A Table of Green Fields (6 page)

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.

—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 and 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.

Golden smile with silver dots for eyes.

—My friend Birgit and I, Samantha said, used to climb out her bedroom window, in our shimmy tails, into a big tree, I think

it was a very old apple, and sit on limbs, like owls. We thought it a very important thing to do.

BOY WITH GEESE

 

In the park, with lakes, in Malmo. Life-size Swedish boy in small britches, three geese, by Thomas Qvarsebo, 1977. Gunnar, Samantha, and Nikolai went over on the boat from Nyhavn to look at it. Nikolai liked the geese, Gunnar the candid modelling, Samantha the big-eared, honest-eyed frankness of the boy.

—And the obviousness, there in the britches, of his being male. 

—Wait till you see my and Nikolai's Ariel.

—Sweden, Nikolai said, is Denmark's Lutheran uncle.

—Lutheran aunt, said Samantha.

BULLETIN BOARD

 

Red and brown poultry foraging in the high street, and dogs, grass between rocks once squared stone but there is no squared stone in these late days in antiquity, the autumn of an autumn, when portrait statues of the emperors had drilled pucks for eyes, all exactitude lost in swollen bulk, when discernible value was draining from things into money and into a frightened spirituality that hated the body.

—L'Orange, Gunnar said when Samantha asked,
Fra Principat til Dominat.
It happened again in Picasso's sculpture.

GOLDEN DOVES WITH SILVER DOTS

 

In the advanced light of a long afternoon, Samantha reading, Gunnar rolling his shoulders, Nikolai rubbing his knees.

—When each of us relates to an idea, separately, essentially, and with passion, we are together in the idea, joined by our differences.

—Kierkegaard, Gunnar said.

Nikolai butted and pushed his way into Gunnar's Icelandic sweater.

—In which, Gunnar remarked to the ceiling, he can pet his mouse, and those of us who are unobservant are none the wiser. 

—He's among friends, Samantha said. Each is himself in himself, different. In our separate inwardnesses we keep a chaste bashfulness between person and person that stops a barbarian interference into another's inwardness. Thus individuals never come too close to each other, like animals, precisely because they are united in ideal distance. This unity of differentiation is an accomplished music, as with the instruments in an orchestra.

Nikolai, whistling, came to sit by Samantha and look at the page. She hugged him closer and wrecked his hair.

—He wears your sweater because it's yours.

—Isn't that barbarian, as you've just read us? Not as barbarian as grubbing around down in under the sweater, but then the two would go together, wouldn't they?

—I hope so, Samantha said.

—I don't know what anybody's talking about, Nikolai said.

—Love, I think, Gunnar said. Your namesake Grundtvig wanted everybody to hug and kiss. Kierkegaard, however, saw people in love as two alien worlds circling each other. Grundtvigians went at it along the hedgerow, watched by placid sheep, and in the Lutheran bed, and in the hayloft, but shy Søren was one for guddling down in under a sweater three sizes too large for. him, without, I should think, the shameless grin.

—Quit twitting Nikolai, who's looking like the most innocent cherub in God's nursery. Kierkegaard looked like a frog with a sorrow.

—Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, Nikolai said. Could be I was named for him, do you think?

—You can say you are. We all live in our imagination, don't we? If we don't make ourselves up, others will make up a self for us, and get us to believe it.

Sweet puzzlement in Nikolai's eyes.

—I wonder, Gunnar said, if we don't make everything up? Man, I mean, is a damned strange animal. He lives in his mind. Of course we don't know how animals think, what their opinions are. What does a horse think about all day?