book of stories under her arm.

“You should have been an invalid.
What have legs ever done for you that I couldn’t have?”

“Good woman!” I cried. “To candor, and to witnessing!”

We were off.

The hounds broke around us;
the mad dash drew steam. We escaped.

Oh, sorrow, seventh failure of a vaunted family,
I came to in a canebreak all alone,
and sat for hours, intent on the ground.
Never a word did I speak.

No sign there was of anyone
come to hurry me home.

LESTER, BURMA

For J.Z.

Lester and Burma were speaking gaily. He had encountered her in the hallway. Hello, he said, you certainly are a sight for sore eyes. They proceeded to a room adjoining that hall, where a large window opened onto the street. I would like to have you for supper, said Burma, and took off her dress.

I am appalled, said the doorman to the coachman, and the coachman to the gardener, at the way the young lady disports herself. You would think she had been brought up better than that.

Burma was wearing no underwear, and her slender body looked very nice on Lester’s sofa. He said so. Thank you, said Burma. I swim each day, and use fine oils. Of course you do, said Lester.

What will happen, said Lester’s father to Lester’s mother, when that boy gets to the big city? Who will he fall in with? Will he return in ten years’ time and shower us with gifts and remembrance? Or will he, said Lester’s father to Lester’s sickly uncle, die from the plague like all his cousins? Perhaps he will take to the sea and become a privateer, with a letter of marque. I would like that, said the uncle. I would like that also, said Lester’s father.

A cloud of bees overtook the window and screened the room for a minute. Do you think they’ll harm us? asked Lester. Why, no, said Burma, they’re just curious. Aren’t you ever curious? Yes, quite, said Lester, laying his hand upon her thigh.

The beekeeper paused by his hives. A cloud of bees is missing, he said, to no one in particular. I hope the little creatures aren’t up to any mischief. I hope they return by dark so I can tuck them in their little beds and read them fairy tales.

At any rate, said Lester, we might at least have a look in the bedroom and see what’s going on in there. Yes, said Burma, we might at least do that. Just to know for sure. The bedroom door closed softly behind them.

And when the bees returned to their hive, the beekeeper was there with glad tears and an admonishing word. He read them a story from a fine book he’d just bought, in which a boy and girl go to bed together with no other reason than that it is nice to be in bed with a boy and it is nice to be in bed with a girl and it is nice to wake up midway through a life in early evening to the buzzing of bees in an adjoining room.

IN PART

Sit quiet. Lie still.
Let walls stand, and windows break.
Let fires burn low.

Someone’s set chairs in a circle.
Someone’s wandering asleep in a cursed house.
And the joy that has its home
in the belly at the base of the soul,
let it come, let it go. Let trees be bowed
by weight, let streams race, and moss decay.

The trembling of furred limbs will not cease—
no one’s word, however bold,
will banish this cold. And so, sit for no
portraits, stay for no relinquishings.
There was a moment when I was aware
of beings in the air above my head.

Have they left? Or do they loiter there,
attendant, faithful? Sit quiet,
and let the water be, let the false face
arrange itself or not, as marble basins
fill with rain, fill and empty,
empty of their own accord.

UNTITLED

The villain in the red suit
may be told to go, and he will go.

The girl who stares may be made
to turn away, and she may.

Concerns are soluble,
difficulties mended.

But this—that the tragedy of your life
may lie in wait, disguised as your life.

She told me just last night, dystrophy, saying,
“I’m a fool. I’m such a fool.”

In the dream I had last night,
I drove an ambulance. Everyone
praised me, the doctors even,
for my recklessness.

In the midst of it, I left a patient
forgotten in the van.

The dream shifted;
someone had been saying,

“We’re there. We’re almost
there,” in a comforting voice. Then silence.

I woke and realized how far I am,
how very far from the world.

The girl who stares may turn away.
The red-suited man may go, may stay.

Can’t we refuse life’s claims?
Isn’t that what honor tells us?

I saw a speck on the horizon, moving
as if to overtake the sun. And so I say:

“In these unruly days, even prayer may be true.”
Though it has never been true, in these
unruly days, let prayer be true.

