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

He woke. It was afternoon and quiet. The sun was cradling his mossy bed with a hazy slow light. He went to the well and looked down it. Old smells seemed to rise and greet his nose. He remembered the faces; he remembered what was at the bottom of the well. He felt then that he had come round to the beginning of a world that was gone.

Away across the landscape, the boy’s grandfather ran on skinny legs, waving his arms. But the boy did not hear him. The boy was standing on the side of the well. The grandfather yelled and redoubled his pace, struggling to run through the bracken. But it was no good. Into the well the boy went. Into the well he went for good. And he fell for a very long time.

And now we have come to that last country of THURSDAYS and JULY.

At five, I relented and began to speak.

For much of my life I forgot

that this might even be regretted.

I began with the anger of friends

and gathered it beneath my coat.

It kept me warm through first

one winter, then another; I

became grateful, and so the anger went away.

I sought it again, with thin hands,

a hypnotist’s assurance.

I was told do not provoke it, and I,

I listened well. I took my fists

to the glassworks where the lovers

I once became with a trumpet call

were arrayed in fine rows, two by two.

They were astonished,

they who had gone apart so long.

Come back to us, they cried, their voices

thin like old glass. Come back, you fool.

SO I TOOK THEM TOO beneath my coat

and called it precaution.

I loved a man who was a scholar of war,

and I hated war, and loved it

even as I hated it. For there are places

where the dust is entertaining like a clavier

each mote abrupt like a struck and filigreed note,

there and then gone, where horsemen,

mercenary, intent on the several work of death,

gallop through books upon the table,

laying siege to centuries of imaginings,

as men in armored lines advance,

their spears like spun cloth.

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

through the winter hills to bring me news.

They whisper through the tiny window kept for just this reason

in long syllables that reach to my long ears.

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

and birds are fools who talk of nothing,

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

of in kind ways. In this

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

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

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

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

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

exposure, as children do in books.

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

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

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

Belie the page upon which this pen sits

like a craven monarch whose kingdom

is as utter and as useless as his fool.

Belie the doldrums that assail

the wizened faces I once bore

in sickness as a raging child.

Belie the becoming and the knowing

of what little I might become, when set

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

Belie the dastard clock, the vagrant

calendar, the leash of seasons, the stunted

grace of graveyards.

Belie the waltzes, the saddened mazurkas that infect

even the joyous as they dance.

And so, in the afternoon I am often

caught feeling as though I’ve gone missing

from the life I was to lead.

This is the chief pleasure, I tell myself,

of young poets.

I followed a ribbon that trailed from a hand

and it led through the grazing of crowds upon pavement,

through laities and simpering voices in evening,

past lives that might be given me in confidence

and confidences that cannot be given in life,

through the drawers of perished infants, where the bed

linens still keep the traces of tiny bodies,

and beside ladders upon which men stand

as on a willful pride that harms all those beneath,

all down, all down at last, to the harbor

where such ribbons trail the water in a hundred places.

I cannot find my own amidst so many,

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

foolhardy into a passing boat.

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

As if there were anything left to do but row.

Prussian blue, the coat

I thought to wear, but cannot,

down into the morning town.

I am a great anticipator, building

my empire with such things as

coats and colors, unexpected visits,

dogs that take their leashes in their

mouths, and gentle-eyed rascals

who follow each other

up through the limbs of trees.

Brown cotton, and how we have all forgotten

so much that we had promised.

Aching then where light

plays upon long floors

in the cleverest rooms of the skull,

I proceed to become

that which I have admired in

those many I admire.

Is it enough that this ambition holds

one moment? Two would be

miraculous, and three, as good as true.

I count the blemishes

that stain my good name.

But who can count so long?

A good name — what use is it

but for causing jealousy in idle hearts?

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

Not a carnival but loud

unexplainable noise. The sound

of someone being chased.

Dogs waiting silently beneath hedges.

A man sifting flour on a park bench

no reason given.

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

as you bid me. I have learned to roll

a coin below my knuckles. I have written down now

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

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

no longer turn only to what’s true

when I speak of my experience. Sainted men

wander in forests that have been set to rows.

And here, today, already I have found a stone

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

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

overhead. But water names wind from within,

as storms proceed in hinges, all through the captive

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

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

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

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

and I cannot say how long it has been bleeding.