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THE STORY OF THE CZECHOSLOVAKIAN BUTTON-MAKER
This is the story of the Czechoslovakian
button-maker, whose family fled an
army of caparisoned, black-booted, saber-swinging
musket-blowing soldiers, young
men with
ruddy faces and puffing cheeks, scared
shitless themselves in all their
flounce and pomp, and the nobleman
young button-maker-to-be and his father and
mother and two sisters and three brothers and
servants, maids and two black
Labrador retrievers fled a
mansion on a hill, room after
room of crystal chandeliers
and
beveled mirrors mathematically
multiplying the
magnificence,
and terrace after terrace of formal gardens with
wild plots you got to through bushes,
birds in almost constant archways of
dazzling flight, tall banks
of black
cypress trees, an actual
river whose sound was always
discernable wherever you
stood, inside the house or
out, gardens, white
rose gardens, gardenia walls, walnut
trees, trellises of morning glories,
they fled in the night with their
belongings in bundles on hay-carts pulled
by the servants
lumbering along, but the
boy couldn't say farewell to his beloved
gardens, couldn't glimpse for the last time
the enchanted enclosures.
Years in sooty cities passed, two flights
up, schoolrooms, back rooms,
the family in poverty, then in
passing gentility, then he
grew older and found his métier, carving
ivory buttons for the local shirt maker.
Round, oblong, square, diamond-shaped
buttons out of ivory, but
unbeknownst to the wearers of the
elegant shirts, behind each button
he'd carved, so small you couldn't
see it except under a magnifying
glass, a portion of his childhood
gardens remembered, a corner, a
sunny glade, a passage between
hedges, a lake with sudden
sunlight, a rosebush
in bloom. A-hum
with bee music. Carved so
gently into the ivory you'd say there was
nothing there at all, just smooth bone.
6/17
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