by Jesse Ball
Der rote Kampfflieger,Berlin, 1917
1 And if there were arguments in the house where I
lived, then I was conscious only of argument. I
sat, listless, on the quiet stairs, mouthing violent
phrases, swearing myself to vanished causes and
collapsed moments. I could bear this, because I
have a stolid face and a grasp of games. I was
involved in a lie so deep that nothing could be
proven, not by me or by anyone I knew. All basis
for deduction was nonexistent. And so I could let
words stream from my mouth, in a hundred
misplaced contexts.
It gets easier, the longer I speak, for you to
recognize what’s false, what’s mine, what’s
made. I recognize as I trace the silhouettes of
famous scabs. There’s something in a nose that
makes a man cross a picket line. I’ll never
cross. Scraped-up knuckles, torn trousers,
scratched boots. It’s only a fight if there’s a
good chance you’ll lose.
And so we remain the best of friends, you and
I, strolling haphazardly across parks, through
districts. I point to the mountains that loom
beside this northern city, having sat atop them,
having sat atop mountains and felt that if the
sky threatened rain, then it was I who was
threatening.
It’s terrible to think I give, never to know how
it will fare with you. Here’s my hope that you’ll
have strings to tie up all the trees. Here’s my
hope that I find you at your best, crouched
beneath a withered sun, among the last, glad
to hear any news, even news as poor as this.
33 What was lovely remained lovely. All the
vestiges of last week’s rain were present in
the smallest gesture, a turn of a slim wrist, the
catcall intonation of voices heard at distance,
saying things we knew once to be true. They
are true still, but not for us, so we must search
these landscapes for new truths, and what was
once the guide will be a guide no longer. There
was a scene I saw once in a film—I was passing
through a room in early evening, eager to be
on to what was next, but I recall the faces of
the famous man and woman and how they
stood. Were they exiled in a foreign place with
sand for trees, the sun in place of seasons? It
seemed so, and I took that with me as I left
the room, took off across the evening city.
These are clues to how I chose to make my
life, these faces, not yours, not mine, but how
I wished they were, how I wished our lives
were patterned on those lives that were best
led before. It seems false that we must make
the same mistakes again and again. I had been
sorry long years before you took my hands
and led me through the falling snow to your
three rooms on the edge of town. I would call
for that again, no comfort save as satiate to
an endless pain. Administer yourself to me as
though I were the boy you met in a dream of
some possible future. You told me of it once,
clear eyes and the palest skin. He led you to
a lake, removed your clothes; he pulled you
in. What could be softer than those waters?
Not this, not this, but my heart, but the
grinding of days, and my heart in your hands.
67 And though the words of my friendliness are
not false, they may
easily seem false, they may easily function falsely
in many of the worlds in which they appear. I was gaunt and pale, a
stranger with a hunger for things that were not
present in my day. And so I spoke of those
things, and called for them. Though I loved the
places in which I sheltered, though hospitality
was the name and signal of my protector, still
I spoke of what was lacking in my heart, and
others, seeing it to be lacking about them, and
in them as well, took their landscapes and their
homes as false, and went looking elsewhere for
sincerity, sincerity having then grown to be
what was lacking, though never would I have
said, arriving, that what was present within
each hold was false. I was a lover, of nothing
living and nothing dead, and what I loved had
not yet, perhaps would never come to pass. Yet
it seemed but distanced from me by this wall,
by that door. Should I win the heart of she, or
he, should I drive a stake into cold packed
earth and make a place to live my life … each
thing became less as soon as it became. It was
years before a first tentative step could be
taken toward any comfort. Such years are not
remembered. Such seriousness is compelling
to thought but not to memory. Days when we
can see our lives stretched out in all directions,
they are themselves ciphers, altitudes on a flat
map, as lines verge on the obvious, then fall
again into hazy misapprehension.
99 To move your hand just so, and conjure for an
audience that is always being born. A poet can
afford few tricks, for he is easily seen through.
