A Table of Green Fields

by Guy Davenport

  THE YELLOW OF TIME

  In his Roman garden Bertel Thorvaldsen sat reading Anacreon. A basket of Balkan melons, squash, and runner beans sat under the cool of the fig tree, delivered by a girl out of Shakespeare, soon to be carried into the kitchen by Serafina the cook. He had drunk a gourd of well water brought in a stone jug from the country. It tasted of gourd and stone, and of the depths of the earth. Johan Thomas Lundbye's landscape of a Danish meadow hung in his sitting room. There were letters from Copenhagen, Paris, Edinburgh. On his cabinet of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine coins stood branches of oleander in a yellow jug.

  9

  —Morning, halfling. You look tumbled and slept in. It's good you can come early on Saturdays.

  —Is there more of that coffee? It was time to get up as soon as I got to sleep.

  —Am I to ask intelligent questions or leave your private life private?

  Thoughtful grin.

  —You probably don't want to know. Mikkel is a maniac and I'm his understudy.

  —What about we sit in the sun awhile, with our coffee, in the courtyard. You can skinny down to briefs. Cool air and warm sun, with roses and hollyhocks, lavender and sage, to unsnarl cobwebs from the brain.

  —O wow.

  —An orange juice and a Vienna bread too?

  —Better and better. Gunnar, you're a grown-up Lutheran and all that, but you're a pal, too, aren't you, because the briefs I'm wearing are Mikkel's, or mine and Mikkel's swapped back and forth. Mama makes we wear snow-white underwears here, like I was going to the doctor's, but as I spent the night at Mikkel's, if you're following this.

  —Are you embarrassed or bragging? Sounds wonderfully imaginative and comradely to my evil ears.

  —Fun. Make Samantha hold her nose. Why evil?

  —Evil's a vacuum, they say, where good might be. Nature abhors a vacuum. Therefore nature abhors, and excludes, evil. Grundtviggian logic, wouldn't you say? Being friendly with Mikkel is good sound nature.

  —You think?

  —I know.

  Long silence.

  —Nature's good.

  —What else could she be?

  10

  A time machine, H. G. Wells's as modified by Alfred Jarry, made of brass, walnut, and chromium, with manufacturer's plate in enamel on tin. Levers, dials, a gyroscope, all real.

  Nikolai, older, in bronze as the pilot. Trim Edwardian clothes, scarf and backward cycling cap.

  11

  The girl Samantha was like the Modigliani on the big push-pin cork board where forty-eleven postcards, notes, letters, Parisian metro tickets, photographs made a collage for Nikolai to study while he doffed and donned his clothes.

  —His mama had, yes, he answered Samantha's question, put it to him, in her arch voice moreover.

  —I know mamas, Samantha said with her fetching smile.

  —That Gunnar who was at somebody's house where she was, bald brainy people from the university, needed a handsome boy to pose for a statue without a stitch the Georg Brandes Society had commissioned, Ariel he's called, in a play by Vilhelm Shakespeare, and she said she had a rascally son.

  —A sensitive son, I imagine she said.

  An understanding grin from a crush of soccer jersey pulled up and off.

  —Who's just going from cute to goodlooking.

  —To adolescent beauty, and who at an astute guess instantly saw in a model's fee skateboards backpacks naughty comicbooks and revolting phonograph records.

  On one knee, undoing shoes.

  —Ha. What about, the score of the first Bach partita, and new fiddle strings, and these new briefs, see.

  Gunnar with sharpened chisels.

  —I'm getting acquainted, Samantha said, with this Danish angel with the unangelic plumbing fixtures.

  —Do angels pee? Are they even oxygen breathers?

  —They're all male in Scripture, I believe. But they don't fuck, as each is the only member of a unique species, and species don't crossbreed.

  —What a dreary place, heaven.

  —I'm not a species, Nikolai said. Gunnar, did you do this man in handcuffs here in the photograph?

  —That's Martin Luther King. It's in a church garden over in Jylland, out from Aarhus.