SHIP’S MANIFEST

The best of us have retired our skepticism
and bury letter after letter
in the salted ground of a parricide yard.

This is to say, we address the unknown
by shouting after the uncompromised.

FROM A CLEARING

I was set upon by three men.
I felled the first with a word,
the second with a blow.

Beyond them the pale city
Fortune beckoned.
But the third, oh, the third.
His face was hidden.

And in his hands he held
parchment twisted
like the bones of my throat.

MARCH HOUR

I gave the child a coin; it promised not to speak.

Beyond the shallow lake, a leak had come
through the ceiling. Paint ran, and the face
the crowd had worn was now become
wholly new. For instance, the servant girl, staid,
in severe linen, now wore her coyness like a bell.

“Remember, keep quiet!” I said, hurrying off.

If I got to her in time, she might yet remember
some past we might have had, in a nameless Welsh room.

DIAGRAM

Everyone I know is asleep right now.
I’m in a room full of strangers.
The door unlocks to admit another man
I’ve never seen before. It should
be morning soon, though I can’t say
how long I’ve been here. All I know is
we’ve been telling lies, trying
to hurt a man we’ve tied to a chair
in the center of the room. He’ll believe
anything. I tell him he’s part
of an enormous experiment, that his wife
is a scientist and cares only for numbers.
He nods and mumbles, “I suspected
as much.” Someone comes up with the idea
of keeping him in the box where we raise
flies. “He’ll be uncomfortable,
I’m sure of it.” Heads nod. No one knows
where the man came from, where
we came from, when we’ll be allowed
to go. “I think we need to convince him
of something,” says a man whose face
is entirely covered by old bandages.
“Let’s use the garden hose,” murmurs
someone’s cruel son. “Let’s shave
all the hair off his body.”

In the next room, a child prodigy
is playing piano. We all strain to listen.
The man we’ve tied up taps his foot
in time with the music, hums the tune.
“I’ve always loved Ravel,” he says,
to no one in particular. The old man
who holds the door grimaces, glares.
“That was Schoenberg, not Ravel.”
“Quite right, I was mistaken,” says the man.
“If only you knew,” I said, smiling.
General laughter, then silence.

INSTRUCTIONS

Presently he happened to think
that perhaps what was required of him
would not be precisely
what he had been told.

He thought about that. Yes,
in fact, it was quite likely that
what he was told would have
very little to do with what was intended,
with what was supposed
to occur, and as he was the only one
working toward that end, influencing
these most particular of events, then surely
his instructions must have been
incorrect from the start. The question,
therefore, was twofold: one, to what end
would he have been given
a false set of instructions and, two,
despite all this, what should he do
in order to finish the work as planned?
He took a few steps back
and pondered the problem.
Of course, in a matter of minutes
another shift would start. After all,
the whole thing was the foreman’s fault.

He really oughtn’t do
more than he’d been told to.
In fact, such a deviation might
be fatal, in other circumstances.

Yes, yes, it would be best for him
to leave the work undone,
to walk briskly about the factory floor,
seemingly busy,
until someone else, another employee
in this ridiculous enterprise,
should come to relieve him. Of course,
if no one came, if no one should ever
come again, then he would have
no choice but to finish the work,
in whatever manner seemed possible, hoping
that by chance he would please
someone with the power to grant him
the sort of life he’d wanted as a boy.

IN VEILS

An argosy, arriving at a port of call, may find
the city emptied of all save the sentinel
trees that watch over stretching avenues,
may find, stacked beyond city walls,
the famine-ridden, the dead diseased,
in piles of color.

It’s then we know it’s time to turn our ships around
and trail off into the trial of evening, toward home,
and hope that what we return to we will find
untouched by the pestilence of the other shore.
And our return to the home city! Our reception
at the hands of the populace. The kissing of rings,
the praising of prayer and merchant. Yet somehow
we are blamed for turning back. For it was our word
alone that named the sea impassable. Years pass.

