The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (13 page)

a dessicating frailty which showed

in his worn mother, a taut tree

shorn to the dark house's use,

its hothouse, fragile atmosphere

laboring yearly to produce

the specimen,
Gregorias elongatus
.

In the spear-lowering light of the afternoon

I paced his hunter's stride,

there was a hierarchic arrogance in his bearing

which crested in the martial,

oracular mustaches of his father,

a Lewis gunner in the First World War,

now brown, prehensile fingers plucked his work,

lurid Madonnas, pietistic crucifixions

modeled on common Catholic lithographs,

but with the personal flourish of a witness.

Widowed, his father's interest in life declined,

his battle finished. The brown twigs broke apart.

Around that golden year which I described

Gregorias and that finished soldier quartered

in a brown, broken-down bungalow

whose yard was indistinguishable from bush,

between the broad-leaved jungle and the town.

Shaky, half-rotted treaders, sighing, climbed

towards a sun-warped veranda, one half of which

Gregorias had screened into a studio,

shading a varnished, three-legged table

crawling with exhausted paint-tubes, a lowering quart

of
Pirate
rum, and gray, dog-eared, turpentine-stained editions

of the Old Masters. One day the floor collapsed.

The old soldier sank suddenly to his waist

wearing the veranda like a belt.

Gregorias buckled with laughter telling this,

but shame broke the old warrior.

The dusk lowered his lances through the leaves.

In another year the soldier shrank and died.

Embittered, Gregorias wanted carved on his stone:

PRAISE YOUR GOD, DRINK YOUR RUM, MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS.

We were both fatherless now, and often drunk.

Drunk,

             on a half-pint of joiner's turpentine,

drunk,

             while the black, black-sweatered, horn-soled fishermen drank

             their
l'absinthe
in sand backyards standing up,

             on the clear beer of sunrise,

             on cheap, tannic Canaries muscatel,

             on glue, on linseed oil, on kerosene,

             as Van Gogh's shadow rippling on a cornfield,

             on Cézanne's boots grinding the stones of Aix

             to shales of slate, ochre and Vigie blue,

             on Gauguin's hand shaking the gin-colored dew

             from the umbrella yams,

             garrulous, all day, sun-struck,

till dusk glazed vision with its darkening varnish.

Days welded by the sun's torch into days!

Gregorias plunging whole-suit in the shallows,

painting under water, roaring, and spewing spray,

Gregorias gesturing, under the coconuts

wickerwork shade—tin glare—wickerwork shade,

days woven into days, a stinging haze

of thorn trees bent like green flames by the Trades,

under a sky tacked to the horizon, drumskin tight,

as shaggy combers leisurely beard the rocks,

while the asphalt sweats its mirages and the beaks

of fledgling ginger lilies

gasped for rain.

Gregorias, the easel rifled on his shoulder, marching

towards an Atlantic flashing tinfoil,

singing “O Paradiso,”

till the western breakers labored to that music,

his canvas crucified against a tree.

    
II

But drunkenly, or secretly, we swore,

disciples of that astigmatic saint,

that we would never leave the island

until we had put down, in paint, in words,

as palmists learn the network of a hand,

all of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines,

every neglected, self-pitying inlet

muttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangroves

from which old soldier crabs slipped

surrendering to slush,

each ochre track seeking some hilltop and

losing itself in an unfinished phrase,

under sand shipyards where the burnt-out palms

inverted the design of unrigged schooners,

entering forests, boiling with life,

goyave
,
corrosol
,
bois-canot
,
sapotille
.

Days!

The sun drumming, drumming,

past the defeated pennons of the palms,

roads limp from sunstroke,

past green flutes of grass

the ocean cannonading, come!

Wonder that opened like the fan

of the dividing fronds

on some noon-struck Sahara,

where my heart from its rib-cage yelped like a pup

after clouds of sanderlings rustily wheeling

the world on its ancient,

invisible axis,

the breakers slow-dolphining over more breakers,

to swivel our easels down, as firm

as conquerors who had discovered home.

    
III

For no one had yet written of this landscape

that it was possible, though there were sounds

given to its varieties of wood;

the
bois-canot
responded to its echo,

when the axe spoke, weeds ran up to the knee

like bastard children, hiding in their names,

whole generations died, unchristened,

growths hidden in green darkness, forests

of history thickening with amnesia,

so that a man's branched, naked trunk,

its roots crusted with dirt,

swayed where it stopped, remembering another name;

breaking a lime leaf,

cracking an acrid ginger-root,

a smell of tribal medicine stained the mind,

stronger than ocean's rags,

than the reek of the maingot forbidden pregnant women,

than the smell of the horizon's rusting rim,

here was a life older than geography,

as the leaves of edible roots opened their pages

at the child's last lesson, Africa, heart-shaped,

and the lost Arawak hieroglyphs and signs

were razed from slates by sponges of the rain,

their symbols mixed with lichen,

the archipelago like a broken root,

divided among tribes, while trees and men

labored assiduously, silently to become

whatever their given sounds resembled,

ironwood, logwood-heart, golden apples, cedars,

and were nearly

ironwood, logwood-heart, golden apples, cedars,

men …

FROM BOOK III:
A SIMPLE FLAME

All have actually parted from the house, but all truly have remained. And it's not the memory of them that remains, but they themselves. Nor is it that they remain in the house but that they continue because of the house. The functions and the acts go from the house by train or by plane or on horseback, walking or crawling. What continues in the house is the organ, the gerundial or circular agent. The steps, the kisses, the pardons, the crimes have gone. What continues in the house is the foot, the lips, the eyes, the heart. Negations and affirmations, good and evil have scattered. What continues in the house is the subject of the act.

