I do not need historical accuracy
to be who I am. My window’s little view
admits an occasional passing ball or girl
amidst the flowers that I call my own.
My people were Dutch or French, that painter Hals
was one of them. I keep one on my walls
as a sort of a conversation piece,
though strictly conversation’s not my forte.
In France now Mesmerism is the rage;
they say Franz Anton Mesmer is a sage,
he took Ben Franklin up in a balloon;
but what is that to me, who have confined
myself to gardens here on this estate?
In youth I pined for new philosophy,
and sought to find it in the weekly papers.
But now, in the decrepid rancour of my age,
confined by gout and palsy to my bed,
I more and more retreat into my head,
or take my pleasure looking out of windows.
I who cannot imagine the living Tyre,
or trace the etymology of language.
A girl passed this way several days ago,
who must have chased a cat into the garden.
I saw her at the window’s very edge,
or part of her. The whole view was occluded,
being in motion and too far to one side.
A leg, a dress, some laughter and some talk,
meant for the cat no doubt. While I inside
struggled to glimpse the colour of her hair.
Her feet were very white and pink and bare,
and auburn gold the colour of her hair.
I counted the minutes till I saw her eyes,
so dark blue-green they filled me with surprises.
She couldn’t have been much more than eleven.
I knew a woman once who was of age,
and watched her so, while reading books. I spied.
Yet even then, though my view were occluded
I wanted to see her partially denuded,
and wondered should I let her glimpse of me?
What were the likelihood that she could see?
Or hear. Then a strict panic took me back.
First thought. No, that can’t be correct.
It is legitimate to inspect
the frames of windows.
Looking outward is my first ambition.
I have not the learning or cognition
to sense of this her burning rampart plums,
twizzling once as though to prove Weslier’s theory.
Cool bath pools, limestone quarries, clock my mind.
I have gathered these tomes to one side,
grouping them accordingly as one author,
the history of an age inherited.
Chiefly such terminologies have swept Europe
briefly in images, glanced in the corner of talk,
like the voice of the oboe over the orchestra,
inevitably superseded by voices of friends,
extinguished in the ocean of recognized consciousness.
Look at their jackets. Something is very different about each one.
Six years of monthlies that I paid to bind.
Angels are visitors to different houses.
They are transparent, yet to the mind are white.
While to other people, even cousins,
they are real people. Their voices in houses
(and hear I cannot escape my own)
allay fears with ordinary transactions.
Cousins are humourous, good to have in the house.
I want to go everywhere with Fred, or be alone with Roger.
Julia and Jennifer are my spies in court.
I have hung mirrors on lengthy poles
to catch a glimpse of my aunt undressing in the room next to mine,
for several days through the spring festivals,
or was it the harvest. Night of the thunderstorm.
To have come from far places tired, garrulous.
The crisp decree of history in the air,
harsh like the talk of the viceroy, her husband,
who beat us all at cards, but gave us cheroots,
but a dull monotone spread over the western world
as far along the calendar’s divide
to China as any theory of gravity.
It hung in the air like Franklin in his balloon,
at night I hope it was, Franklin and Mesmer talking,
for upwards is space that is continuous with issued thought.
The development of nations is nothing to the
absolute apostle who rides the throne at the center.
Hermetic I should loan her to her mother.
Begin to understand one voice speaks for the nation,
it is what we take home with our hearts.
It is the voice of time and space and science,
which co-exists with Africa and Japan.
I have spent days in the gardens or at the zoo,
and felt that I could travel anywhere.
But to be leaving, by train or by ship,
carries with it a sense that is thunderous,
not merely the joy of being with family,
but the dark pleasure obstructed by distance and mountains,
the true lightning and lightning rod of the age.
It is the gods still that we beckon to.
It is something we all know. What is it?
The voice of the ocean. The thunder. The atmosphere.
Trading an ever rolling algorithm of series of numbers
on the market, welcoming a January day.
It is the dull tolling of time at the end of death,
and the likelihood of other people before here like us.
But it is the firm reply of trade, and the wealth of nations,
the hum of the shell that stretches across dreams
and tidies up each hour of the night,
till pennies are different than minutes count,
or the stroke of the waltz under rapid feet.
We hug, we say good night, we the elite.
There isn’t any stroke in dreams of wars.
Far different and far distant a reach.
None are isolated in careers.
Probably France could tell you. My reply
is a firm faith in the lord Jesus, though I go to no churches.
I practice certain services at home, by correct light,
with a simple faith. Contrive of midnight
the alchemical ulterior of day’s brisk schedule,
and remember the dead. My little window
breathes the faith light of the Virgin Mary,
dandelion puffballs blown across the summer.
Far east of the north corridor
stand certain mountains of the Himalayas.
By these you may tell a diver’s pearl in Subu,
or exhaust the eyes of day in winter,
sure of a woman’s obedience, the lord
of pregnant familiars. The vast waste
is idle too, obedient to these powers.
Decrees and universal knowledge fill the hours.
But that day when I faced her living sex
there was no way of getting round it.
She preferred me to all other men.
I was compelled to repay the compliment.
That is an old book. I could look it up.
There beside the first assessment of modern psychology.
I worked for no wage.
Women, as we Dutch say, were all over me.
____
Ben Mazer‘s most recent collection of poems is New Poems (Pen & Anvil, 2013) [reviewed in this issue by Liza Katz–Ed.]. Previous collections include Poems (Pen & Anvil, 2010) and January 2008 (Dark Sky Books, 2010). Mazer is the editor of a critical edition of the complete poems of John Crowe Ransom, forthcoming from the Un-Gyve Press of Boston, and of editions of the poems of Landis Everson and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. He lives in Cambridge, Mass., and is the Editor of The Battersea Review.