There is now nothing to the east of us. There is
no trade. Ships rot in the harbor. Men once able
fall to dice, find themselves in afternoon, in poverty
beneath the shade of trees. Singers revel
among crowds at the shore pavilion. Watchers
on the cliff heights will see no sails. They sun
themselves on rocks and watch
for cloud banks, vast and unformed. The rain
replies with the curtaining of monotony. Silk dancers
silhouette themselves upon a hundred stages. Courtesans
with smooth shoulders stand alone in gardens. And here,
among the discarded satiates of inconclusion,
we remember the maps we once followed,
and speak of the inchoate godhead that troubled us
in the guise of tide, of fame, of fever.

A TALE

Plangent tones may string
an instrument. How then to string
a soul across the mention of these limbs?

Fables wheel in the pier glass.
The angers of small men infect
even the wells, which center,
cruciform now, on festivals of birth.
Carlos, I have devised a method
by which to build the place
in which I may be happy.
It is difficult, involves altitude
and the early afternoon. A maypole,
a wharf: set against
gray morning in the freight of spring.
What I am told I want

I do not want. This is how
one begins to be happy, by leading
a slow trail through the brazen
chorus of disbelief. The routed
are running still, on an immense hillside
beneath a single yellow cloud.

We are speaking now
at the hill’s edge, where crooked trees
conceal our ugliness.

Do you hear me? We are the routed.
There are no others. Upon our arms,
the scars of proscription. Within our
lifeless eyes, the stamping out of fire.

PROBLEMS OF WARFARE

Lindy tells me another one has washed ashore.
It’s late afternoon, but there’s light yet,
so we walk down to have a look. And here,
she says, is his helmet. And here, his canteen.
He had no gun, or rather, if he had it, it must
have been lost along the way. The soldier
peers up at us, hostile and weak. Lindy laughs
and throws a bit of sand in his face. This makes
the soldier flinch, and one can see he’s trying
to bring his arm up. Of course,
we can’t have that. So Lindy and I, we set
to clubbing the soldier, I with my heavy
stick, she with a rock tied up in cloth. He’s
the third in a week, soon weaker from our treatment
than he was from the sea. “Depart!” I shout, “Fail!”

and strike him heavily in the temple so his face
crumples in a wrong way. I can tell his skull
won’t bear up much more. Snuffling sounds
come unbidden from the cavity
of his nose and mouth. But we shall stay
to hear no words.

Now, Lindy, Lindy dear, let’s head up the hill
and have our supper. The dogs will find their way
and finish this, such as it is, tonight.

THE PRINCIPAL AVENUE

A calliope? A room in the house where I
was born? I was never told. Don’t think
your attendance at some latter-day unveiling
gives the lie to much of anything. A cipher
is second to last in any number of wild lists
made with you in mind. And besides,

I’m starting to recall chords of pure volume,
wide as the principal avenue in some
unquestioned history. If it was not my name
it was the beginning of my name, a word said
slowly, long ago, having in mind
the whole of this, the entire plain of featureless
days, and how they figure in the play of nerves
across an uncomposed face.

PRAIRIE HERMITAGE

Trappists with beveled faces neglect the lower rooms
of this old house in which they shelter. God keeps
to the rooftops in our town, where men are known
by silhouettes of sun-blanched feature, women
by the motion of fans. Here we are not often called upon
to attend to bells, or to the clarion of visiting voices.

A hundred years ago, when the prairie was the fact
of this place, the Felk brothers, barbers,
were hanged among the limbs of the Great Oak
that presides over New Trafalgar Square.
They were highway robbers, apprehended in their guise
as ordinary men. As such they died.

From this house of worship, the scene opens
with a monk gesturing, calling though not speaking,
as a terrible wind musters in the eastern reaches of the sky.
For weeks a thousand mile storm has grown closer.
It’s clear we shall wake tomorrow to weather as it was
before men knew the causes of the world.

5
Several Replies in a Numbered Column

One does not need to be an aerobatic artist or a trick shooter;
rather, (one has) to have the courage to fly right up to the opponent.

