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

—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