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

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what is about to happen. But we,

obtaining for ourselves some lasting thing — we

are present where pretending has no joy.

What’s childish is done without thought of the future.

Children’s hands — can we call them needles?

Come with me, then, and turn your hands in a lathe,

lay them desperately against a whirring stone.

Out beyond the window there are crowds waiting

and waiting in narrow avenues of stone.

Cleverness is no salve. It wants too much.

It expects that it has won, or will.

You may learn to play an instrument, and carry it with you

and have it be a muscle, and always present.

That’s what’s best about people—

loving the world enough to confuse it for oneself.

But what is a statue? Can a farm be a statue?

Can a city? How long does a thing pause before it’s static?

A camera with an open shutter in a high ceilinged room.

We pass by a hundred times invisibly.

I am invisible, you may say, in that photograph,

just as you say,

my wife is standing over there, behind that wall.

There is a door, and a screen, and then she.

Can you imagine what she’s thinking?

16

The speed of trees must fascinate.

An oak tree on a slope releases acorns

and suddenly surrounds itself with oak trees. Oak trees are running

down to the water, they are running all along with the drive.

They ring a place. They drive from that spot in rings.

An old oak was there. It fell one day, in the midst of its dreaming.

You who write on trees, who carve into them,

be careful—

we must take care—

for, hold up your hand before your face — you cannot even see it,

so dark it has suddenly become.

17

A woman is torn in two by the skin feat. She takes her life.

She was on the edge of it. She felt it there,

but it was rotting. It had a stench.

I wanted to cry to her of the sea,

of wood that is called ash, of gas jets on a stove.

But pregnancy has no shape — that is its secret.

It isn’t round at all — it goes beyond itself.

The sun is wrapped in a blanket — yet you feel it from a hundred feet.

Suicide is a carrying also — a pregnancy also.

One carries a cold word, a thought without shape

until it is possible.

One works as an expression of the limbs. Food is gotten, so too a roof.

But there is no use to dancing

if you are yourself—

isn’t movement a mask? isn’t it a costume?

Are you so poor that you walk in only one way,

that you speak and act from one role?

Learn whole lexicons to people your theatre,

and surely know your audience

is no audience at all — just clatter

from a remembered hallway.

18

A bridge is being built. You may find the approach

a short walk from the place you’re standing in.

There are you know, places where when you go there

no one can be admitted.

There are gardens like this — whole sections

of city parks, low places in forests.

What is it holds in a place like that, what matches

us so well that we, appearing there,

feel gone beyond ourselves, and knowing,

the sight of an empty landscape isn’t human?

For we aren’t human — not when we’re alone.

19

The skin feat reports like a drum. Did I say it was breath?

It isn’t breath at all — it’s blood, the beating of blood.

We hear a drumming in the hills. We are out walking

and the drumming comes to us, and I do not look at you.

I am far too afraid.

20

But grief — are we not giving grief its place?

The skin feat is a wardrobe of costumes, and grief is the softest one,

as soft as a cooking knife.

We must love the dead, and learn to sense their finger- tips that trail

and never leave us.

And so, turning from them, we do not leave them. Grief is,

like age, a visible grain that runs the world’s length,

but cannot be followed.

Violet glass of late afternoon when evening will be riotous.

21

Masts fare so well on ships — and how proud we are of them.

Nothing has ever been admired

as sails are, as masts.

The skin feat unfolds your folded limbs, your legs, hands,

arms, chest.

Raise yourself in all weakness, not despite it, but in it.

We receive because of circumstance — not gifts, that’s why

boasting is foolish. That’s why

passing strangers in the early morning

you are not afraid

to look at their eyes

yes, there, where the light pours out.

22

But can you be covetous

of some costume you have made?

The skin feat does not set itself against things.

We don’t frown on possession.

Who doesn’t love, like a rat,

to fill the house with objects, to reflect our selves

in everything we feel kindred to

and gather that to us?

Only — let there be cycles.

Go one day from your fastness

out with a small sack. Five things you like

and you won’t come back.

23

Am I afraid to be the way I speak?

One’s hopes must always be larger than oneself. One

must always

reach with thoughts where hands can’t go.

The work of a life is to find something indomitable.

I love the color gray, and see,

how fine it would have been

to guess at fire, and to have been right.

The one who did that

had no thought for the future.

24

Be easy, be easy. Feel my paper hand

warm upon your own.

Do I love you? You are reading this book,

a book of my heart, and there are things clouding the air.

I expect that you will be hurt today. That you will be hurt

today, and the next day, the next and the next.

The ones who go through their hurt, they don’t impress

me.

Neither the ones who collapse beneath it.

Show me the ones who embrace it — who tie it tight

like a cravat, but unremarkable.

They cannot say afterwards even what prompted

that day, the necktie.

I am bound, they say, for a funeral, my own,

in a place not of my choosing

where cornflowers have been threaded

into a rope that anyone may carry.

25

We see animals and want what’s theirs,

but are afraid to give up even one thing our own.

Don’t you see? You’re already carrying

as much as can be held. You have always done so.

Becoming does not mean hazarding what you were—

it means letting it fall away.

Each time you cross the room, you will step

delicately over

the skin of your old life.

26

I tie ribbons in my beard, on my wrists, my ankles.

Is it violence you fear? I have fought others and laid them

down

and I have been hurt myself in the same way.

The body is so strong! It is covered in bark. It is poisonous to touch!

I have also been a coward and stood by

and afterwards helped a friend pick up his teeth.

Do you see my tooth? he said.

I said, a bit of it is there. And there’s another piece. He said,

the teeth break when they hit against the other teeth.

The sound of the skin feat is teeth breaking.

Do you feel the preciousness of your teeth?

27

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