The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (11 page)

the beams with their star-seed of lice,

pain shrinking every room,

pain shining in every womb,

while the blind, dumb

termites, with jaws of the crabcells consume,

in silent thunder,

to the last of all Sundays,

consume.

Finger each object, lift it

from its place, and it screams again

to be put down

in its ring of dust, like the marriage finger

frantic without its ring;

I can no more move you from your true alignment,

mother, than we can move objects in paintings.

Your house sang softly of balance,

of the rightness of placed things.

 

 

CHAPTER 3

    
I

Each dusk the leaf flared on its iron tree,

the lamplighter shouldered his ladder, a sickle

of pale light fell on the curb.

The child tented his cotton nightdress tight

across his knees. A kite

whose twigs showed through. Twilight

enshrined the lantern of his head.

Hands swing him heavenward.

The candle's yellow leaf next to his bed

re-letters
Tanglewood Tales
and Kingsley's
Heroes
,

gilding their backs,

the ceiling reels with magic lantern shows.

The black lamplighter with Demeter's torch

ignites the iron trees above the shacks.

Boy! Who was Ajax?

    
II

Ajax,

              lion-colored stallion from Sealey's stable,

              by day a cart-horse, a thoroughbred

              on race-days, once a year,

              plunges the thunder of his neck, and sniffs

              above the garbage smells, the scent

              of battle, and the shouting,

              he saith among the kitchen peels “Aha!”

              debased, bored animal,

              its dung cakes pluming, gathers

              the thunder of its flanks, and drags

              its chariot to the next block, where

Berthilia,

              the frog-like, crippled crone,

              a hump on her son's back, is carried

              to her straw mat, her day-long perch,

              Cassandra, with her drone unheeded.

              Her son, Pierre, carries night-soil in buckets,

              she spurs him like a rider,

              horsey-back, horsey-back;

              when he describes his cross he sounds content,

              he is everywhere admired. A model son.

Choiseul,

              surly chauffeur from Clauzel's garage,

              bangs Troy's gate shut!

              It hinges on a scream. His rusty

              commonlaw wife's. Hands hard as a crank handle,

              he is obsequious, in love with engines.

              They can be reconstructed. Before

              human complications, his horny hands are thumbs.

              Now, seal your eyes, and think of Homer's grief.

Darnley,

              skin freckled like a mango leaf,

              feels the sun's fingers press his lids.

              His half-brother Russell steers him by the hand.

              Seeing him, I practice blindness.

              Homer and Milton in their owl-blind towers,

              I envy him his great affliction. Sunlight

              whitens him like a negative.

Emanuel

              Auguste, out in the harbor, lone Odysseus,

              tattooed ex-merchant sailor, rows alone

              through the rosebloom of dawn to chuckling oars

              measured, dip, pentametrical, reciting

              through narrowed eyes as his blades scissor silk,

                            “Ah moon / (bend, stroke)

                            of my delight / (bend, stroke)

                            that knows no wane.

                            The moon of heaven / (bend, stroke)

                            is rising once again,”

              defiling past Troy town, his rented oars

              remembering what seas, what smoking shores?

FARAH & RAWLINS
, temple with

              plate-glass front, gutted, but girded by

              Ionic columns, before which mincing

Gaga

              the town's transvestite, housemaid's darling

              is window-shopping, swirling his plastic bag,

              before his houseboy's roundtrip to Barbados,

              most Greek of all, the love that hath no name, and

Helen?

              Janie, the town's one clear-complexioned whore,

              with two tow-headed children in her tow,

              she sleeps with sailors only, her black

              hair electrical

              as all that trouble over Troy,

              rolling broad-beamed she leaves

              a plump and pumping vacancy,

              “O promise me,” as in her satin sea-heave follow

              cries of

Ityn! Tin! Tin!

              from Philomène, the bird-brained idiot girl,

              eyes skittering as the sea-swallow

              since her rape,

              laying on lust, in her unspeakable tongue,

              her silent curse.

Joumard,

              the fowl-thief with his cockerel's strut,

              heads home like Jason, in his fluttering coat

              a smoke-drugged guinea-hen,

              the golden fleece,

Kyrie! kyrie! twitter

              a choir of surpliced blackbirds in the pews

              of telephone wires, bringing day to

Ligier,

              reprieved murderer, tangled in his pipe smoke

              wrestling Laocoön,

              bringing more gold to

Midas,

              Monsieur Auguste Manoir,

              pillar of business and the Church

              rising to watch the sunlight work for him,

              gilding the wharf's warehouses with his name.

