The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (10 page)

above the promontory, the sky

grew drunk with light.

                                       There

was your heaven! The clear

glaze of another life,

a landscape locked in amber, the rare

gleam. The dream

of reason had produced its monster:

a prodigy of the wrong age and color.

All afternoon the student

with the dry fever of some draftsman's clerk

had magnified the harbor, now twilight

eager to complete itself,

drew a girl's figure to the open door

of a stone boathouse with a single stroke, then fell

to a reflecting silence. This silence waited

for the verification of detail:

the gables of the Saint Antoine Hotel

aspiring from jungle, the flag

at Government House melting its pole,

and for the tidal amber glare to glaze

the last shacks of the Morne till they became

transfigured sheerly by the student's will,

a cinquecento fragment in gilt frame.

The vision died,

the black hills simplified

to hunks of coal,

but if the light was dying through the stone

of that converted boathouse on the pier,

a girl, blowing its embers in her kitchen,

could feel its epoch entering her hair.

Darkness, soft as amnesia, furred the slope.

He rose and climbed towards the studio.

The last hill burned,

the sea crinkled like foil,

a moon ballooned up from the Wireless Station. O

mirror, where a generation yearned

for whiteness, for candor, unreturned.

The moon maintained her station,

her fingers stroked a chiton-fluted sea,

her disc whitewashed the shells

of gutted offices barnacling the wharves

of the burnt town, her lamp

baring the ovals of toothless façades,

along the Roman arches, as he passed

her alternating ivories lay untuned,

her age was dead, her sheet

shrouded the antique furniture, the mantel

with its plaster of paris Venus, which

his yearning had made marble, half-cracked

unsilvering mirror of black servants,

like the painter's kerchiefed, ear-ringed portrait: Albertina.

Within the door, a bulb

haloed the tonsure of a reader crouched

in its pale tissue like an embryo,

the leisured gaze

turned towards him, the short arms

yawned briefly, welcome. Let us see.

Brown, balding, a lacertilian

jut to its underlip,

with spectacles thick as a glass paperweight

over eyes the hue of sea-smoothed bottle glass,

the man wafted the drawing to his face

as if dusk were myopic, not his gaze.

Then, with slow strokes the master changed the sketch.

    
II

In its dimension the drawing could not trace

the sociological contours of the promontory;

once, it had been an avenue of palms

strict as Hobbema's aisle of lowland poplars,

now, leveled, bulldozed, and metaled for an airstrip,

its terraces like tree-rings told its age.

There, patriarchal banyans,

bearded with vines from which black schoolboys gibboned,

brooded on a lagoon seasoned with dead leaves,

mangroves knee-deep in water

crouched like whelk-pickers on brown, spindly legs

scattering red soldier crabs

scrabbling for redcoats' meat.

The groves were sawn

symmetry and contour crumbled,

down the arched barrack balconies

where colonels in the whiskey-colored light

had watched the green flash, like a lizard's tongue,

catch the last sail, tonight

row after row of orange stamps repeated

the villas of promoted Civil Servants.

The moon came to the window and stayed there.

He was her subject, changing when she changed,

from childhood he'd considered palms

ignobler than imagined elms,

the breadfruit's splayed

leaf coarser than the oak's,

he had prayed

nightly for his flesh to change,

his dun flesh peeled white by her lightning strokes!

Above the cemetery where

the airstrip's tarmac ended

her slow disc magnified

the life beneath her like a reading-glass.

Below the bulb

a green book, laid

face downward. Moon,

and sea. He read

the spine.
FIRST POEMS:

CAMPBELL
. The painter

almost absently

reversed it, and began to read:

               “Holy be

               the white head of a Negro,

               sacred be

               the black flax of a black child…”

And from a new book,

bound in sea-green linen, whose lines

matched the exhilaration which their reader,

rowing the air around him now, conveyed,

another life it seemed would start again

while past the droning, tonsured head

the white face

of a dead child stared from its window-frame.

    
III

They sang, against the rasp and cough of shovels,

against the fists of mud pounding the coffin,

the diggers' wrists rounding off every phrase,

their iron hymn, “The Pilgrims of the Night.”

In the sea-dusk, the live child waited

for the other to escape, a flute

of frail, seraphic mist,

but their black, Bible-paper voices fluttered shut, silence

reentered every mold, it wrapped the edges

of sea-eaten stone, mantled the blind

eternally gesturing angels, strengthened the flowers

with a different patience, and left

or lost its hoarse voice in the shells

that trumpeted from the graves. The world

stopped swaying and settled in its place.

A black lace glove swallowed his hand.

The engine of the sea began again.

A night-black hearse, tasseled and heavy, lugged

an evening of blue smoke across the field,

like an old wreath the mourners broke apart

and drooped like flowers over the streaked stones

deciphering dates. The gravekeeper with his lantern-jaw

(years later every lantern-swinging porter

guarding infinite rails repeated this) opened

the yellow doorway to his lodge. Wayfarer's station.

The child's journey was signed.

The ledger drank its entry.

Outside the cemetery gates life stretched from sleep.

Gone to her harvest of flax-headed angels,

of seraphs blowing pink-palated conchs,

gone, so they sang, into another light:

But was it her?

Or Thomas Alva Lawrence's dead child,

another Pinkie, in her rose gown floating?

