where it all started
I’m finally digging into my thesis work after getting by for most of this year with not that much effort. Part of me feels disillusioned with it; my thesis is dealing with a book and its characters and the very “real-I-need-to-find-a-job” part of me is not bending at will to its abstractions. Re-reading Omeros, though, has reminded me why I chose to write about this. It also represents a nice arc to my time at Haverford, since the first time I read this novel was in my freshman writing seminar. It’s nice to think how much things have changed since then & how much I’ve grown as a person. Anyway, this is the passage that made me love Walcott even before I understood how much talent brims on his pages. It’s not only because it’s about a Polish waitress, a narrative that parallels my mothers, or that it alludes to Polish cities…but more just about a general feeling that I’ve identified with many times before.
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Acres of synonymous lights, black battery cells
and terminals coiling with traffic, winked out. Sunrise
reddened the steel lake. Downstairs, in the hotel’s
Canadian-fall window, a young Polish waitress with eyes
wet as the new coal and a pageboy haircut was pouring him
coffee, the maples in the glass as yellow as orange juice.
Her porcelain wrist tilted, filling his gaze to the brim.
He hoped adoration unnerved her; the sensible shoes
skirting the bare tables, her hand aligning the service
with finical clicks. As if it had tapped her twice
on the back for her papers, she turned with that nervous
smile of the recent immigrant that borders on tears.
A Polish Sunday enclosed it. A Baroque square, its age
patrolled by young soldiers, the flag of their sagging regime
once bright as her lipstick, the consonants of a language
crunched by their boot soles. In it was the scream
of a kettle leaving a freightyard, then the soft farms
with horses and willows nodding past a train window,
the queues in the drizzle. Then the forms
where her name ran over the margin, then a passport photo
where her scared face waited when she opened its door.
She was part of that pitiless fiction so common now
that it carried her wintry beauty into Canada,
it lined her eyelashes with the snow’s blue shadow,
it made her slant cheekbones flash like the cutlery
in the hope of a newer life. At the cashier’s machine
she stood like a birch at the altar, and, very quietly,
snow draped its bridal lace over the raven’s-wing sheen.
Her name melted in mine like flakes on a river
or a black pond in which the wind shakes packets of milk.
When she stood with the cheque, I tried reading the glow
of brass letters on her blouse. Her skin, shaded in silk,
smelt fresh as a country winter before the first snow.
Snow brightening the linen, the pepper, salt domes, the gables
of the napkin, silencing Warsaw, feathering quiet Cracow;
then the raven’s wing flew again between the white tables.
There are days when, however simple the future, we do not go
towards it but leave part of life in a lobby whose elevators
divide and enclose us, brightening digits that show
exactly where we are headed, while a young Polish waitress
is emptying an ashtray, and we are drawn to a window
whose strings, if we pull them, widen an emptiness.
We yank the iron-grey drapes, and the screeching pulleys
reveal in the silence not fall in Toronto
but a city whose language was seized by its police,
that other servitude Nina Something was born into,
where under gun-barrel chimneys the smoke holds its voice
till it rises with hers. Zagajewski. Herbert. Milosz.”
