Jesse Ball - The Village on Horseback - Prose and Verse, 2003-2008

I could dream my way

into that citadel

and wake, the green box

clutched in my hands.

It was a dull play about a boy whose pet calf was being slaughtered.

Apparently no one could stop this thing from happening.

The butcher was played by a florid man with a huge beard.

Somehow having a beard made him likely to kill a calf.

I felt sorry for the calf, which was an actual calf,

and must have been on sedatives. It let everyone drag it around

on a little tether of worn rope. I wanted to write a review

for a major newspaper saying, “the little sedated calf

stole the show in Sunday’s performance of Johan’s Gift. ”

Instead, two hours into the performance, the boy has his feeble

arms wrapped around the calf which isn’t breathing.

Someone is singing a lullaby, trying to make him fall asleep

so they can take the animal to the block. The butcher

has a surprisingly sweet voice. Nine tawdry little urchins

dressed in sparkly tutus do a dance around the boy. This is his dream

beginning. Each boy has a sedated calf in his arms.

The butcher sneaks in the window and is reaching for the calf

when the dream-urchins draw swords and stab him to death.

They were just pretending to be dream-urchins. HA!

Clever remarks were no good,

Elizabeth realized. A sparrow was a sparrow,

and would never be a proper friend,

nor make up for the legions

of her childhood who’d abandoned her,

and left her to drift in this half-haze,

this country holiday without end.

at the core of all the great artists, all the great thinkers, some severe misunderstanding, arrived at in childhood and never disclosed, never brought to light. Such a generative force propels imagination, skews thought, forces realization. And since it is, at heart, a mistaken conception, buried deep in the artist’s past, one cannot hope to emulate that mind’s growth, nor even to find out what it was about which that child was wrong.

Darius, in a beggar’s filthy robe, passing

in the street below, a guard of six

beggars about him.

A faint frustration

like a candle’s negligible smoke:

Alexander’s many thousand troops seized

all the beggars of Issus.

But none was Darius.

I am watching a girl draw in her notebook.

She draws a little broad-shouldered fellow

with big eyes. Beneath it she writes,

“A WORM BORES INTO FYODOR’s BRAIN.”

Then she draws the worm. As she says,

it is indeed boring into his brain.

In no time the little chap will be insensible.

While there’s still a moment left, I intercede

on Fyodor’s behalf. “At least put a doctor

on the scene. At least that.”

She draws a doctor on a corner of the paper.

He is wearing pajamas.

“I had to get him out of bed,” she says. “He hates that.”

In the cafe, men are playing at cards,

smoking and drinking. A large moon has risen

over the cantina wall. In every direction,

the world is rising out of itself, stretching

like a healed animal. And I too am part of this.

Rising, I say to the girl, “Let’s go to the lake.”

Up she gets. Her things go into a cloth bag.

No one notices us leave except a yellow cur that follows us

for miles across the filthy blackened landscape.

Not This But The Truth

A YOUNG WOMAN IS AT THE DOOR. SHE ENTERS,

CROSSES THE ROOM AND OPENS A LOCKED BOX.

INSIDE IS THE POET, JESSE BALL, CURLED UP ASLEEP.

SHE RUNS HER HAND THROUGH HIS HAIR SLOWLY,

CAREFUL NOT TO WAKE HIM, FOR IF HE SHOULD WAKE,

SHE MURMURS SOFTLY, THEN WHAT WOULD

BECOME OF ALL OUR SECRET AND IMPLAUSIBLE HOPES?

The sadness of colored glass bottles stands in rows in the disused pharmacy.

I went there once

thinking to play a trick. Oh what a trick.

As if these true books were given up

in guttural jest,

in flawed and flawing laughter—

And how, upon the road this day

at a line of shadowed yards two dogs

turned their heads and beheld me.

Could I but have called to them by name

we might have gone on, saying,

Evening crouches like a banister,

our famed poverty the steps beneath.

A trail of clothespins held my dress on

as I wandered in the wilderness.

I wandered for seven years

and each year I grew immeasurably

more beautiful.

How many, I ask you, how many

lives can there be that pass

without a glance to right or left?

I made a bargain with a mill-stone.

I said, “Be my lover.”

And it replied,

“Better you had died.”

Not Satan, but some other

more shrewd impresario

created Music with a cunning

beyond good, beyond evil.

Therefore Music, like certain

other human tongues,

is not a source but a mutiny.

My mother lives by the smallest road

you could possibly imagine. She walks up it

each day, and down. I think sometimes

that such a road changes our possibilities.

By this I mean, you will never see this road

because I will never tell you

where to find my mother.

Was there a way we were taught

to talk in doorways? Occasions,

I have always felt, should be the guide

to best propriety: a form for speech

while walking; a way to converse

surprised; a method for

engaging someone whom

you have embarrassed. These

and others would be part

of that manual I wish I had created

forty years back. Forty years

might be time enough, if the work

had been addressed by all,

for those now living to know

how to speak not just their minds

but also what they hope.

At the Ambassador’s house the women took up

precisely half the space they ought to have

in order to be pleasing to the eye,

and everyone said savage things to each other,

in hopes they would be overheard.

But I was not amused. Consider this:

My cat had passed away just hours before

on a little plot of grass in the front yard.

In fact, I was carrying it over my shoulder

in a sagging gray canvas bag. And there I was,

there, there, there, as if anything could be solved

by foolish scripted action or the eyes that follow it.

Before he left, he passed me the knife

and I used it to cut my bonds.

It was a very dull knife

and the cutting took years.

Guards would wager on my progress.

“Sooner or later,” they’d say,

while washing the changing fashions

out of their thin and cunningly braided hair.

Her picture came to when I threw the water

over. Its eyes began to follow me.