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The Poet's Work: The John Holmes Collection

Part IX

Annotations are below, matched to superscript footnotes in the text

Map of My Country

annotated by John Holmes


IX.

Put terrors where no knowledge is,

Said the old cartographers,

Fear comets, and serpents that swallow ships.

Keep away from the edge of the known world.

So they showed whirlpools, and dragons in the margins,

And giants and terrible winds.⁴⁵

– -

Those old maps are very decorative, quaint, desirable for framing.

They were right, though. There are some things you can't do anything about.

You do fall into the whirlpool sometimes, you do get hit by a comet,

You get blown by a black wind out to the edge of the known world,

Slammed against a brick-wall question, and no answer.

– -

A woman was crying as if she couldn't stop.
I listened, but I didn't know who lived there.

Somebody's bad luck
, I said; like that.

I watched an ambulance at the hospital door.

They were being very careful with the stretcher,

It was small, it was white, it must have been a child.

Somebody's bad luck.

The morning paper, under a big blurred picture

Of a man with his face turned aside, says . . .

No one I know.

– -

Somebody's bad luck in the newsreels last night.

Somebody's bad luck this morning in the street-car,

Told by a short man with his back to me, I couldn't hear all of it.

Somebody I saw downtown, looking sick, looking scared,

Nowhere to go. Somebody, no one I know.

– -

Who?

Who's hurt?

Where is he now? Where are you?

I'm coming. I'm crying your name in the night everywhere.

You. I'm coming. Answer me. Where are you?

– -

Where are they? Who?

Now that I draw the known world, they are all here near me.

I'm hurt, and you.

I'm scared, too.

It was Johnny carried away in that ambulance, my son,

Or was it your son?

That was you sobbing in the next house.

That was me with my back against the street-car door.

The names in my poem of ecstasy and ancestor

Are yours and mine and might be anybody's-it's all been done.

You climbed the trees I climbed, they hated the same deaths,

We remember the spring-moonlit-leaves at school.

It's drawn here, it belongs to everyone.

– -

Will you follow the map's lines

Past gaps in knowledge, into my deserts and darkness,

And read the reasons for the lines I drew-

Or have you been there, too?

– -

Since the thirtieth year of my age I've heard the cry

That on a seventeenth-century night no one in England answered,

O God! O save me!
Black silence, and another blow.

I believe the man died in a ditch, of many wounds, and no name.

I believe there is more murder than they print in the papers,

And the news I read I scarcely understand,

but I have bad dreams.

I dream magazine-pictures of refugees with bundles, plodding,

The road full of them, a long road going somewhere, nowhere,

A road leading away from home,

And they might be my wife, my child, myself with a push-cart, plodding.

Where did they sit down? When did they open the clumsy package,

And what had I put in it, shirts, toys, insurance policies,

Food out of the icebox, what did I save?

– -

The day after this dream I say little.

People notice my bad temper.

But I am not angry, it isn't anger.

What can we save? What have we got that goes best in a bundle?

– -

When I was young, I was the center of my world,

And said from where I sat, serenely, greenly curled,-

Give up, go home and die, no one would care,-

To old, gross, fat, sad, ugly hopeful people everywhere.

But each one was the center of his world, and cared,

And was not old or ugly; but I was sad, I cared,

When I grew up, whether or not they died,

And what they hoped for, and to whom they cried.

– -

I am remembering a cry I heard and answered.

I heard a girl scream; got out of bed and dressed; I was asleep;

She flung herself out of his car and ran up the street home

Just as I got there, and he drove around the block to where I stood.

Would you like to talk to me, he said.

He told me his bad luck, he was married, he was in love with this girl.

When she said, We've got to stop this, it's all wrong,

This is getting us nowhere, and my family doesn't like it,

He hit her. He didn't mean to, but he hit her.

He was going to kill himself that night, he said.

I was very cold sitting in his car late listening to his bad luck.

I was in love myself at that time,

I was very sure about it, I told him,

Very lucky; and at that time I was, and I was very happy.

I think he went home, he got quiet after he told me the story;

I never knew, and he didn't tell me his name.

He had planned to drive his car into the river.⁴⁶ ⁴⁷



45) The quotation is partly paraphrased, arid was very much to my purposes for this section of the poem. I wanted a terra incognita passage, not the geographically fearful and unmapped, but the evils and perils that cannot be mapped even if they are known. This section is again the insistence on the dark half of the double root. "Somebody's bad luck" was a phrase in a novel by John Dos Passos, a passer's-remark so casual and so usual I might have overheard it myself on the street. The episode at the end is true

46) Once when I was hopeless and thought the end of the world had come - a girl had run away with my best friend; my girl, that is - I used to look at the faces of people in the subway cars and hate them all. I hated them, or rather despised them, for not knowing what real misery and tragedy could be, as I knew. Into the subway car came a little girl with her mother, and all or most of the faces loosened, and some smiled; whatever was locked inside, this general demonstration showed that the mask was not all stone, and even I thought for a moment about the child and was thinking like the others. I returned to my brooding shortly, and the smiles passed from the other faces. But in that moment I realized with a shock that I was not uniquely cursed, not alone smitten. I reasoned with some wonder that I could see no definite outward evidence on the faces of hidden hurt, and that no one was staring at me, whose hurt I had been so bitterly certain was so large and so lonely. In that instant my contempt changed to compassion. I exchanged one sort of grief for another, but it was less selfish.

47) The man in the car did tell me his name, and his business, and where he had gone to college, and that he had belonged to the fraternity of which my father was once national president. In my superiority - or at any rate, in my relative security - I asked the man to write to me when he was ready to. He seized on this, and wrote down my name and address. It was then that he thanked me, and told me he had intended to drive his car into the river. In three weeks he wrote me, and that was when I learned his name, that he had pulled himself together, that his family and his business were in hand again, and that he was grateful to me for this.

Other ideas, or images, or attitudes, have repeated themselves in my poetry, and in this poem, but the story of the Good Samaritan had always seemed to me the greatest story, and his act the only one that could save the world. If I had not already thought about this, I probably would not have acted myself as fast as I did that night; the person who finds himself in this position must act at once, no second thought. I think that the episode of the subway car, which had occurred several years before, in some way brought about the second one, or my part in it. Yet there was some other and more ordinary preparation: I knew who the girl was, though not her name; the neighborhood knew she often came home late at night, and sat in a car that was parked three or four houses away from hers. Just below our house, as a matter of fact, or I would not have heard.

I became formally engaged to the girl I had referred to in talking with the man; she was the girl I walked with in spring nights at college, and took to all the dances. She did not like it that I wanted to be a college instructor, and broke the engagement during the first year of my first job, and two years later I married a girl from that city.