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
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 youn
g 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.
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 go
d’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.