Jake's Flea Market

Though primogeniture, the passing of an estate to the eldest son, was the norm in sixteenth century Europe, it wasn’t unusual for estates of the Holy Roman Empire to be divided between sons. Beyond this observation, these lines are fiction--- the biography of a fictional Margrave: Who in life, got it all together; and in death, had his togetherness divide….

vi

unite the leisure divided

a leisure   the first part of three your father inherited
a third of a life of fairs and festivals and plays
banquets and balls
horseback hunts with hounds and hawks

and boredom
first gifted to a fortunate man
by an emperor thirty or so generations ago

the second part your father bought 
from your uncle who sold 
his life for a colonel’s hat and frock in charles’s   
mercenary wars

a second third of a life of
absence from his estates and domains 
presence at prague to elect   
the emperor and to pay a liegeman’s debt 
with his infantry on expeditions and crusades

the third part he bought 
from your younger uncle who gave himself for free 
to the walls and ceiling of a monkery   begged
in the streets for crumbs and crusts and rags

he sold to your father a third
third of a life with hands 
uncalloused by the tolls reaped from the roads
by the rents threshed from the yields of the lands
by the taxes seized like eggs from the nests
of the hungry unfortunates who laboured
in the fields for the gleanings

the fourth part your father bought
from the poles   it costed
hundreds of knights and vassals   drained
into the sod of that eastern land

and now with that same one leisure united   
he reclines   on his deathbed   eases
himself out   leaves
that one   unity   divided   by six