Nessus,

              nicknamed N'homme Maman Migrain

              (your louse's mother's man),

              rises in sackcloth, prophesying

              fire and brimstone on the gilt wooden towers of

              offices, ordures, on

              Peter & Co. to burn like Pompeii, on J.

              Q. Charles's stores, on the teetering, scabrous City of

              Refuge, my old grandmother's barracks, where, once

Submarine,

              the seven-foot-high bum-boatman,

              loose, lank and gangling as a frayed cheroot,

              once asking to see a ship's captain, and refused,

              with infinite courtesy bending, inquired

              “So what the hell is your captain?

              A fucking microbe?”

Troy town awakens,

              in its shirt of fire, but on our street

Uncle Eric

              sits in a shadowed corner,

              mumbling, hum-eyed,

              writing his letters to the world,

              his tilted hand scrambling for foothold.

Vaughan,

              battling his itch, waits for the rumshop's

              New Jerusalem, while Mister

Weekes,

              slippered black grocer in gold-rimmed spectacles,

              paddles across a rug of yellow sunshine

              laid at his feet by the shadows of tall houses,

              towards his dark shop,

              propelled in his tranced passage by one star:

              Garvey's imperial emblem of Africa United,

              felt slippers muttering in Barbadian brogue,

              and, entering his shop,

              is mantled like a cleric

              in a soutane of onion smells, saltfish and garlic,

              salt-flaked Newfoundland cod hacked by a cleaver

              on a scarred counter where a bent half-penny

              shows Edward VII, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India,

              next to a Lincoln penny,
IN GOD WE TRUST

              “and in God one, b'Christ,” thinks Mr. Weekes,

              opening his Bible near the paradise plums,

              arm crooked all day over a window open

              at the New Jerusalem, for Colored People Only.

              At Exodus.

Xodus, bearing back the saxophonist,

              Yes, whose ramshorn is his dented saxophone,

              bearing back to the green grasses of Guinea,

Zandoli,

              nicknamed The Lizard,

              rodent-exterminator, mosquito-murderer,

              equipment slung over a phthisic shoulder,

              safariing from Mary Ann Street's café,

              wiping a gum-bright grin, out for the week's assault on

              roaches, midges, jiggers, rodents, bugs and larvae,

              singing, refumigating

              Jerusalem, for Colored People Only.

              These dead, these derelicts,

              that alphabet of the emaciated,

              they were the stars of my mythology.

 

 

CHAPTER 4

    
—Jerusalem, the golden

    
With milk and honey blest

 

Thin water glazed

                         the pebbled knuckles of the Baptist's feet

In Craven's book.

Their halos shone like the tin guards of lamps.

Verocchio. Leonardo painted the kneeling angel's hair.

Kneeling in our plain chapel,

I envied them their frescoes.

Italy flung round my shoulders like a robe,

I ran among dry rocks, howling, “Repent!”

Zinnias, or else some coarser marigold,

brazenly rigid in their metal bowls

or our porch's allamandas trumpeted

from the Vermeer white napery of the altar:

LET US COME INTO HIS PRESENCE WITH THANKSGIVING

AND INTO HIS COURTS WITH PRAISE.

                                              Those bowls,

in whose bossed brass the stewards were repeated

and multiplied, as in an insect's eye,

some jeweled insect in a corner of Crivelli,

were often ours, as were the trumpet flowers

between the silvered chargers with the Host

and ruby blood.

                           Collect, epistle, lesson,

the Jacobean English rang, new-minted

the speech of simple men,

evangelists, reformers, abolitionists,

their text was cold brook water,

they fell to foreign fevers,

I would be a preacher,

I would write great hymns.

Arnold, staid melancholy of those Sabbath dusks,

I know those rigorous teachers of your youth,

Victorian gravures of the Holy Land,

thorn-tortured Palestine,

bearded disciples wrapped tight in malaria,

the light of desert fevers,

and those thin sunsets

with the consistency of pumpkin soup.

Gray chapel where parched and fiery Reverend Pilgrims

were shrieking twigs,

frock-coated beetles gesturing hellfire.

Are you cast down, cast down, my coal-black kin?

Be not afraid, the Lord shall raise you up.

The cloven hoof, the hairy paw