Slanting Light

James Chambers, Itinerant Poet

—British, 1748–1820

Cradling this slim fragile volume that sheds leather dust into my palm, I read in the crude frontispiece portrait the lines of age and eccentricity in face and frame alike. Forgotten now, old Chambers was a character, a low celebrity in the Ipswich countryside who wrote for money to drink, composing acrostics on the spot and epics by day in the rude stable that served him as a home.

Fabled—his forgotten editor observes, who must have known him well— for “the inexpressible filthiness” of his person, he appears in notes and memoirs of contemporaries obscure and not who tried to help, to nurture and sustain him: fearful of such confining kindness, he fled to the next village and another rude hovel, another public house with new drinks to write for, new patrons.

How strange, now, to feel his book’s dry spine rub off on my fingers, my scholar’s soft hands, to read in his verses on Nelson’s death a depth of feeling unmitigated by polish, the sharp and stark response that shames in its rude fashioning the glossy surfaces of poets who line the miles of libraries, who rest in marbled graves, unlike Jemmy Chambers whose only grave is in my hand, this dry deckle-edged book.

Tenement

The room looks cold, there, flattened on canvas and clammy, its walls no longer even lime green: the silly, grinning cat clock on the wall— its wagging tail and goggling eyes arrested in pigment— seems embarrassed to be in the frame.

Near the cloudy window that strains the slanting light the woman swipes a white washrag with a red stripe across the yellowish tabletop. The spill she wipes may have been milk, juice perhaps; it must be tacky now, for the rag sticks, tugging back against her hand. Her fingers are tense: she is rushed, annoyed at the balky oven, the spotty potatoes she peeled, the washing that didn’t dry in the unexpected cold. Her nails are short, but red—bright spots flickering in the glooming recesses of the room.

Coffee, probably, brews on the counter in the bullet-shaped pot plugged into the brown socket; very likely, it is bitter and drunk black from the figured china cup beside the pot. There must be a stew in the oven: a few carrot parings and a flake of onion-skin lie at her feet, beneath the table, where she cannot see, near a telltale puff of cat hair that hints at an animal offstage, asleep on a heavy brocaded bedcover, pale green and peach, that nearly brushes the carpet.

How many will eat, and who? There are no plates, no silverware, glasses, napkins; no salt, even, or pepper; no sugar, bread, butter. Nothing speaks of company, of warmth: no steam rises from the percolator, and the heat-loving cat rests elsewhere. Even the painter’s palette ran cold and acidic as the woman’s drawn and pointed face.