3 POEMS | KEI MILLER

This Zinc Roof

This rectangle of sea; this portion
Of ripple; this conductor of midday heat;
This that the cat steps delicately on;

This that the poor of the world look up to
On humid nights, as if it were a crumpled
Heaven they could be lifted into.

God’s mansion is made of many-coloured zinc,
Like a balmyard I once went to, Peace
And Love written across its breadth.

This clanging of feet and boots,
Men running from Babylon whose guns
Are drawn against the small measure

Of their lives; this galvanised sheet; this
Corrugated iron. The road to hell is fenced
On each side with zinc —

Just see Dawn Scott’s installation,
A Cultural Object, its circles of zinc
Like the flight path of johncrows.

The American penny is made from zinc,
Coated with copper, but still enough zinc
That a man who swallowed 425 coins died.

This that poisons us; this that holds
Its nails like a crucified Christ, but only 

For a little while. It rises with the hurricane,

Sails in the wind, a flying guillotine.
This, a plate for our severed heads;
This that sprinkles rust

Over our sleep like obeah;
This that covers us; this that chokes us;
This, the only roof we could afford.

***

If this short poem stretches

If this short poem stretches beyond

its first line, then already, already,

it has failed, become something else,

something its author did not intend

for it to become, a misbehaving,

rambunctious, own-way thing,

its circuitous journey a secret known

only to itself, its tongue its own.

The author is destined, I am afraid,

to write poems that escape him.

This, for instance, was to be just one

line long, or even one long line,

dedicated to Mervyn Morris and his love

of brevity, but it has become something else

entirely. The poem sings its own song,

reaches its own end in its own time.

 ***

The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion

an extract

i.    in which the cartographer explains himself

You might say

my job is not

to lose myself exactly

but to imagine

what loss might feel like – 

the sudden creeping pace,

the consultation with trees and blue

fences and whatever else

might prove a landmark.

My job is to imagine the widening

of the unfamiliar and also

the widening ache of it;

to anticipate the ironic

question: how did we find

ourselves here? My job is

to untangle the tangled,

to unworry the concerned,

to guide you out from cul-de-sacs

into which you may have wrongly turned.

ii.     in which the rastaman disagrees

The rastaman has another reasoning. 

He says – now that man’s job is never straight-

forward or easy. Him work is to make thin and crushable 

all that is big and as real as ourselves; is to make flat 

all that is high and rolling; is to make invisible and wutliss 

plenty things that poor people cyaa do without – like board 

houses, and the corner shop from which Miss Katie sell 

her famous peanut porridge. And then again 

the mapmaker’s work is to make visible 

all them things that shoulda never exist in the first place 

like the conquest of pirates, like borders, 

like the viral spread of governments

iii.

The cartographer says

no – 

What I do is science. I show 

the earth as it is, without bias. 

I never fall in love. I never get involved 

with the muddy affairs of land. 

Too much passion unsteadies the hand. 

I aim to show the full 

of a place in just a glance.

iv.

The rastaman thinks, draw me a map of what you see 

then I will draw a map of what you never see 

and guess me whose map will be bigger than whose? 

Guess me whose map will tell the larger truth?

***

Kei Miller is a Jamaican poet and novelist. He read English at the University of the West Indies and completed an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. His PhD work considers epistolary narratives from the Caribbean.

His first collection was There is an Anger that Moves and he is editor of New Caribbean Poetry (both Carcanet, 2007). Carcanet published the collection A Light Song of Light in July 2010, and his novel, The Last Warner Woman, is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. He teaches at the University of Glasgow and has been a visiting writer at York University in Canada, a Vera Rubin Fellow at Yaddo, and an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa.

His collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion was published in 2014, and won the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Until 2014, he was Reader at the University of Glasgow.