It's Alexander Hamilton's birthday, this most neglected and misunderstood of Founding Fathers. He's been in my life a long time, and he helped me through some truly rough patches while growing up.

In a dim bookshop,
where a fat, bad-tempered charcoal
cat with yellow eyes glared
through a fly-specked window,
I found you.

A worn olive drab
with a gold title
antique spine, the date, 1902.
Mother must have bought you;
the cost was a whole $2.

A black and white reproduction of
a painting by Trumbell--
You—ecstatic, fair head thrown back,
face shining, 1776 on fire!
No wonder your new friends,
fellow aides-de-camp to the great
George Washington, nicknamed
you “Little Lion.”

Accustomed to escape in books,
I read and read, oddly compelled to
struggle through a dense jungle
of Edwardian prose,
the work of a once lauded,
now forgotten
Lady Novelist.

How well she knew you!
Baby-faced orphan who
withstood the scorn
of a world where
you were “a bastard brat,”
who held on, somehow,
to your God Inside.

I started sleeping with you
when I was eleven.
We were both alone and anguished,
threatened by mean drunks.

Outside, in tropical night
was the eternal
rum-soaked party,
grown-ups braying,
men fighting,
pawing the women,
a grand finale of fists
or vomit.

We tried instead to hear the
tree-frogs chorus,
to drowse at last
to the rattle of palm and
whispering Casurina, to let
Lady of the Night bloom
inside our nostrils instead
of puke.

We hid from blows,
from double binds tougher
than the Gordian knot,
Hid from the stink of
last night’s whiskey,
and trays of butts,
hiding, fingers in our ears,
from assaults which might
include us,
from the Beauty
with a black eye who was
our mother.

With that old book,
I traveled on prop planes,
and, when the money ran out,
on tramp freighters redolent
with diesel,
the battered book
my creature comfort.

I found more books—
in the trash can
behind the bacchanalian
Bajan bar from whose stools
inebriated Brits leapt into the sea.
Alexander found his in the musty,
cockroach-haunted libraries
of planters, gentlemen
for whom he fetched and carried,
for whom he copied,
whose accounts he balanced,
whose doors he opened
so they could step right through,
to whom he was a servant,
a ragged charity child.

We parted company.
Alex went his never-was-a-kid
way, pondered
Philosophy and Law,
read Blackstone, Hobbes and Hume,
as well as the New Science
of Economics,
while I, back against the bar,
sat on the floor and imagined,
along with ETA Hoffmann,
that singing
could kill you.

We were growing up separately,
in different centuries,
in an opposite sex.

His ambition sought
“War and Preference”
and “a gentleman’s honor,”
while I roamed the brown-sugar
strand, talking to myself,
oblivious,
a teen-age girl
in a yellow French bikini.


--Juliet Waldron