  PONIES ON THE FYN

  Riding a pony naked through a meadow red with poppies on a sweet day in June, like Carl Nielsen at Østerport (commented on by mallards and green-shanked moorhens as O a big one with six legs), Nikolai drank the spring air like a Pawnee and looked for buffalo in the hollows and eagles in the clouds.

  —Steady, said Gunnar. You need a break?

  —He's miles away, Samantha said. I can see it in his eyes.

  —What? Nikolai asked.

  —Nikolai's rarely here. He turns up most business-like, sheds his britches, takes his pose, and goes away like Steen to fight the Nazis with the Churchill Gang or in his space pod through phosphorescent interplanetary dust to galaxies with forests of celery and creeping red slime.

  13

  A session of drawing, Gunnar intent, Nikolai bored, tolerant, behaved.

  —Why are grown-ups so dumb?

  —Those who are in your words dumb, friend Nikolai, have always been like that. They were dumb children.

  Nikolai thought about this. The silence contained bees, a violin passage of lazy intricacies, a dense stillness.

  —On the other hand you have a kind of point. Bright children do grow up to be dull. I wish I knew why. The century's mystery is that intelligent children become teen-age louts, who grow up to be pompous dullards. I'd like to know why.

  —Is this a trick question?

  —Brancusi at thirty-four had the liveliness to begin to be Brancusi.

  —You talk to me as if I were grown up.

  —You want me to talk to you as if you were half-witted?

  —Only some grown-ups are morons. Most of 'em. You're OK, Gunnar.

  —Thanks.

  —Tell me more about Korczak, the republic of children, Poland.

  14

  —It's a meadow that shades off into a marsh with reeds and then does sand banks into the cold wet Baltic, out from Hellerup, we can take the train, want to go? You'll turn honey brown.

  —Now?

  —Just thought of it, so let's do it.

  Their locomotive was the Niels Bohr.

  —If you thought of this friendly outing, as you call it, when I turned up to pose, how come Edith had a thermos and snack ready in that satchel?

  —Those pants, Nikolai. With the obliging fit.

  Imp's grin, musing eyes.

  —They're this short from the store, and then Mama took in the crotch at the inseam. Packages my mouse neater. If your look means was it her idea, well no. She's so good at sewing that it took her only a minute to do it, and she whistled in a meaningful way while she was clicking it through the sewing machine. A dry cough in the handing over, but never a word. So how come Edith knew you were going to these marshes?

  —A meadow all greenest grass and one million wild flowers with a white strand at its foot. A marsh, too, with grebes and mallards.

  —How come Edith knew you were going to this midge heaven? —Second sight. They have it in the Faeroes.

  Imp's grin, silly eyes.

  Hellerup, a back street, a lane, a field, the meadow sloping down to the strand.

  —Drawing block, pencils, sammidges, sunglasses, said Nikolai of the canvas satchel's contents. What's in the thermos?

  —A nice couple I know, can't keep their hands off each other, live in that house we passed, in a maze of box hedges. They're now, poor dears, in the United States, at some conference on the economics of cows. This is their property, so we can make ourselves at home.

  Curious gaze at Gunnar, a twitched nose, speculative crimping of the corners of the mouth.

  —The meadow is a recurring image in Rimbaud. It's his image of the world after the flood. The world anew after being drowned. Shakespeare grew up in meadows, a country boy. —Rimbaud.r />
  —He called them a harpsichord. The harpsichord of the meadow.

  —I like it when you babble, Gunnar. Go back to Rimbaud. —No underwear.

  —And one problem, learn from experience, with abridged and minimized pants is that you can't get them off over your sneakers.

  —If you didn't have sneakers the size of boats and socks as thick as towels, you'd have a chance.

  —Grown-ups are so fucking tiresome, you know? Who tied these laces? not me. Blue toes and heels to these socks, see.

  —Grown-ups know that you take your shoes off before your pants. Rimbaud was a French poet, probably the greatest of our time. He quit writing at 18, became a vagabond.

  —I can't wait to have hair all over the top of my feet and toes, like yours. Drives Samantha crazy, I imagine.

