A Table of Green Fields, Guy Davenport [ebook reader screen .TXT] 📗

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.

—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