Author’s Note:
 
These poems are from a series entitled I Am What They Make Of Me. Each poem is written from the perspective of a character in a novel who has been influential on me as a writer and as a person. The poems draw much of their language directly from the source texts, arranging and adapting it to emphasize the elements that speak most to my connection with the characters.

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Charles Marlow

By Jeremy Luke Hill

I am he who comes also from the dark
places of the earth, lives in the flicker
 
of what we dream, alone, travels the night
of first ages, a beetle crawling the floor
 
of a lofty portico, leaving hardly a sign,
and no memories, only: vague forms of men – 
 
(running, bent double, leaping, gliding,
distinct, incomplete, evanescent);
 
his voice – (an extravagant mystery,
pulsating stream of light, deceitful flow
 
from the heart of an impenetrable
darkness, impalpable, dying vibration
 
of one immense jabber, silly, atrocious,
sordid, savage, mean, without sense); the choice,
 
at least, of nightmares – (forced upon me
in a tenebrous land invaded by mean
 
and greedy phantoms); the wrestle with death – 
(impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot,
 
without spectators, clamour, or glory,
without the great desire of victory, great fear
 
of defeat, or belief in your own right);
and the inappreciable moment where
 
we overstep the threshold of the invisible.
 


​– from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

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Henry Soames

By Jeremy Luke Hill

I am he who sinks down on the bed,
solid as a mountain, troubled by dreams,
 
waking to write the dead on brittle pages
between the testaments, drunk, not from whiskey,
 
but from the huge, stupid love of man,
empty and meaningless as fog,
 
that comes down to wanting the whole damn world
to itself – an empty diner, sticky places
 
on counter stools, bolts and old wrenches, sheer pins,
cotter-keys, baling twine up to your knees – 
 
until the girl, like a crocus in snow,
appears with the tromp of organ pedals,
 
with rice raining down, numberless as stars,
the emptying of the fragile glass,
 
and I see her astride the stern of a ship
drawing steadily away, the veil falling
 
softly from the circlet on her forehead,
solemn as a catafalque of silver.


​ 
– from John Gardner’s Nickel Mountain

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Geoffrey Firmin

By Jeremy Luke Hill

I am he who endures the night: and again
the nightly grapple with death, the room
shaking with daemonic orchestras,
the snatches of fearful sleep, the darks’ spinets,
 
the howling of pariah dogs, the cockerels
that herald dawn all night. I take my guilt
into cloisters and under tapestries,
into the misericordias of cantinas.
 
I seem to see now, between mescals,
a light blue moonless summer evening,
but late, with Venus burning hard in daylight,
when comes the thunder of a many-engined
 
freight train over distant mountains, a mass
of white clouds, suddenly, as by a light
in an alabaster lamp, illumined from within
by gold lightening, no thunder, only the roar
 
of the great train and its wide shunting echoes:
and all at once a fishing boat’s tall gear
comes running round the point like a white giraffe,
leaving a silver scalloped rim of wake
 
stealing beachward, swaying the timber floats,
tormented in sleeked silver, then calm again,
the reflection of remote thunderclouds
in the water, lightning in deep water,
 
as the boat, a golden scroll of travelling light
in its silver wake, vanishes round the headland,
silence, and then again, the thunderless gold
lightning in the blue evening, unearthly.


​ 
– from Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano

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Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Gordon Hill Press, a literary publisher based in Guelph, Ontario. He is also the Managing Director of Vocamus Writers Community, a non-profit community organization that supports book culture in Guelph.