  Upper lip lifted, Thorvaldsen, eyes dimmed.

  —Paisley underwears, what there is of them. Recite me a poem by this Rimbaud.

  —Samantha's gift. One has to wear gifts.

  O saisons, ô chateaux.

  Quelle âme est sans défauts?

  O saisons, ô chateaux,

  J'ai fait la magique étude

  Du bonheur, que nul n'élude.

  —Hey! You're beautiful, Gunnar. You've always been big shoulders under a sweater, and raunchy jeans, and forty-four shoes, and underneath you're an Olympic diver.

  I see apples,

  I see pears,

  I see Gunnar's

  Underwears.

  Oh seasons, right? Oh chateaux. And something about magic happiness, yuss? This sun's great. I can feel myself turning honey brown.

  —What soul is without its faults? I've made a magic study of happiness, or a study of the magic of happiness. Let's look at the marsh.

  —Swap dicks with you. Now I see why Samantha drools when she looks at you. Why didn't you bring her, too?

  —Two males dressed like Adam are free of the electricity that charges the air when Eve's along.

  —I'd be an idiot if I were hung like you.

  —It will grow if you drink your buttermilk, eat your spinach, and play with it diligently.

  O vive lui, chaque fois

  Que chante le coq gaulois.

  —There are nests in the marsh grass, grebe or mallard. Every time the French rooster crows cockadoodle, cockadoodle, cock-adoodledo!

  —Let happiness thrive every time the cock crows. How many times they painted you in the last century, a naked boy on the ocean's edge, Peder Kroyer, Carl Larsson, Anna Ancher, all those masters of tone. The Finn Magnus Enckell. Hammershøi was their Vermeer. There's a charming story of Nexø's about naked spadgers on the beach, somewhere around here.

  Devil dance on shining sand flat.

  —How come?

  —Symbolism, idealism, Walt Whitman, the Mediterranean past, hope, the beauty of the subject, Thorvaldsen, the Danish heart.

  —Did Edith pack any peapods?

  Fingers flipping at mosquitoes, midges, gnats.

  —Nietzsche and Georg Brandes. We could go see.

  —Hey!

  —Walk up.

  —I'm too big to ride piggyback, wouldn't you say?

  —On my shoulders.

  —Ho!

  —Ho!

  —What's in the thermos is cold milk. Edith thought it the only tipple for a growing Danish boy.

  Fingers wrecking Gunnar's hair.

  —I figured you'd go silly.

  Legs out straight, Gunnar holding his shins, Nikolai leaned forward to stare eye to eye upside down.

  —Catch! said Nikolai, doubling and pitching forward into Gunnar's arms, deadweight limp, laughing.

  —Dig into the satchel and see what Edith calls a picnic. Should I make any remark, however friendly, about the incumbent of the diminished short pants pointing to the sky?

  Downward stare, mock surprise.

  —I guess I get a hard on when I'm happy. Sammidges in wax paper. Bananas. Eggs, Vienna breads with raisins and walnuts. Brownish pink, stalk and bulb, scrotum round and tight. Silly grin, happy eyes.

  —It lifts and waggles when you're posing. At your age, it has a mind of its own.

  —Yours doesn't? It has my mind, too, sometimes.

  —The foreskin slides back, I hope? Some don't.

  Foreskin withdrawn from palest violet glans by a ready fist.

  —Why don't some don't?

  —Why do some people have webbed toes and six fingers? Nature has an awful lot to do in designing a body. She did very well with you.

  —This sammidge is country pate, smells like gym socks worn for two summer weeks, and Gruyere. This one's ham, mayonnaise, and olives.

  —One of each. Faeroe Islanders disapprove of choice, on religious principle, I think.

  Nikolai among meadow flowers, eating his Vienna bread first.

  —Banana next, then sammidges.

  —It's a free country.

