From Inside Out: Selected Prose
By Alastair Reid
The O-Filler
One noon in the library, I watched a man –
imagine! – filling in O’s, a little, rumpled
nobody of a man, who licked his stub of pencil
and leaned over every O with a loving care,
shading it neatly, exactly to its edges
until the open pages
were pocked and dotted with solid O’s, like towns
and capitals on a map. And yet, so peppered,
the book appeared inhabited and complete.
That whole afternoon, as the light outside softened
and the library groaned woodenly,
he worked and worked, his o-so-patient shading
descending like an eyelid over each open O
for page after page. Not once did he miss one,
or hover even a moment over an a
or an e or a p or a g. Only the O’s –
oodles of O’s, O’s multitudinous, O’s manifold,
O’s italic and roman.
And what light on his crumpled face when he discovered –
as I supposed – odd words like zoo and ooze,
polo, oolong and odontology!
Think now. In that limitless library,
all round the steep-shelved walls, bulging in their bindings,
books stood, waiting. Heaven knows how many
he had so far filled, but still there remained
uncountable volumes of O-laden prose, and odes
with inflated capital O’s (in the manner of Shelley),
O-bearing Bibles and biographies,
even whole sections devoted to O alone,
all his for the filling. Glory, glory, glory!
How utterly open and endless the world must have
seemed to him,
how round and ample! Think of it. A pencil
was all he needed. Life was one wide O.
And why, at the end of things, should O’s not be closed
as eyes are? I envied him, for in my place
across the table from him, had I accomplished
anything as firm as he had, or as fruitful?
What could I show? A handful of scrawled lines,
an afternoon yawned and wondered away,
and a growing realisation that in time
even my scribbled words would come
under his grubby thumb, and the blinds be drawn
on all my O’s, with only this thought for comfort –
that when he comes to this poem, a proper joy
may amaze his wizened face and, o, a pure pleasure
make his relentless pencil quiver.
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