—Manfred von Richthofen,
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
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
seconds in the mind: they are the only
contributors to a song that sings like a vacuum
in your head, a rush of air followed by pain.
What we want is to be rescued, but when we
are ourselves we are ornate, far too heavy to
be carried. If you left the door open, then you
hoped for the uninvited guest, the one who
may give warmth as the fire does not. I have
seen him crossing the open spaces, simply
attired, moving with a sureness that was
staggering. I did not follow him; I could not
bear to see what that arrival would be like,
when he has spurned my door and scorned my
table, when he has walked through the wood
beside my house each day of his infinite life,
each day of my infinite life, and has never come
calling on me.

349          Served at table by men and women, each more
lovely than the last, served dishes and courses
that ebb on for hours, served liquors in
fashions that dim light and day, I retire for a
moment to the street, leaving the laughter of
company. I know then that I am a plain man.
Geometry is my science, the method of
arriving at a thing by staring it into sense. A
girl passes in the street, alone, and though there
are girls for me in the place from which I came,
I want this girl because she is alone. Surely she
knows what it is like to be on the street and see
me—surely she thinks that because I am alone
I too resist the quiet by singing beneath my
breath. It’s true, I want to say. You’re right
about everything. We are the thousand
variations. We project ourselves on every
wall. We don’t need shadow. We don’t need
light to manage it.

And so she passes, and I return to the meal,
which is grander with each moment. Night
ends in a bed. It begins with a stripping of
sheets. When I go down to the morning and
the morning street I am amazed again.

The fascination morning holds is that it is
always cleaner, more complete, than we
imagine.

376          When the dead leave paper, it is best used
without malice. Even the hint of a grin can
bring the tragic on wide wheels like a summer-day
parade. Everyone’s tending to flower
boxes. Everyone’s opening mail. The Dutch
door depends upon the farmyard; one day both
will be extinct. In a district of churches, I
sketch you with the ease of a master. The
drawing itself is less gifted. It will go in a trunk,
to be looked at on two occasions before I die.

386          And so, you see that what I told you on Tuesday,
when we lectured each other in the rain, when we
sprang upon the back of that great stone lion and
his twin, whispering apocryphal details, spouting
inconsistencies, now you see that I was lying. I
told you then that I would care to know, really,
which particle was the smallest, and how fast
it moves, and all the other sundry details that
go to explain everything save the need for
explanation itself. Believe me, I love the quest
for this particle. I love late hours in the
laboratory, when the atomic rain has fallen in
tiny happy chambers, duly recorded, noted in
a spidery hand on paper sheets produced
expressly for that and no other purpose. Gladly
I will creep about in such a place, exchanging
niceties with those researchers who labor, deep
inside the human cell. They love their mining,
and I love them for loving their mining. But I
am no miner.

IF the lion bucked, and his replica rose
sphinxlike in our esteem (speaking all
languages, knowing the wisdom of ancient
gods), then we were amazed, and that was
enough.

I have been a passenger on a yellow ship that
any doubt would founder. And so, I am
grateful to tell whatever occurs and the
manner of its occurrence. And here and now,
what occurs is this thought, this striking of
nerves. And so I tell it, speaking my mind as
though it were a map of the greatest of cities,
made long before your birth, a thing that your
life cannot question, because the questioning
and the rebuttal have gone their separate ways,
leaving you a simple yes, a simple movement
of the eye along the page.

423          There were men who named the crowds and
called to them at need. These men cared not
for who composed the crowds, cared only for
the energy with which these currents ebbed
and flowed. And though I am intimate with
this verse, though I know the feel of it beneath
my hands, I know it only as men have known
the crowd. For it is unfamiliar to me in ways,
and seems to each new observer as it will never
seem to me. A man shouts, points a finger. The
crowd ascends a wall, to stand upside down
upon the ceiling and chat of strangeness. A
man shouts, points a finger. The crowd
surrounds a child, steps into his heart, steps
into his limbs, inhabits well and long his head,
puts cloth across his eyes. I was afraid of these
things once—that there is no control for
speech, nor over speech, nor in speech itself.
And so I ready myself with contradictions, and
give you this view and that, and this idea
backwards compounded by rumors on the x
axis that the land to the west is populated only
by liars.

