The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (14 page)

your arms were downed and ripening pears,

for you became, in fact, another country,

you are Anna of the wheatfield and the weir,

you are Anna of the solid winter rain,

Anna of the smoky platform and the cold train,

in that war of absence, Anna of the steaming stations,

gone from the marsh-edge,

from the drizzled shallows

puckering with gooseflesh,

Anna of the first green poems that startlingly hardened,

of the mellowing breasts now,

Anna of the lurching, long flamingos

of the harsh salt lingering in the thimble

of the bather's smile,

Anna of the darkened house, among the reeking shell-cases

lifting my hand and swearing us to her breast,

unbearably clear-eyed.

You are all Annas, enduring all goodbyes,

within the cynical station of your body,

Christie, Karenina, big-boned and passive,

that I found life within some novel's leaves

more real than you, already chosen

as his doomed heroine. You knew, you knew.

    
II

Who were you, then?

The golden partisan of my young Revolution,

my braided, practical, seasoned commissar,

your back, bent at its tasks, in the blue kitchen,

or hanging flags of laundry, feeding the farm's chickens,

against a fantasy of birches,

poplars or whatever.

As if a pen's eye could catch that virginal litheness,

as if shade and sunlight leoparding the blank page

could be so literal,

foreign as snow,

far away as first love,

my Akhmatova!

Twenty years later, in the odor of burnt shells,

you can remind me of “A Visit to the Pasternaks,”

so that you are suddenly the word “wheat,”

falling on the ear, against the frozen silence of a weir,

again you are bending

over a cabbage garden, tending

a snowdrift of rabbits,

or pulling down the clouds from the thrumming clotheslines.

If dreams are signs,

then something died this minute,

its breath blown from a different life,

from a dream of snow, from paper

to white paper flying, gulls and herons

following this plow. And now,

you are suddenly old, white-haired,

like the herons, the turned page. Anna, I wake

to the knowledge that things sunder

from themselves, like peeling bark,

to the emptiness

of a bright silence shining after thunder.

    
III

“Any island would drive you crazy,”

I knew you'd grow tired

of all that iconography of the sea

like the young wind, a bride

riffling daylong the ocean's catalogue

of shells and algae,

everything, this flock

of white, novitiate herons

I saw in the grass of a gray parish church,

like nurses, or young nuns after communion,

their sharp eyes sought me out

as yours once, only.

And you were heron-like,

a water-haunter,

you grew bored with your island,

till, finally, you took off,

without a cry,

a novice in your nurse's uniform,

years later I imagined you

walking through trees to some gray hospital,

serene communicant,

but never “lonely,”

like the wind, never to be married,

your faith like folded linen, a nun's, a nurse's,

why should you read this now?

No woman should read verses

twenty years late. You go about your calling, candle-like

carrying yourself down a dark aisle

of wounded, married to the sick,

knowing one husband, pain,

only with the heron-flock, the rain,

the stone church, I remembered …

Besides, the slender, virginal New Year's

just married, like a birch

to a few crystal tears,

and like a birch bent at the register

who cannot, for a light's flash, change her name,

she still writes '65 for '66;

so, watching the tacit

ministering herons, each at its

work among the dead, the stone church, the stones,

I made this in your honor, when

vows and affections failing

your soul leapt like a heron sailing

from the salt, island grass

into another heaven.

    
IV

Anna replies:

I am simple,

I was simpler then.

It was simplicity

which seemed so sensual.

What could I understand,

the world, the light? The light

in the mud-stained sea-wash,

the light in a gull's creak

letting the night in?

They were simple to me,

I was not within them as simply

as I was within you.

It was your selflessness

which loved me as the world,

I was a child, as much

as you, but you brought the tears

of too many contradictions,

I became a metaphor, but

believe me I was unsubtle as salt.

And I answer, Anna,

twenty years after,

a man lives half of life,

the second half is memory,

the first half, hesitation

for what should have happened

but could not, or

what happened with others

when it should not.

A gleam. Her burning grip. The brass shell-cases,

oxidized, the brass reeking of cordite,

forty-one years after the Great War. The gleam

of brass reburnished in the allamanda,

through the barbed wire of bougainvillea thorns

beyond the window, on the sun-chevroned porch

I watched the far cannon-smoke of cloud

above the Morne, wounded, struck-dumb,

as she drew my hand firmly to the firstness

of the crisp, fragile cloth across her breast,

in a locked silence, she the nurse,

I the maimed soldier. There have been

other silences, none as deep. There has since

been possession, none as sure.

FROM BOOK IV:
THE ESTRANGING SEA

    
Who order'd that their longing's fire

    
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool'd?

    
Who renders vain their deep desire?—

    
A God, a God their severance ruled!

    
And bade betwixt their shores to be

    
The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.

                        
ARNOLD,
“To Marguerite”

 

 

CHAPTER 20

    
—Down their carved names

    
the raindrop ploughs

                                        
HARDY

    
I

Smug, behind glass, we watch the passengers,

like cattle breaking, disembark.

