Time Unwinds

A Calendar of Hours

—from a medieval book of hours illustrated by the Limbourg brothers for the Duc de Berry

1. 1.

   Silken youths at court brocaded, all male (you know the scene)—noël fire crackling. Guests just in from winter

   gesturing and gestured at. A joust is forming on the tapestry. War hunts behind the arras for a horse.

2. 2.

   Earth and water freezing, winter etches the lower orders: peasants before a cottage fire. Night warms the genitals.

3. 3.

   Rows of purple sillion follow a hillside plow—vines get dressed for spring, the courtier’s dressage. Winter’s dragon flies off hissing.

4. 4.

   Foreshadowings in grisaille: the world is still a garden but walls now stand guard.

5. 5.

   Delight runs to lapis to cobalt blue to the eternal. Envy, green like Vice, pirouettes outside a Flemish church.

6. 6.

   Reapers dance; eros loves a round: antique Paris peers over the municipal wall.

7. 7.

   At midjourney the hills turn conical, the castle triangular. Bounty spreads checkered fields for summer’s plenty.

8. 8.

   Peasant boys and girls skinny dip. The lanky nobles look diffident. The bundled wheat is shocked.

9. 9.

   Roads always lead to someone’s idea of somewhere. Mules know the way.

10. 10.

    Hearts bared with leaf fall: an archer-scarecrow aims aimlessly, pure shadow among shadows, afternoon grown still.

11. 11.

    Light sparkles along a sleeve through goldleaf generosity. In the oak grove light and leaf give the fall away.

12. 12.

    Nine towers and the blown mort: nine hounds bring down the boar. Hunters gesture to us from a haunted world.

    A page enters with compass. This is as lost as the world gets. Lutes and citherns gloss the margins. Time unwinds in a ceremonial bow.

My Chest of Books Divide among My Friends

—Keats: letter to John Taylor, August 14, 1820

My chest of books divide among my friends: novels of misspent years give to Goodwill for the reader off the street who intends to sample menace in James, how Austen extends caveat and cavil into plots too subtle for evil. Books I’ve leaned on give to friends (though who will want the philosophy depends on affinities for the severities of Pascal, how Wittgenstein’s On Certainty amends the “name” settled on green). Wary of trends, still I’ve followed the chimeras historians troll for, the endgames in Gibbon and Spengler—friends may dip into these with the Pliny to judge my mind’s bent, the autumn in my heart I could not disguise. Célan’s poetry that hardly anyone understands and Ashberry’s early baroque (each contends for space on the upper shelves), few will choose. My chest of books divide among my friends but ignore the lives, memoirs, the life one intends.