As though conclusions were the point of
anything … we shall all come to the same
conclusion. Let us live on cliffs among the
filthy seabirds, and scavenge eggs from hidden
nests. The only thing worth disguising has
already been disguised.

452          The palpable was a myth that we knew better
than to laugh at, for were our shapes not bent
beneath the weight of a thousand gravities that
would never relent? Count yourself among
those situated upon a high place. Let this
elevation speak to you and bring to your senses
details long lost even to the wise.

How shall I intermingle my blood and my
worth with the mass that crawls in the alleys
and lanes? I have heard that question, long
posed on your lips. And you will hear it posed
again and again, at each crossroads, each
waking from occupation. Only the very old,
on the eve of death, have played their hand so
thoroughly that they are left with no recourse.
Bend your mind to this better philosophy—
that everything that is is in the service of your
senses, and that your love is the equal to the
love of the world. Could you call it forth, you
would believe me. But you must believe first,
without counting scope or merit, without
thought of safety. There is no safety. Everything
is visible, and everything is harmed, and
everything is waiting to be harmed again.

476          At that the door is shut firmly from within, and
we are left in the hall with a sinking feeling.
Was there something more? There was not, I
say quietly. You nod, your stern young face
upturned, and we return to the stairs that lead
down to our many and varied destinations,
each taxing us a little more, until we too grow
old, until we too are visited in the unrecognizable
depths of our age, when such a door as
the one upon which we knocked today will
open and then close in evening. One of us will
be behind it, the bent one who turns in to the
room, unsteady feet upon a faded carpet, who
makes his way toward a row of gabled
windows to lock them shut, each one, against
the coming of night.

And if there are questions then, gathered in the
cotton of our bedsheets, draped among the
dusty remains of the piled things that we chose
one by one, then they are not pressing. For
how could they be? How could they be of any
importance? If they were, would we not have
asked them long before, in our youth or in our
prime, when our minds were agile, still capable
of understanding whatever answers might be
offered? No, these questions are not pressing.
They are merely old questions, long answered,
now risen again in confusion. Beg for the
answers if you must, but beg them only of
yourself. Beg them only to pass the time.

506          Oh, but do not take me at my word. For how
could I, who prize this life for what it is—a
single egregious question—ever speak of
failure, ever say there is a time when one who
wishes to think may not be able to think. Or
worse, that I should say such attempts are
worthless. No, no. I talk only of what I fear.
You know me, you know of me: a coward, a
gambler. For my skin will be no help to me in
this struggle with the opaque. And though I
have the marks of a proud family etched
variously on my frame, I fear even this. To
speak of my cowardice and thus make it real.
Well, it has always been real, with or without
my consent. Consent has had no part in this
life.

522          There was a time when I stood by the barber
amid a crowd of arguing men. I proclaimed
that the world has always been precisely the
way it is now. “Progress is an illusion for the
weak-minded,” I shouted, and others took up
the cry. But there was one, in the back of the
room, who quietly rebutted my every word.
He did this simply and without an audience, and
when I was done speaking, during the clapping
of backs and hands, he slipped out the rear. He
knows all the back ways and all the arguments,
and they are all, he will confide, in one tedious
vein. He is pleased not by relative merit, but
only by impetus. It is this study of moments—
of how a thing is caused—that is his greatest
love. “The universe has not yet been created,”
he is fond of saying. “Nor will it ever be.”

539          In the counting houses, the counting has
stopped. In the bell tower, the ropes have
frayed, the ropes have snapped. The bells are
falling through masonry, weight following
weight. With each moment, a new note is
struck. Never mistake the world’s inanimacy
for purpose. Purpose is a human trait, bred in
ice-age migrations, endless winters, feral
springs. The notation you see in scholarly
books, left open on a table, in a library’s
ancient wing, where the steps you take have
long been apprehended, commented upon,
discarded—it is no cause for worry. It must be
true: men have lived and died happily. Yet
these accounts are missing from the annals.
For now you see—the glad don’t trouble
themselves with certainty. This is how a
mirror becomes a door. This is how a letter
arrives, smuggled, at a crucial hour. The
urgency of hospitals, of necessary truth, is
inconceivable on this hot day, when the grass
is growing. Everywhere, ants well up out of
loose soil, intricate, manifold, working toward
an end. How can there be so many? How can
there be ten million ants to counter every
human mind? Ten million ants, carpeting the
ground, in a field to which you will never go.

