March Book Read online

  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

  Problems of Warfare

  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.

  Another will soon pass him. Behind them, bees,

  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.