CESAR VALLEJO,
Poemas Humanos

 

 

CHAPTER 14

—ANNA AWAKING

    
I

When the oil-green water glows but doesn't catch,

only its burnish, something wakes me early,

draws me out breezily to the pebbly shelf

of shallows where the water chuckles

and the ribbed boats sleep like children,

buoyed on their creases. I have nothing to do,

the burnished kettle is already polished,

to see my own blush burn,

and the last thing the breeze needs is my exhilaration.

I lie to my body with useless chores.

The ducks, if they ever slept, waddle knowingly.

The pleats of the shallows are neatly creased

and decorous and processional,

they arrive at our own harbor from the old Hospital

across the harbor. When the first canoe,

silent, will not wave at me,

I understand, we are acknowledging

our separate silences, as the one silence,

I know that they know my peace as I know theirs.

I am amazed that the wind is tirelessly fresh.

The wind is older than the world.

It is always one thing at a time.

Now, it is always girlish.

I am happy enough to see it as a kind

of dimpled, impish smiling.

When the sleep-smelling house stirs

to that hoarse first cough, that child's first cry,

that rumbled, cavernous questioning of my mother,

I come out of the cave

like the wind emerging,

like a bride, to her first morning.

I shall make coffee.

The light, like a fiercer dawn,

will singe the downy edges of my hair,

and the heat will plate my forehead till it shines.

Its sweat will share the excitement of my cunning.

Mother, I am in love.

Harbor, I am waking.

I know the pain in your budding, nippled limes,

I know why your limbs shake, windless, pliant trees.

I shall grow gray as this light.

The first flush will pass.

But there will always be morning,

and I shall have this fever waken me,

whoever I lie to, lying close to, sleeping

like a ribbed boat in the last shallows of night.

But even if I love not him but the world,

and the wonder of the world in him, of him in the world,

and the wonder that he makes the world waken to me,

I shall never grow old in him,

I shall always be morning to him,

and I must walk and be gentle as morning.

Without knowing it, like the wind,

that cannot see her face,

the serene humility of her exultation,

that having straightened the silk sea smooth, having noticed

that the comical ducks ignore her, that

the childish pleats of the shallows are set straight,

that everyone, even the old, sleeps in innocence,

goes in nothing, naked, as I would be,

if I had her nakedness, her transparent body.

The bells garland my head. I could be happy,

just because today is Sunday. No, for more.

    
II

Then Sundays, smiling, carried in both hands

a toweled dish bubbling with the good life

whose fervor steaming, beaded her clear brow,

from which damp skeins were brushed,

and ladled out her fullness to the brim.

And all those faded prints that pressed their scent

on her soft, house-warm body,

glowed from her flesh with work,

her hands that held the burnish of dry hillsides

freckled with fire-light,

hours that ripened till the fullest hour

could burst with peace.

“Let's go for a little walk,” she said, one afternoon,

“I'm in a walking mood.” Near the lagoon,

dark water's lens had made the trees one wood

arranged to frame this pair whose pace

unknowingly measured loss,

each face was set towards its character.

Where they now stood, others before had stood,

the same lens held them, the repeated wood,

then there grew on each one

the self-delighting, self-transfiguring stone

stare of the demi-god.

Stunned by their images they strolled on, content

that the black film of water kept the print

of their locked images when they passed on.

    
III

And which of them in time would be betrayed

was never questioned by that poetry

which breathed within the evening naturally,

but by the noble treachery of art

that looks for fear when it is least afraid,

that coldly takes the pulse-beat of the heart

in happiness; that praised its need to die

to the bright candor of the evening sky,

that preferred love to immortality;

so every step increased that subtlety

which hoped that their two bodies could be made

one body of immortal metaphor.

The hand she held already had betrayed

them by its longing for describing her.

 

 

CHAPTER 15

    
I

Still dreamt of, still missed,

especially on raw, rainy mornings, your face shifts

into anonymous schoolgirl faces, a punishment,

since sometimes, you condescend to smile,

since at the corners of the smile there is forgiveness.

Besieged by sisters, you were a prize

of which they were too proud, circled

by the thorn thicket of their accusation,

what grave deep wrong, what wound have you brought Anna?

The rain season comes with its load.

The half-year has travelled far. Its back hurts.

It drizzles wearily.

It is twenty years since,

after another war, the shell-cases are where?

But in our brassy season, our imitation autumn,

your hair puts out its fire,

your gaze haunts innumerable photographs,

now clear, now indistinct,

all that perusing generality,

that vengeful conspiracy with nature,

all that sly informing of objects,

and behind every line, your laugh

frozen into a lifeless photograph.

In that hair I could walk through the wheatfields of Russia,