In a dim bookshop,
Where a huge, bad-tempered charcoal
Cat with yellow eyes glared in the sepia shadow
Of a fly specked window,
I found you.
A worn olive drab
A bold gold title
Antique spine, dated 1902.
Mother must have bought you,
The cost a whole $2.
Black and White
Trumbull in front--and
There you were!
You—ecstatic, thin, red head thrown back,
Face shining, 1776 on fire!
No wonder your new friends,
Fellow aides-de-camp to the great
George Washington, nicknamed
You “The Little Lion.”
Accustomed to escape like this,
I read and read, oddly compelled to
Struggle through a dense jungle of
Edwardian prose,
The work of a once lauded,
Now forgotten
Lady Novelist.
Oh, how well she knew you!
Baby-faced orphan who withstood the scorn of
A world where you were “baseborn,”
Who held on, somehow,
To the God Inside.
I started sleeping with you
When I was eleven.
We were both alone and anguished,
Threatened by mean drunks
Who round the clock
Figured chaos.
Outside, in tropical night, the
Rum-soaked party, grown-ups braying,
Men fighting, pawing the women,
A grand finale of blows and vomit.
*
We hugged each other about the neck,
Knobby knees to knees,
Breathed in each other’s breath—
Yours sharp, redheaded.
We tried instead to hear the
Tree-frogs chorus, to drowse at last to
The rattle of palm and
Whispers of Casurina, to let
Lady of the Night bloom
Inside our nostrils instead of
Puke.
Together we crept from the hot room,
And stared at the sky, until
Our eyes spilled at
Venus blazing over jet-black surf,
A mirrored path
Across a living,
Phosphorescent sea.
With that old book,
I traveled on prop airplanes,
On ocean liners, and
When the money ran out, on
Tramp freighters redolent
With diesel,
The rounded corners
My creature comfort
In a sinkhole of
Squandered love,
And money.
Across time, we held hands,
Brother and sister.
We hid from blows,
From nightmarish demands,
From double binds tougher
Than the Gordian knot,
Hid from the
Stink of last night’s whiskey,
Trays of butts,
Hiding, fingers in our ears,
From assaults which might
Include us,
From the harsh slap and roar
Of violent sex,
From the Beauty
With a black eye, who is
Our mother.
Tropic rain,
Sloshing cow’s piss
Splashing the palms, the beach,
Turning Caribbean streets
into an
Odorous garbage-strewn river.
Hurricane weather, gray dragon clouds
Sprawl above snarling surf.
White horses stampede and
Boom, manes tossing on the reef.
We grow up anyway,
Children in peril.
We find more books—
Mine in the trash can
Behind the bacchanalian
Bajan bar from whose stools
Inebriated Brits leap into the sea.
He finds his in the musty,
Cockroach haunted libraries of
Planters, lordly gentlemen
He fetches and carries for,
Merchants for whom he copies,
Dawn to dusk,
Accounts balanced,
Doors he jumps to open so
They can step right through,
He is just another a cheap
Commodity, this brilliant charity child.
We part company.
He goes his never-was-a-kid
Capricorn way, ponders
Philosophy and Law,
Studies Blackstone, Hobbes and Hume,
And the new science,
Economics,
While I, backed behind the bar,
Sit on the floor and imagine,
Along with ETA Hoffmann,
That an aria can
Kill you.
Alone now, on the beach,
I watch whales court
In neon water, while at my feet,
Sea foam dwindles into sand.
I am lost
Along with Odysseus,
Groping in the bedrooms of
Murderous Plantagenets.
We grow up separately,
Different centuries,
Opposite sex,
Different books in hand.
His ambition seeks
“War and Preference”
A Gentleman’s Honor,
While I roam the brown-sugar
Strand, talking to myself as he did,
Oblivious to the unblinking stares of
Wrinkled old men,
A tan teen-ager
In a yellow French bikini.
~ Juliet Waldron
A MASTER PASSION