Whole generations may be warned against
him, and still he beguiles those more willing,
those who see because they care to, because it
is their freedom to accept what others discard,
to populate dead roads with the living who
wander, one question on their lips. And have
you been fooled? And will you be fooled
again? I laid a trail in the daybreak woods with
the carcasses of tiny animals, each of whom
loved me well. And I was sad to do this, but
there was grayness to the light, and the killing
seemed correct. What if the trail ends in
underbrush, no answer but the crushing
weight of hot air in the lungs? Where would
you go next? Where else would you go
looking for the inspiration that’s driven each
night through your skull with a hammer the
size of your life? And there are questions
leading on to questions…. Who could lift
such a hammer, who would and why? There
are reasons only in so much as we have need
of them, and surely you can see, we have no
need to know the origin of things. If I were a
madman, scratching statements in the sides of
trees with rusty clippers found beneath my
bed, why, I would write a hundred things I had
no business knowing, and my business in
knowing them would be the life of madness.
What we drove home that night, what we
drove before us with the force of our
intentions, was a spirit that was living alone in
the hills but that now lives off the heat of your
breath, the factory of your limbs. I had a mind
to tell you, when we played the cloud game and
lay for hours inventing—well, I could not see
the clouds for anything but clouds. Yet I could
see your mind, and your thoughts, and I could
tell them to you before you ever knew that
day, and thinking there was nothing for it but
to name a place to which we might escape.
Well, we have escaped. What names will we
give ourselves now? We may build a fire that
is so large that there is no standing about it, but
only standing in it, and we will watch it take
us, and we will watch it take all that we know,
and we will call this fire the happiest time of
our life, and it will be our life, but we will not
be living it. We will have lived it. We will look
back upon the living of it. The things we
cannot anticipate are so pale in memory. I was
struck by a car, hurled through the air, and I
do not remember. I was a child then, living
beside a road. Many years have passed.
156 And who can weather the contingencies of
belief, emerging to say, I know why I believe
what I believe? There are few such, and I am
certain that they do not speak, or if they do, they
do not speak to me. It is not for them I write
these lines, not for them I make an empty place
at table. And it is not for you, though you may
sit there at table, though you may read all I write
and say, may know what I know, have what I
have. Say this to yourself, there have been
casualties in this life, who will not see what I
have done, who are gone off now to compose
the world that I love, to make of themselves the
very wind that comes of an afternoon when
everything living resounds, and everything
dead sings in empty echo. Say this and know
that my belief is true, without knowing why;
join me in the passing of columns along an
empty grass run road, and act if you can, for
properly, there is no audience to be a part of, and
so you are no part of it. Forced to the stage,
make no complaint about the hour, about your
lack of preparation, your untrained tongue. For
the tongue is trained to itself, and taut with force
of mind, and what you have to tell can truly be
lost and never heard again.
We are a species, a splash in the waters of a
land-bound lake, and we may speak in turn, as
long as we may, and when we are finished
there will be no one to speak, or hear, or write,
or dream. It is of consequence to note the
passing moments, the manners of our days.
Allegiances and hands are held in the
chambered heart, and it is filling itself,
shuddering great arcs of light, of blood, of
liquid so heavy with animate that it makes us
ourselves to move, and moves us to thought.
“To thought? Toward what?” mumbles the
chorus, in vague dissent. A row of trapeze
artists in an empty theater, who rock slowly on
a central beam, they disagree. It is their slow
rocking that troubles me most, and the
awkward angles their knees assume, their
elbows take: such figures are proof of
something. It is not given yet to know of what.
201 But do not fail me—for even now I hear my
name being called. I turn, arm still stretched
by the small demands of bandages, practically
wrapped, as at first, with a torn dress. We’ve
been through this. No one’s calling. I’m asleep
on a bench, and it is forbidden to be outdoors
between the hours of 8 and 9. It is forbidden
to be curious about the hours of 8 and 9. It is
forbidden to mention them.
All of these tricks I employ may be wasted. It’s
easy to see oneself under one’s own spell. But I’m
sure you duck better than I. I’m sure you’ve seen
me coming, the length of the street. (Determined,
with wild hair, narrowed eyes.) My eyes
are always narrowed. It is the narrowing of
myth, and helps me to make out some hoped-
for importance in the hunching of men, in the
Saracen mathematics of which we claim control.
219 But mastery, as we know, is the act of the
desperate. One doesn’t need it if one has
flowers, a pinafore, a carved toy, a jackknife
and trees to hand.