566          Is there a distance more profound than the
distance of oneself from one’s own observations,
when separated by time? To know
something truly, completely, and to be the
genesis of insight, and then later, days, weeks,
years later, to look upon that thought as on a
foreign city, where populations have borne
lives without number to which you were never
party, though perhaps you knew their father’s
father, or his father’s father before him. The
blood has grown thin, and the streets are quite
unrecognizable. The myriad paths of our feet
and our body through life, drawn out on a map,
some small infinity of repeated passage, is as
nothing to the courses of the mind, which
moves as even Mercury cannot, bridging
impossibilities with assertions of the possible
born of misunderstandings that in time become
truth. Poetry may list, may render records in
this archive of my mind’s long tale. I was born
in a village by the sea, in a place of widow’s
walks and barbershops. A man in cold colors
stood with a beard at the shore and told me, this
dream, this one apart from all others, it is your
life, and though others may form and fail, this
thread has weight unlike that which will follow,
and unlike that which came before. You will
never know these things to be true, for your
movement between such states will be
indistinguishable. Say that the grass has passion.
Say that it once was born as you, to walk upon
the land, and that when the universe is cold, and
all matter distant from all other matter, then that
will be our longest sleep.

600          Artists mimic the objects of our lives with great
precision. Some contrive worlds where you
may live despite your separate, outer life. Still
others make a badge of their difference, and
disclude you from the products of their work.
I am not of these types. I am a machinist, and
I build theatres, and in those theatres I say the
most foolish things I can think of. I do not, of
course, think at the time that these things are
foolish. At the time I am in love with the
substance of my thought. It seems to me, in this
haze, that every inch of existence is carpeted
in a rich substance. To touch anything is
divine, et cetera, et cetera. And then I am
ashamed to have said so to a full house.

But this shame can be borne, and it is a bright
and pleasing existence, building chutes and
passages for thought. Acrobats enlist and sign
their paychecks with an X. I employ only the
illiterate, as I hate when what I write is read
from over my shoulder. Wait until I speak! I
shout. And my lovely legions wait, and talk of
things in the clear autumn light. It’s early
evening, and supper will be soon. Geese make
numbers in the sky, and the light doubles them
softly upon the ground. We are all ancient, and
no one has seen half so much as we have seen.
No one has left to see half so much as we have
left to see. And though I will die, it is of no
importance. For the air is temperate here
where I make my home, and the dusk is gentle,
and when morning comes I will go walking in
long fields while the earth sleeps fitfully,
beneath leaves as opaque, as delicate, as
crumbling as my own memories and the faces
around which they pulse and gather.

NOTES

The epigraph, “But now thou dost thyself immure and close/ in some small corner of a feeble heart” is from the poem, “Decay,” by George Herbert.

“#31, Conflict With a God” refers to the thirty-first of 36 possible dramatic situations.

“From a Clearing” was written initially on a bedroom wall in a house in Bedford Stuyvesant.

The writing that is visible in the lower left hand corner of the Brueghel drawing has been translated as “He who knows where the nest is, knows it; he who has the nest has it.” (An old Dutch proverb).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not have made its ungainly appearance without the help of others. I’d like to thank Catherine Ball for her continued and indefatigable support. To Richard Howard and his eagle eye I owe a huge debt. Others who deserve thanks are: Glyn Maxwell, Lindsay Sagnette, Rob Reddy, Eamon Grennan, Todd Jones, Tim Kindseth, Liam Rector, Paul Russell, Stacie Cassarino, and Jana Zabinski.

As well, I am thankful for the munificence of the Red Barn in Michigan.