Part IV
Annotations are below, matched to superscript footnotes in the text
Map of My Country
annotated by John Holmes
IV.
Once upon a time dragons in the curled wave,
Nights of waiting in starlight for the wind,
Sails tall under the slow antique Pacific clouds at sunrise;
Once upon a time, and a long time ago now,
Slim men on neat narrow decks, with good manners, and guns.– -
The elaborate legend of the great-uncle's voyage to Japan.³¹
– -
Once upon a time red stripes
In the striped flags whipping in sun.
Dark blue uniforms. Gilt and green carven
High-breasted ship's figure-head. Cannon. Once upon a time.
The foreign shoreline compared by a Boston man to Boston.
Brass glinting, the western ship's clean deck easy at anchor.
Speeches and gifts under the awnings,
The foreign costumes, the fans. Once upon a time.– -
A long time ago now. The strangeness; letters; the diary.
"Clothes are queer. Visited a temple. I send my love." ³²
At home, later, the fat blue porcelain jar of dry rose petals.
In my grandmother's parlor, in my aunts' houses,
The table screens of faded rich brocade, the ivory carvings
In a motionless procession forever in a brick Boston house,
The inlaid cabinets full of kid gloves, calling cards,
Pictures of the children, souvenirs of the World's Fair.
At my mother's table, in my uncle's office,
Later, a little at a time, family talk:
His good clothes of gray cloth, his job at the Navy Yard,
His long walks on Sundays in Charlestown, under Bunker Hill,
Alone, carrying a thin cane, and his linen very clean.
Had he seen the Emperor? Had he tasted the metal music
Of gongs in some shrine in the Japanese hills, worn the costume
Of moonlight on a curved bridge to some flowery island?
His silence at dinner. His sudden angers.
As if he had seen in a war more than he could bear thinking about,
Hearing the people at home talk and ask questions.
His death at forty-two.
The pencil color of his pocket diaries.³³– -
Writing my cousins' names here, I think of him, call to him,
And I keep his color still rare, though mixed with time.
We believe he climbed the bridge to the island
Shaken with music, and
Came back.
His passion in us is poetry, music, painting, theater.
I have shown this on the map everywhere,
Painting red and bronze over white and black, swirling;
Telling in color here how the west went east, telling
What he remembered on his Sunday walks, alone, slim, silent,
Telling it at last only in his blood.
He knows we know him. We think he voyaged well.
31) William Upham was a great-uncle (a fact, this time) on my mother's side of the family; I believe there were Uphams in my father's roster, too, but incidentally. He was quar-termaster on Commodore Perry's flagship on the voyage a hundred years ago that opened Japan to western trade, an occasion celebrated by the festival of the Black Ships. The "elaborate legend" is elaborated only in the poem; he left almost nothing in his own words. As a child I would hear him talked of, and I made my own mystery and legend of him; when I began to write poetry, I wanted to account for this new talent in the family by ascribing it to him, a biological impossibility. Yet he was the adventurer to the far places, he was the color. The fact is that when he came home from the Perry voyage, he went to work in the Charles- town Navy Yard, and died in his forties. The family lived then in a brick house near the Bunker Hill monument - it was as good a section, and the houses similar, as Beacon Hill -and he was said to be a silent man, who dressed immaculately on Sunday and took long walks alone. I have seen and read the diary, with its very few and non-committal entries. The Oriental souvenirs were in the houses of all the relatives, and of them all, I have a pair of coolies, about three inches high, each down on one knee, holding a basket on the shoulder. His daughter's son was a concert pianist and composer, his son a painter. The theater runs strong in the blood of some of the other cousins. And I wanted to attribute my poetry to some strain in the Upham family joined to the engineering activity of the Holmes family.
32) This is not a real quotation, but what I imagined his laconic style might have been. For all I know, he never wrote from Japan. And of course all the description of the ships and the flags is imagined, and everything that follows, with the exception of the porcelain and the screens, the ivory carvings and the inlaid cabinets. A little hearsay about his angers and his linen, a few souvenirs on tables. The rest I invented.
33) Newspaper descriptions this year (1953) of the festival of the Black Ships suddenly made me realize that he is nearer to me in time than I had realized, and that he had been still nearer. Aunt Mary, his widow, was a well-remembered part of my childhood, before and during the first world war. But for his early death, he would have been one of the family elders at the family gatherings - and perhaps not so mysterious. In a way, my imaginings and romancings put him further back in time than he was. There is much cataloging here, a dependence on the naming of things to lift up recreation, and what I knew was actual I mixed with what I did not know at all, but wanted to believe. I saved two actual items for the end of the passage, a diminishing cadence - the early death, and the pencil-color of the few words in the narrow pages of the diary, a vest-pocket volume, thin, bound in dark smooth red leather. The written words were the nearest personal actual thing I had of him, and they were dim and rubbed, and said nothing, anyway. Pencil-color.