Da Vinci's Bicycle - Guy Davenport (e novels to read TXT) 📗

near the umbrellas of Proust, the Great War began. They burnt the library at Louvain. What in the name of God could humanity be if man is an example of it?

Deftly she drew the crystal water from the sycamore, deftly. Her helper, perhaps her lord, wore a mantle of leaves and a mask that made his head that of Thoth, beaked, with fixed and painted eyes.

We were in Genoa, on tracks that belonged to trolleys. Walls as long and fortresslike as those of Peking were stuck all over up to a height with posters depicting corsets, Cinzano, Mussolini, shoe wax, the Fascist ax, boys and girls marching to Giovanezza! Giovanezza! Trees showed their topmost branches above these long gray walls, and many of us must have tried to imagine the secluded gardens with statues and belvederes which they enclosed.

He lay with his hands folded over his sword, the Conquering Lion, somewhere on the train. Four spearmen in scarlet capes stood barefoot around him, two at his head, two at his feet. A priest in a golden hat read constantly from a book. If only one could hear the words, they described Saaba on an ivory chair, on cushions deep as a bath, a woman with a bright mind and red blood. They described Shulaman in his cedar house beyond the stone desert it takes forty years to cross. The priest’s words were as bees in an orchard, as bells in a holy city. He read aloud in a melodious drone of saints, dragons, underworlds, forests with eyes in every leaf, Mariamne, Italian airplanes.

— An unweeded garden, Joyce was saying, is all an inspired poet rode rickrack the river to usher to us. Her wick is all ears, the lady in the garden. There is an adder in the girl of her eye, dew on the lashes, and an apple in the mirror of the dew. Does anybody on this buggering train know the name of the engineer?

— King’s Counsel Jones, cried James Johnson Sweeney.

He had pushed his way between federales of the Guardia Civil, Ethiopian infantrymen in tunics and pith helmets, quilted sergeants of the Kwomintang.

I thought of the engineer Elrod Singbell, who used to take the mile-long descending curve of Stump House Mountain in the Blue Ridge playing Amazing Grace on the whistle. I remembered the sharp sweet perfume of chinaberry blossoms in earliest spring.

Joyce spoke of an Orpheus in yellow dancing through bamboo, followed by cheetahs, macaws, canaries, tigers. And an Orpheus in the canyons at the bottom of the sea leading a gelatin of hydras, fylfot starfish, six-eyed medusas, feather-boa sealillies, comb-jelly cydippidas, scarlet crabs, and gleaming mackerel as old as the moon.

— Noé, Apollinaire said in a brown study.

— Mice whisker to whisker, Joyce said, white-shanked quaggas trotting presto presto e delicatamente, cackling pullets, grave hogs, whistling tapirs.

La Belle Jardinière. We saw her selling flowers in Madrid, corn marigolds, holy thistles, great silver knapweed, and white wild campions. In Odessa she pranced in a turn of sparrows. She was in the azaleas when we went through Atlanta, shaking fire from her wrists.

— Would that be the castellum, Joyce said, where the graaf put his twin sons together with a commentary on the Babylonian Talmud in a kerker dark as the ka of Osiris until a certain lady in jackboots and eyepatch found her way to them by lightning a squally night she had put the Peahen into the cove above Engelanker and kidnapped them tweeling as they were sweetening Yehonathan and Dawidh a sugarplum’s midge from Luther into the wind and stars but not before twisting her heel by the doorpost and wetting the premises?

— Shepherds! Apollinaire cried to the car, startling us all. We had no shepherds at Ypres. We have no shepherds now.

We were crossing the gardens of Normandy, coming back to Deauville.

Somewhere on the train, behind us, before us, Haile Selassie lay on his bier, his open eyes looking up through the roof of his imperial car to the double star Gamma in Triangulum, twin suns, the one orange, the other green.

Ithaka

THERE WAS, as Ezra Pound remarked, a mouse in the tree. We sat under the pergola di trattoria above San Pantaleone in Sant’ Ambrogio di Rapallo. His panama on the table, his stick across his lap, Pound leaned back in his chair. In the congenial mat of vine and fig above him there was, as he said, a mouse.

— So there is, Miss Rudge said. What eyes you have, Ezra.

We had been moving Pound’s and Miss Rudge’s effects from a dependenza in an olive grove above Rapallo to the little house that Miss Rudge had lived in before the war and only now had managed to regain. The heavier pieces had gone on the day before. We loaded our Renault named Hephaistiskos with crockery, Max Ernst’s Blue, the photograph of the Schifanoia freschi Yeats writes about in A Vision, books, and baskets of household linen.

Pound’s cot would not fit into the car and I carried it on my head along the salita.

Then we drove down to the harbor, to meet Massimo for a swim. We changed in a cameretta di spiaggia that belonged to Massimo’s family, Pound into bathing drawers of some black clerical cloth that sheathed him from chest to knee, so that alongside our piccole mutandine he seemed to be the nineteenth century, bearded, doctoral, and titled, going swimming with the twentieth. A fierce pink scar, obviously the incision of an operation, curved across the old man’s lower back.

— He’s going out much too far! Miss Rudge called to me once we were in the water.

She sat under a fetching floppy hat on the terrace of the beach house. It was a while before I saw that she was genuinely anxious.

— Do tell him to come in closer!

I swam out and signaled Steve.

— You and Massimo, I said, swim around the old boy in circles. Don’t let him out of your sight.

We had taken the measure of his stubbornness