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

By way of good manners, Mikkel rolled out of bed. Downstairs he started coffee and poured orange juice into burgundy glasses, for style. The studio seemed strange, and he looked at the rosy marble of the Ariel as if he'd never seen it before.

And

A papyrus fragment of a gospel written in the first century shows us Jesus on the bank of the Jordan with people around him. The fragment is torn and hard to read.

In the first line Jesus is talking but we cannot make out what he's saying: too many letters are missing from too many words to conjecture a restoration. It's as if we were too far back to hear well.

We catch some words. He is saying something about putting things in a dark and secret place. He says something about weighing things that are weightless.

The people who can hear him are puzzled and look to each other, some with apologetic smiles, for help in understanding.

Then Jesus, also smiling, steps to the very edge of the river, as if to show them something. He leans over the river, one arm reaching out. His cupped hand is full of seeds. They had not noticed a handful of seeds before.

He throws the seeds into the river.

Trees, first as sprouts, then as seedlings, then as trees fully grown, grew in the river as quickly as one heartbeat follows another. Arid as soon as they were there they began to move downstream with the current, and were suddenly hung with fruit, quinces, figs, apples, and pears.

That is all that's on the fragment.

We follow awhile in our imagination: the people running to keep up with the trees, as in a dream. Did the trees sink into the river? Did they flow out of sight, around a bend?

 The Lavender Fields of Apia Julia

There is no such thing as time on a summer afternoon. The green and blue of the lavender fields, the tumbled clouds over the pine wood, the Roman bridge neither slide along the river of time nor feel its current pass through them.

—It's the drone of the bees, Julie said, stops time. And the fragrance of the lavender drenches it, and puts it to sleep.

They had built their boxcar beyond the lavender fields where the woods begin.

—Raise sweet children, bright children, Anne-Marie said in her grandmother's raspy voice, and what do they do? They build a boxcar.

—Well, Grandma, Bernard said with tenor innocence, it's to play in.

—It's not being able to keep an eye on us that bugs them.

Julie, Bernard, Anne-Marie, and Marc built their boxcar beyond the lavender fields where the woods begin. Five metres long, two wide, it sat knee-high above the pine-needle floor of the wood on corner posts braced with diagonal studs.

—A shoebox to the power of fifteen, Marc said, with doors in the middle. It has the feel of a real boxcar. The doors are sort of permanently open.

—Boxcar doors are sometimes open, Anne-Marie said, sometimes closed, even when the train's moving. We got the proportions right.

Knocking apart the packing crates salvaged from back of the factory had been as much fun as building the boxcar: floor, walls, top, pie-pan brake wheels, the ladder up.

The light in the boxcar was neither room light nor tent light. At the doors the light was that of the wood. The dark ends of the inside were brightened by small high windows.

—Ours, Julie said, patting her knees, all ours.

—Lavender fields out one door, the wood out the other, Marc said. It's a tree house that's a boxcar. Along the river, on the tracks, in all kinds of weather. Let's all hug.

—The Autumn Crocuses, Julie announced.

Marc sighed, crossed his eyes, and twiddled his fingers. —The meadow is splendid and lethal in autumn the cows grazing there are placidly poisoning themselves.

—Apollinaire.

—Anne-Marie's underpants are a meadow, Bernard said, what there is of them, cornflowers, buttercups, daisies.

—Crocuses the lilac of a black eye.

Bernard had entered the boxcar with high elbows and a bound. He lay on his side in the straw, hands under his cheek, eyes alert.

A bird whistled a trill, went silent, and began again with dotted notes and sharp rests, like a dripping faucet, before another trill.

There was a distant dry rasp of crickets.

He had known where Honduras was in class. And M. Brun had said that General de Gaulle had never talked over the telephone.

A sulphur butterfly flew at changing heights through the doors of the boxcar, from the lavender fields to the wood.

—Your eyes are like these flowers, violet and dark as autumn. They poison me as the crocuses poison the cows.

—Poor sick cows.

—M. Brun explained why the crocuses are like mothers who are daughters of their daughters and if Apollinaire had any more punctuation than Marc has hair in his britches you could follow him better.

—The crocus blooms before it has any leaves. There's an article on it in the Encyclopedia under Sons before Fathers.

—School children come in a fracas elves in winter jackets with hoods playing harmonicas and pick crocuses mothers that are daughters of daughters and are the color of your eyelids. Anne-Marie began a dance to the poetry.

Bernard pretended to be asleep.

A Roman cart drawn by two white oxen crossed the stone bridge.

Marc was General de Gaulle refusing to talk over the telephone, batting at gnats.

—The children bob like flowers in a demented wind.

—The cowherd sings, Anne-Marie joined in.

—And the cows, they recited together, abandon forever, mooing and shambling slow, this autumn meadow beautiful with deadly flowers.

Marc grunted.

Beyond a march of sunflowers, laundry on a line, fragrant with lavender, Marc recognized his summer shirts, socks, underpants, jeans. Sunflowers like Aztec kings in green mantles.

The abrupt bluff. The stone bridge, over which the Romans passed in carts laden with sacks of lavender.

Apta Julia in Provincia Gallia.

And in the river, once, in the time of the painters of Lascaux, seals. Back when trees walked, owls spoke oracles, and the moon gave signs.

—Wolves, Marc said, at the dark of the moon.

—We could make a film here, Anne-Marie said. A shoebox on a tripod, with round candy boxes for the Michel Mouse ears on top. Lights, and the little board with