Jolly Hour, by Scott Ruescher

Statue, likely Aphrodite (Greece) c. first or second century BC. Photo by author, taken at Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Jolly Hour
 
It wasn’t, after all, a second-line jazz band from Preservation Hall 
that I heard behind me on my way back toward the Fens on foot
in a state of arrested attention that left me open to such possibilities 
after sketching, in a museum hallway, a marble statue of Aphrodite
in the process of emerging from the foam of the Aegean Sea,
chiseled by some Hellenistic sculptor on the Isle of Rhodes
in 43 B.C.E.—Athenodore, Polydorus, or Agesander, maybe--
minus her noble head, her raised arms, and her legs below the thighs.
 
Bells clanging and horns tooting, iron wheels clicking off the iambs 
at well-measured intervals across the frets of the railroad ties 
on the parallel iron rails, it was the sound of the outbound trolley 
clattering up Huntington Ave., not a brass band like the one I heard 
in Tremé, the first Black neighborhood in the nation, a few years before
on my only visit to New Orleans, after visiting the Blues Trail, 
Yoknapatawpha County, and the battlefield in Vicksburg.
 
It wasn’t a parade of pallbearers leading friends of the deceased
behind the black hearse and its flower-bedecked casket
in that funeral march I witnessed through a graveyard’s open gate
from the sidewalk on Esplanade, across from a Catholic church,
as I walked toward the French Quarter, by way of Congo Square--
not a joyful dirge for a teenaged boy who died in a hail of gunfire
in a neighborhood still traumatized from Hurricane Katrina,
or a send-off for a beloved octogenarian mother of four children
and grandmother of ten, some classy old gal whose gumbo and greens 
brought water to the mouth, whose ancestors worked for free
on sugar and cotton plantations in Haiti and the Deep South.
 
It was the sound of the outbound trolley clattering up Huntington Ave.,
but Judy Garland wasn’t aboard, singing her way up the aisle 
in her high starched collar, perky and cute in that sharp little suit
in bright red lipstick and high-top shoes, her auburn tresses piled 
high on her head, lamenting aloud, as if no one else were around, 
in her trademark velvety contralto, at the World’s Fair of 1904,
depicted, forty years later, in the Meet Me in St. Louis movie,
that she’d jumped aboard on an impulse, “to lose a jolly hour,”
but had found herself distracted by a fellow passenger on that loud
and cheerful trolley, instead of relief from the surging crowd.
 
And he was “quite the handsomest of men” at that, so tall and dapper,
a dashing stranger indeed, in a bright green tie and shiny shoes
popping into the scene now, tipping his light brown derby hat
to her, and apologizing if he had accidentally stepped upon her feet 
as he took a nearby seat, scaring her half to death, by golly, 
causing her heartstrings to thump and twang in her chest, and making
her lose, rather than that jolly hour, her lonely heart instead.
 
It was the sound of the outbound trolley clattering up Huntington Ave.,
and the model for Aphrodite—a young woman named Phoebe, 
Angela, or Chloé, whom he’d heard about through the grapevine--
at five-feet-six and one hundred and fifty-two or -three, fresh 
from a patio breakfast of feta, grapes, pita, and hot mint tea, 
with the archaeological discovery of her statuesque stone figure 
among the Grecian ruins still so many centuries in the future, 
wasn’t heading to work on it, her golden hair in braids, dressed
in the emerald linen jumper and rope sandals she wore all summer,
hanging onto a strap among all the students and commuters
listening to podcasts and reading their magazines and newspapers. 
 
She wasn’t humming and tapping her foot to a folk-rock, funk, 
or hip-hop tune that she heard on her headphones, either,
or looking particularly forward to resuming a difficult pose,
to lifting her arms and raising her face to the brightness of the sun,
in a diaphanous gown that looked more like a camisole, to be honest, 
with an Empire waist, with a fitted bodice provocatively reinforced, 
just below the bust, by a drawstring cord tied in a rabbit-ear bow
that clung to her solid torso, to her ribs, breasts, and hip bones, 
when the demanding, if not maniacal artist soaks her with water
to make her look even more like she’s emerging from the foam.
 
It was the sound of the outbound trolley clattering up Huntington Ave.,
and I had attempted to evoke, in soft and steady charcoal strokes,
more than two millennia later, with the help of my blending stump, 
not the winner of the wet t-shirt contest at a fraternity party,
but the complexity of that impossible bow, the folds of silken cloth 
overlapping at her cleavage, and the expression of her arms,
even in their absence, upflung to suggest those of the love goddess,
Aphrodite herself, as she sprang from the Aegean Sea, as told
in Hesiod’s Theogyny, written several hundred years before,
in the eighth century B.C.E., to describe the gods’ genealogies.
 
It was the sound of the outbound trolley clattering up Huntington Ave.
between the Mission Hill projects and the MFA of Boston, 
toward the VA Hospital at Heath Street in Jamaica Plain, 
near Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace —the E train of the Green Line 
traveling between the poverty of Roxbury and the prosperity 
of the Fens, as if to draw attention to the best and worst of Boston.
 
That, and the upward thrust of her right hip in its subtle contrapposto.
 
Scott Ruescher

Scott Ruescher is the author of two full-length poetry collections--Waiting for the Light to Change (Prolific Press, 2017) and Above the Fold (Finishing Line Press, 2025)-- and of two earlier chapbooks, Sidewalk Tectonics and Perfect Memory. He has won Able Muse’s Write Prize, Poetry Quarterly‘s Rebecca Lard Award, and, twice, the New England Poetry Club‘s Erika Mumford Prize for poetry about travel and international culture. His poems have appeared in About Place, AGNI, Common Ground Review, Negative Capability, Nine Mile, Pangyrus, Ploughshares,  Solstice, and many other publications. Retired from administering the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and teaching English in the Boston University Prison Education Program, he writes publicity for The Neighborhood Developers in Chelsea, Mass., and works in ESOL and citizenship classes at the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden.

Author's art after statue above. Scott Ruescher (USA) 2025