A Table of Green Fields by Guy Davenport (ebook reader .txt) 📕

T-shirt and wrunkled socks. His mom says that if he turns himself into an idiot how would you notice?

—O pure innocent Danish youth!

Questioning eyes.

—Teasing the model, Samantha said, is Gunnar's way of relating. You'll get used to it. Besides, you can tease him back. Gunnar's jealous, anyway.

TREE HOUSE

—How old is this Gunnar?

—He's had a rabbit, a Belgian hare I think it is, in a show, and a naked girl holding one leg by the ankle in another. He did those at the Academy, and then he was in Paris for a year. He was seventeen when he went to the Academy, that's four years, and Paris was just a couple of years back, so he's like twenty-four, yuss? Outsized whacker in his jeans.

—The bint's there all the time?

—Oh no, very busy girl, Samantha. She comes and goes. Spends the night a lot, too, I think.

4

—Brancusi's Torso of a Boy, there. My Ariel is to be as pure as that, but with all of you there, representational, as the critics say, thugs, the lot of them.

Nikolai tugged his foreskin into a snugger fit.

—It leks, and it doesn't, you know?

—The thighs make it a boy, and the hips the same girth as the chest. But further than that, in style, you can't go. Gaudier, here, had the genius of the age. Killed in the First World War, only 24. That's his bust of the poet Pound, and that's his Red Dancer.

—Real brainy is what I'm getting a reputation for, even at home. Would Brancusi have used a model, some French soccer player? He could at least have put in a navel. I'll have my pecker and toms, won't I, as Ariel?

—Shakespeare would insist. He liked well-designed boys and approved of nature.

—I'll bet. Did Brancusi?

—Brancusi's private life is unknown. I think he simply worked, sawing and polishing and chiselling. He did his own cooking. There was a white dog named Polar.

—What would an Ariel by him have looked like?

5

Commandant Nikolai Doyen-Parigot rode his white charger Washington among Peugeots and Citroens to Antoine Bourdelle's studio. Tying Washington to a parking meter, he strode inside. Bourdelle was in his smock. A boy was mixing modelling clay in a tub. Amidst life-size casts of Greek statues Nikolai Doyen-Parigot took off his uniform, handing it piece by piece, epauletted coat and sword and spurred boots and snowy white shirt and suspenders and wool socks slightly redolent of horse and long underwear, to a respectful but blushing concierge.

Herakles with the head of Apollo.

Thick curly hair matted his chest. His dick was as big as his charger's, and his balls were like two oranges in a cloth sack. His wife went around in a happy daze because of them, as did several lucky young actresses and dancers. Restocking the regiment for the next generation he called it.

He took the long bow that Bourdelle handed him and assumed the pose of Herakles killing the Stymphalian birds.

Later he would play soccer, and wrestle with Calixte Delmas. He would march his regiment up and down the street behind a military band.

—What are Stymphalian birds, Gunnar?

—Something Greek. Quit wiggling your head. One of the labors of Herakles.

6

—Sculpture should be a verb not a noun. The David is Jack the Giant Killer, handy with strings, so that he can play the harp and have his dark fate in hair, but in his eyes he is the friend of Jonathan, that sweet rascal from crabstock, as Grundtvig said. Where Rodin kept going wrong was in sculpting not only nouns but abstract nouns. Nikolai!

—Jo!

—Imagine you can walk on the wind just under the speed of light. There's a magic cunning in your fingers and toes. Fatigue is as unknown to you as to a bee. You have been commanded by the magus Prospero to dart all over an enchanted island to do things impossible for others but easy for you. You have just been given your instructions. The reward of your compliance is freedom. You're about to nip off.

Listening to Prospero, elbows back, chin over shoulder, eyes and mouth wide open, a jump into action, wheeling on toes, and a collision with Samantha who had walked into the studio. A laughing, staggering hug.

—Ariel digging off to execute Prospero's orders.

—Do it again. This time I'll be ready for the hug.

TREE HOUSE

 

The Korczak group will be this Polish doctor who had an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto way back when the shitty Germans were burning up all the Jews and there was a day when the Germans took all the kids and Korczak and a woman named Stefa to die at Treblinka, and they all marched through the streets to the cattle cars. I'm to be the boy that carried their flag, the flag of their republic, the orphanage. Gunnar wants you and me to be two pals in the group, arms around each other's shoulders. You'll like Gunnar. He's real. For balls he has a brace of Grade A large goose eggs and a gooseneck of a cock, which his girl Samantha pretends she doesn't go goofy over, I mean all the time he isn't fucking her into fits. She's real, too, and gives me a hard time. Winks at me when I'm posing, and hugs me when we're having a break and stretch. She writes poems and draws posters, and wears badges about Women's Lib. Knows the names of all the butterflies. On his big bulletin board in the studio Gunnar has this list of things Korczak talked to the orphans about every Saturday, or had them swot up, by way of learning about things, famous people like Gregor Mendel and Fabre the bug man, and good and evil, and doing one's duty, and the environment, and how to deal with loneliness, and what sex is, and Samantha has me writing what she calls my responses and ideas, also Gunnar has to write them too, and these go on the bulletin board.

THE YELLOW OF TIME

 

In his Roman garden Bertel Thorvaldsen sat reading Anacreon. A basket of Balkan melons, squash, and runner beans sat under the cool of the fig tree, delivered by a girl out of Shakespeare, soon to be carried into the kitchen by Serafina the cook. He had drunk a gourd of well water brought in a stone jug from the