One life, one marriage later I watched Gregorias stride

across the tarmac at Piarco, that familiar lope

that melancholy hunter's stride

seemed broken, part of the herd.

                                         Something inside

me broke subtly, like a vein. I saw him grope

desperately, vaguely for his friend,

for something which a life's bewilderment could claim

as stable. I shouted, “Apilo!”

Panic and wonder struggled for the grin.

“O the years, O…”

                                The highway canes unrolled in

silence past the car glass, like glass

the years divided. We fished for the right level, shrill,

hysterical, until, when it subsided,

a cautionary silence glazed each word.

Was he as broken down as I had heard,

driven deep in debt,

unable to hold down a job, painting so badly

that those who swore his genius vindicated

everything once, now saw it as a promise never kept?

Viciously, near tears, I wished him dead.

I wished him a spiteful martyrdom, in revenge

for their contempt, their tiring laughter.

After I told him, he laughed and said, “I tried it once.”

“One morning I lay helplessly in bed,

everything drained, gone. The children crying.

I couldn't take any more. I had dreamed of dying.

I sent for Peggy, you remember her?

She's in the States now. Anyhow,

I sent her to the bathroom for a blade …

When she had brought it, I asked her to go.

I lay there with the razor-blade in my hand …

I tried to cut my wrist … I don't know why

I stopped. I wanted very, very much to die …

Only some nights before, I had had a dream …

I dreamt…”

                    And what use what he dreamt?

“We lived in a society which denied itself heroes”

(Naipaul), poor scarred carapace

shining from those abrasions it has weathered,

wearing his own humility like a climate,

a man exhausted, racked by his own strength,

Gregorias, I saw, had entered life.

They shine, they shine,

such men. After the vision

of their own self-exhaustion bores them,

till, slowly unsurprised at their own greatness,

needing neither martyrdom nor magnificence,

“I see, I see,” is what Gregorias cried,

living within that moment where he died.

Rereading Pasternak's
Safe Conduct

as always again when life

startles under the lamplight,

I saw him brutally as Mayakovsky,

nostalgia, contempt raged for his death,

and the old choir of frogs,

those spinsterish, crackling cicadas.

Yet, even in such books

the element has burnt out,

honor and revelation are

a votive flame, and what's left

is too much like a wreath,

a smoky, abrupt recollection.

I write of a man whom life,

not death or memory, grants fame,

in my own pantheon, so, while

this fiery particle

thrives fiercely in another,

even if fueled by liquor

to venerate the good,

honor the humbly great,

to render in “an irresponsible citizen”

the simple flame.

Too late, too late.

    
II

The rain falls like knives

on the kitchen floor.

The sky's heavy drawer

was pulled out too suddenly.

The raw season is on us.

For days it has huddled on the kitchen sill,

tense, a smoke-and-orange kitten

flexing its haunches,

coiling its yellow scream

and now, it springs.

Nimble fingers of lightning

have picked the watershed,

the wires fling their beads.

Tears, like slow crystal beetles, crawl the pane.

On such days, when the postman's bicycle

whirrs dryly like the locust

that brings rain, I dread my premonitions.

A gray spot, a waterdrop

blisters my hand.

A sodden letter thunders in my hand.

The insect gnaws steadily at its leaf,

an eaten letter crumbles in my hand,

as he once held my drawing to his face,

as though dusk were myopic, not his gaze.

“Harry has killed himself. He was found dead

in a house in the country. He was dead for two days.”

    
III

The fishermen, like thieves, shake out their silver,

the lithe knives wriggle on the drying sand.

They go about their work,

their chronicler has gone about his work.

At Garand, at Piaille, at L'Anse la Verdure,

the sky is gray as pewter, without meaning.

It thunders and the kitten scuttles back

into the kitchen bin

of coal, its tines sheathing, unsheathing,

its yellow eyes the color of fool's gold.

He had left this note.

No meaning, and no meaning.

All day, on the tin roofs

the rain berates the poverty of life,

all day the sunset bleeds like a cut wrist.

    
IV

Well, there you have your seasons, prodigy!

For instance, the autumnal fall of bodies,

deaths, like a comic, brutal repetition,

and in the Book of Hours, that seemed so far,

the light and amber of another life,

there is a Reaper busy about his wheat,

one who stalks nearer, and will not look up

from the scythe's swish in the orange evening grass,

and the fly at the front of your ear

sings, Hurry, hurry!

Never to set eyes on this page,

ah Harry, never to read our names,

like a stone blurred with tears I could not read

among the pilgrims, and the mooning child

staring from the window of the high studio.

Brown, balding, with a lacertilian

jut to his underlip,

with spectacles thick as a glass paperweight

and squat, blunt fingers,

waspish, austere, swift with asperities,

with a dimpled pot for a belly from the red clay of Piaille.

Eyes like the glint of sea-smoothed bottle glass,

his knee-high khaki stockings,

brown shoes lacquered even in desolation.

People entered his understanding

like a wayside country church,

they had built him themselves.

It was they who had smoothed the wall

of his clay-colored forehead,

who made of his rotundity an earthy