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….


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 
of infantry for expeditions and crusades

the third part he bought 
from your younger uncle who gave himself for free 
to the walls and the 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 

unblemished by the tolls reaped from the roads

or by the rents   threshed from the harvests of barley

by the taxes   seized with the 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 then   with that one leisure 
united  he reclined   
on his deathbed   eased
himself out   scattered
that one  unity to six sons