Both held the same dark eyes,

slow, haunting coals, the same curved

ivory hand touching the breast,

as if, answering death, each whispered “Me?”

    
IV

Well, everything whitens,

all that town's characters, its cast of thousands

arrested in one still!

As if a sudden flashbulb showed their deaths.

The trees, the road he walks home, a white film,

tonight in the park the children leap into statues,

their outcries round as moonlight,

their flesh like flaking stone,

poor negatives!

They have soaked too long in the basin of the mind,

they have drunk the moon-milk

that X-rays their bodies,

the bone tree shows

through the starved skins,

and one has left, too soon,

a reader out of breath,

and once that begins, how shall I tell them,

while the tired filaments of another moon,

one that was younger,

fades, with the elate extinction of a bulb?

 

 

CHAPTER 2

    
I

At every first communion, the moon

would lend her lace to a barefooted town

christened, married and buried in borrowed white,

in fretwork borders of carpenter's Gothic,

in mansard bonnets, pleated jalousies,

when, with her laces laid aside,

she was a servant, her sign

a dry park of disconsolate palms, like brooms,

planted by the Seventh Edward, Prince of Wales,

with drooping ostrich crests,
ICH DIEN, I SERVE
.

I sweep. I iron. The smell of drizzled asphalt

like a flat-iron burning,

odors of smoke, the funereal berried ferns

that made an undertaker's parlor of our gallery.

Across the pebbled backyard, woodsmoke thins,

epiphany of ascension. The soul, like fire,

abhors what it consumes. In the upstairs rooms

smell of blue soap that puckered the black nurse's palms,

those hands which held our faces like a vase;

the coffee-grinder, grumbling,

ground its teeth,

waking at six.

                         The cracked egg hisses.

The sheets of Monday

are fluttering from the yard.

The week sets sail.

    
II

                         Maman,

only on Sundays was the Singer silent,

then,

tobacco smelt stronger, was more masculine.

Sundays

the parlor smelt of uncles,

the lamppoles rang,

the drizzle shivered its maracas,

like mandolins the tightening wires of rain,

then

from striped picnic buses,
jour marron
,

gold bangles tinkled like good-morning in Guinea

and a whore's laughter opened like sliced fruit.

Maman,

you sat folded in silence,

as if your husband might walk up the street,

while in the forests the cicadas pedaled their machines,

and silence, a black maid in white,

barefooted, polished and repolished

the glass across his fading watercolors,

the dumb Victrola cabinet,

the panels and the gleam of blue-winged teal

beating the mirror's lake.

In silence,

the revered, silent objects ring like glass,

at my eyes' touch, everything tightened, tuned,

Sunday,

the dead Victrola;

Sunday, a child

breathing with lungs of bread;

Sunday, the sacred silence of machines.

Maman,

your son's ghost circles your lost house, looking in

incomprehensibly at its dumb tenants

like fishes busily inaudible behind glass,

while the carpenter's Gothic joke, A, W, A, W,

Warwick and Alix involved in its eaves

breaks with betrayal.

You stitched us clothes from the nearest elements,

made shirts of rain and freshly ironed clouds,

then, singing your iron hymn, you riveted

your feet on Monday to the old machine.

Then Monday plunged her arms up to the elbows

in a foam tub, under a blue-soap sky,

the wet fleets sailed the yard, and every bubble

with its bent, mullioned window, opened

its mote of envy in the child's green eye

of that sovereign-headed, pink-cheeked bastard Bubbles

in the frontispiece of Pears Cyclopedia.

Rising in crystal spheres, world after world.

They melt from you, your sons.

Your arms grow full of rain.

    
III

Old house, old woman, old room,

old planes, old buckling membranes of the womb,

translucent walls,

breathe through your timbers; gasp

arthritic, curling beams,

cough in old air

shining with motes, stair

polished and repolished by the hands of strangers,

die with defiance flecking your gray eyes,

motes of a sunlit air,

your timbers humming with constellations of carcinoma,

your bed frames glowing with radium,

cold iron dilating the fever of your body,

while the galvanized iron snaps in spasms of pain,

but a house gives no outcry,

it bears the depth of forest, of ocean and mother.

Each consuming the other

with memory and unuse.

Why should we weep for dumb things?

This radiance of sharing extends to the simplest objects,

to a favorite hammer, a paintbrush, a toothless,

gum-sunken old shoe,

to the brain of a childhood room, retarded,

lobotomized of its furniture,

stuttering its inventory of accidents:

why this chair cracked,

when did the tightened scream

of that bedspring finally snap,

when did that unsilvering mirror finally

surrender her vanity,

and, in turn, these objects assess us,

that yellow paper flower with the eyes of a cat,

that stain, familiar as warts or some birthmark,

as the badge of some loved defect,

while the thorns of the bougainvillea

molt like old fingernails,

and the flowers keep falling,

and the flowers keep opening,

the allamandas' fallen bugles, but nobody charges.

Skin wrinkles like paint,

the forearm of a balustrade freckles,

crows' feet radiate

from the shut eyes of windows,

and the door, mouth clamped, reveals nothing,

for there is no secret,

there is no other secret

but a pain so alive that

to touch every ledge of that house edges a scream

from the burning wires, the nerves

with their constellation of cancer,