Two Poems:

Parades

And when you are finally caught and questioned,
it is discovered, sadly, that you know
nothing of use. Your captors exchange glances, nod.
You are released in the freedom of some afternoon,

some autumn of the year, your coat, hat, returned
as if to continue your life. Now it is you

in the world again. In yellowing rooms, life
becomes no more than the places where it occurs.
At the pier in darkness, parades will cross the water,
visible but once. Or I could say

I saw the wind coming hard along the river
touching all it passed.

How are things consequent? When they catch you
again, what will you say? That all things
may be weighed, may be raised and weighed
by two human hands?

I Followed a Ribbon

I followed a ribbon that trailed from a hand
and it led through the grazing of crowds upon pavement,
through laities and simpering voices in evening,
past lives that might be given me in confidence
and confidences that cannot be given in life,
through the drawers of perished infants, where the bed
linens still keep the traces of tiny bodies,
and beside ladders upon which men stand
as on a willful pride that harms all those beneath,
all down, all down at last, to the harbor
where such ribbons trail the water in a hundred places.
I cannot find my own amidst so many,
but I pretend to, and taking up an oar I leap
foolhardy into a passing boat.
"Do you need an oarsman?" I call out needlessly.
As if there were anything left to do but row.

Jesse Ball
The Paris Review
Number 174
Summer 2005

Copyright © 2005 by the Paris Review.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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