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

Of course, one’s empty closets are always filling up with children unexpectedly. Of course, that is the price set, the price that must be paid to live the life I do, in the skin of an owl, on the branch of an evening maple.

Fortunately for me the nurses were all blind and my nakedness went undetected all through the first and second parts of this complicated Amazonian hospital in the faltering construction of a dream.

Without knowing the names of the men who came this way once, gathered up in this same foolishness which I call strength, I rejoice nonetheless in their companionship in their invisible sovereignty — for surely each has been and is suzerain of some single portion of this clever map? Today I resolved to count things in days to take the uselessness of the week and the day of the week and their names and make it still more useless by lettering any letters seventeenth Sunday of the year, fifth Tuesday, thirty-second Friday. Yes, yes, you have perhaps received already one of my frantic letters dated thus on the back: Thirty-fourth Thursday of my twenty-seventh year. I wonder if you took heart at this small uselessness. I wonder if you smiled and braved your way through some season of filth and disease using small kindnesses that I bestowed on you as breviaries or crutches, as pigeons to be mocked and chased. Chase and they shall lead you to the cote where I sit with a good warm bottle of spirits and a fist of chocolate. We shall go on sitting in secret and we shall, I promise you, let no one know what of we speak. And how the portioned day advances never by portion. I refuse its fingertips when they come slipping through my pockets and setting my coat upon my shoulders. Merely because another wants me to go out? Is that reason enough? It is clear to me that the greater part of happiness is to be found in spending as much time as possible roused and gone out from the place in which one sleeps. Yet how to do this simple thing? Even now I write “roused and gone out” yet I’m within my chamber — is it unseemly not to take one’s own advice? But I do, I do. I am a taker of my own advice such as there has never been in this world, and there are many who think me difficult because of it. But there are others — and how sweet their faces are, come calling in my recollection — who see my gladness in the midst of my contrary nature and it is my gladness they go greeting. It is my gladness therefore that goes to greet them that goes walking with them, impromptu, incandescent, ensconced like a glittering mote in the eye of a sometimes pharaoh who calls upon cats and only cats to navigate this much folded kingdom of days.

Going out now and then with a heavy wig upon his shoulders Marzipan was soon overwhelmed by the trading of insults that any outward endeavor soon become in these forthright, claptrap, and cancerous times. Have I shown you the masks I made in these days? the lovely daily masks made for business purposes? A mask for the bakers, a mask for the bank, a mask for gardening, for correspondence. I took myself here and there like a leaf in a dry season, framing my replies with all of my heart. If I knew the interlocuter, if I praised the arbiter with a moment’s pause in my rambling interrogations, then who can speak slightingly of my influence? Some are born in latter times with great capability for grasping certain facts, certain ideas, but not others, and so, when they go wandering in their father’s garden that is the past they receive only half the take of their ears. And I, little gray flower at the pond’s edge, make no case for myself on the long corridors of history. My time was wasted in speaking with frogs in treating with minor devils of time and armature. I who lapped happily at my own edges, gracing the lips of an October machination, was soon party to the dream sendings of just such an incorporeal statesman of the old sort, bearded, you understand, decorated in blood (all duelists of note, retaining nothing if not their word as bond). They sowed amongst themselves no good season giving onto season and now the walls shudder before the might of an evening no parlor or parlor game can dispel. Go out Millicent, to the porch and see what he wants, go at once.

M. Lion Tamer, a puppeteer of no real note, begins each performance with the saying of a Roman proverb. How much I like him for that. Yes, that and the press of the crowd as Christmas nears. Lights have been hung throughout the city center and happiness like coins defeats for a moment the ground of sorrow.

In a golden room I will resolve on all my futures, placing days like ranked and filed soldiers into passes, bridgeheads and river crossings that must at all costs be held.

Not without fault then the arrival of the vain, the timorous, the sounding of their names one by one on the rooftops where we wait with hooks and nets for their leader who comes in the guise of concealed laughter. In my coat, the pistol that’s to be used. My hand was trembling when I took it. I am young and not used to these things.

My love I want only to go to the sunlit chamber above tables and chairs I would push aside spreading space I would lay a sheet upon the ground a sheet of soft cotton and I would say is it soft enough my love? and you would stretch and lie upon it and rise, saying, “it is not soft enough,” and I would lay another sheet upon the first, saying, my love is it soft enough? and you would stretch and lie upon it and rise saying only, my love it is not soft enough. and so for the laying of nineteen sheets, of softest cotton, and the sun.

Not through any change of color do they blend with their environment but rather through a native instinct. First he matches the footsteps of a fellow and seems to go with him, seems in company. Next he is beside a woman — he seems her husband. Her child immediately appears as his daughter. So convincing the part, so regal. But does she take his hand? We cannot say for sadly we have lost them in the press on this hot day in one or another delinquent later month.

It was a sort of typewriter, but for writing on thin stone tablets. They watched as the man expertly tapped away here and there on the keys. In a moment, something was prepared! He pushed it into a slot in the wall. A door opened on the far side of the room.

— Some sort of death certificate, said Macalister. But for whom?

— Oh, don’t say that, said Lorna. It can’t be.

They shrunk together against the hard wall of the cell.

Could it be that the Aztec god was an enormous stone adding machine?

Macalister thought back. If only he’d kept a hold of his “thunder-stick.” Then they wouldn’t be in this mess. He glared impotently at the guard, who was busy drawing a pictograph of Lorna in her modern-style underwear.

A lie had been spread throughout the court, that he who would kill the King would have the Queen’s gratitude and would rule beside her. When a man rose up and killed the King, he was captured by the guards and brought before the Queen, who gave him but one prerogative, that he would forever set the manner of punishment that should befall regicides, and that he himself would begin this new tradition. To which the man, sensible of the great honor being done him, replied with a complicated and elaborate manner of death, one that would require an enormous preparation of years, and the expenditure of great wealth. And the Queen set the preparations in motion, and put the resources of her kingdom to this task, and laboured beside the man for fifteen years, until she was no longer a great beauty, and he seemed to her to be no longer the man who had killed her husband, but another man, of newer and more valuable vintage. Yet to his death the man went, in a ceremony so grand that the kingdom was beggared. The execution itself took an entire year, during which no one in the land was allowed to labor. General fasting was required, with the taking of only water allowed, and only that once a day. When the man died in the specified manner, of grief at the loss of a kingdom of lives, the land was barren and corpseridden, and the next traveler to come that way was puzzled at the immense arena which stood in the midst of an empty city, with the body of the regicide set atop a pillar at its very center.