  —Up there, blued out contrary to all you'd think, are the stars, too many to count, in boundless space, and the air that belongs to our planet only, and here at the bottom of the air, us, in a meadow in Denmark, full of wildflowers, ants, microbes, worms, and grass, and under us layers of chalk and clay and solid rock down to we don't know what, but whatever it is, it gets to a center, and starts the other half of a symmetry on out to the other side of the world opposite to where we are now, which is halfway between New Zealand and King Edward VII Land in Antarctica, pods of mooing whales and icebergs with penguins standing around on them gabbling with each other, the Nautilus with Kaptajn Nemo playing Buxtehude on his organ, great C-Minor chords thrilling through jellyfish, and then back to us and the mayflies and the grasshoppers, and here we are, Gunnar Rung, playing hookey from chiselling an Ariel out of stone, and Nikolai Bjerg, twelve-year-old Lutheran with his richard stiff.

  —You're going to be a poet.

  —You did hug me, you know. When Mikkel masturbates, and comes, it's like the white of an egg all over his tummy, maybe two eggs.

  —Mikkel's how old?

  —Thirteen, but advanced. He says he could come at eleven. This is fun, Gunnar. I should have brought a kite, the breeze is just about perfect. Ouch! Ant on my balls.

  —Bring Mikkel around sometimes. Your best friend, is he?

  Talking while chewing, eyes closed to think, thumb and fingertips wobbling glans.

  —Because.

  —When I start the Korczak group, I'll need several kids, girls and boys. You and Mikkel as friends, holding hands, or arms around each other, or somesuch. I want something Korczak would like. He loved his children. I ask you if Mikkel is your best friend, and you answer because, which probably isn't bright.

  —Good eats, especially as consumed backwards. Actually, these are Mikkel's pants.

  15

  —The interleaving high outward stretch of the tall oak, Samantha said. That's how this Greek poem begins, by Antiphilos. A good shadower, euskion, for phylassomenois, people looking for shade, from the ungiving heat of the sun. Its leaves are thicker together than tiles on a roof. And is home to the ringdove, and home to the cricket. And then it says: let me be at home here, too, at perpendicular noon. That's all the poet says, with a hint at the end that he's going to have a nap in the cool shade under the oak.

  —There's Holberg's oak over by the old library, Nikolai said, and that sacred oak out in The Hills.

  —Don't wiggle, Gunnar said. It's a short poem?

  —Six lines, and amounts to a big oak, green and enormous, with pigeons and crickets in it, and an ancient Greek, or Greeks, sitting or lying under it. It makes a lovely poem.

  —What's its title? When was it written?

  —Greek poems don't have titles. First century, in Byzantium. The ringdove is a phatta, and may be a wood pigeon or the cushat. In the Bible you get ringdoves in terebinth trees.

  Nikolai cooed like a dove and chirped like a cricket.

  —You're translating? Gunnar asked.

  —Trying to. It seems to be so pure a
nd innocent, yet the oak was Zeus's tree, and had a dryad in it, a kind of girl Ariel, and the dove belongs to Aphrodite, and the cricket's squeak and cluck is a symbol for shepherds letching after each other, or for the milkmaid with the sunburnt nose and slim bare feet in the daisies. So what looks like Wordsworth or Boratynski is actually Sicilian and pastoral, a long time after Theokritos. But it's looking ahead to nature poetry, if we want to see it that way, of the kind we begin to get in Ausonius.

  —Have I ever heard anyone talk like Samantha? Nikolai asked the ceiling, crossing his eyes and rounding his tongue like the bowl of a spoon in his surmising mouth. No, I have never heard anyone talk like Samantha.

  —Break! said Gunnar. Bumpkin has decided to play the village idiot.

  —Let me, Nikolai said pulling on a sweater, see that Greek poem. What's that word?

  —Branches.

  —And and.

  —Hanging out over spreading oak good shadow high.

  —In Mikkel's tree house there're leaves all around us, even below, and the light's as green as a salad, and it's cool and private. Show me the house of the ringdove and cricket.

  —Oikia phatton, oikia tettigon. House of the ringdove, house of the cricket. A tettix is a cricket.

  —Named itself, didn't it?

  —Dendroikia paidon, tree house for boys.