I’ve spent decades beneath low ceilings just to
learn vowels, sounds that may be used to warn.
Much that I needed has passed away, and with
it the need. Being human means continue.
Quiet ghosts kneel behind doors wherein the
pledges they once held are daily broken. And
I? I have been given cause and speak. Such a
curious gift—it hurries the passage of time,
and makes consequent the factories of roads,
foundries in which the weight of our footsteps
was once predicted.
234 You were with me in those years before the
century turned. Season after season of
indolence, the play of voices against boughs of
leaves. The world was screened by a world
made of cloth, painted with the faces of the
people I knew. It could be parted with a hand,
with a gesture, but this was a thing little
known. And so we grew fond, and made no
gestures, and saw in this cloth world fortnights
expire and stretch uselessly on the garden
steps. And when the party had passed down
those long steps from the solarium, we two
were left behind, peering down over the west
wall into the kennels built below. There was
disorder in the air. The dogs were passing back
and forth at the base of the wall, scrambling on
each other’s shoulders and scraping at the
stone. I said, half to myself: There will be an
end to this, that we have always known. A
messenger came at dusk, and what we know,
the dogs know. They point like a needle and
show us the weather that rises even now, in the
deep places beyond the hills. This gathering of
things beyond sight—it is my future.
My hands shook then, as they always have, as
they still do, and my clothes were simple, but
there was no death in me. What could I have
said to preserve that season? What vowels
could have moved us to a new delight? If I
sometimes dream of a life without poetry, then
it is a false dream. I am lucky to wake in this
body, lucky to wake in this time. Lucky to
wake with you beside me, listening still.
267 On film the mummer’s dance seems lethal.
Against the sky planes hardly move. Context
both obscures and abuts meaning. Difficulty
pinions hope. Hope is meaning. I woke every
day for a week with an image in my head: a
ring of trees, a picnic, a sundress. I’ve bought
the wine, I’ve listed the perishables. The cloth
is folded on a side table. Spring reflects itself
in shop windows, in the warmth of stoops.
Like kissing, it seldom is what it is. Like
prayer, it has an object. Like instinct, it’s a
thing of skin. Each spring I say to myself: The
winter is kindness, the spring is grief. We are
loveliest when
grieving, buoyant in the salt of
a water that stings at wounds, that does its best
to drown us in the foreignness of a substance
that once was familiar. Equally, we choose to
keep it present. We leave the city and take a
room in an empty town, just to walk the beach
at dusk. Under a seat in the old opera house,
we may find, if luck is with us, a tiny golden
ball. Though it is not the sun, it is similar, and
dangerous in the same way.
290 If there were seven, then I was the eighth, not
wholly present, disputed, unarrived. Doors
were barred. Windows were locked. And the
girl who loved me loved the space beside her
in the bed, though it went unfilled, night after
night. When I went to claim it, it was there
still, and fit me cleanly, taut to my every
muscle. It was my place and bent when I bent,
sang when I sang. What makes the fire run
from house to house? In moments half the city
is ablaze, and flocks have risen to the sky.
There is room yet for you in comprehension
of fire, of wind, room yet for you in the
watching. Those who counted may not have
thought of you. Yes, they have left you out,
they have overlooked you. They do not know
this better way with numbers that says: I am
nine, though there are ten present, though I am
not present; that says; I am the origin of
numbers, and of numbering, and mine is the
final count. Never believe admission can be
denied. Admit what you will, letting gentle
breezes through the open door. The hat shop
is madness. Certain birds love raw meat. In the
dawn, the report of a poacher’s gun travels far.
If I, out taking the air, heard such a sound, I’d
never tell. We who carry broken watches as if
they were sound—we have a contract kept in
a hidden place. We will keep it there awhile.
319 What does it mean to be adored? All of the
table settings have gone astray, and yet we are
striving to prepare ourselves for supper. The
door to the street is open, and though it is
summer, I am forced to ask myself, “What is
summer, what is a thing for which I have
waited so long?” There is no food in the
pantry, just empty shelves. The flicker of
motion in the street—someone is going home.
But you are less able than they. You are at
home. And the terror of the minute hand, the
long failure of hours, the discrepancy of