The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (15 page)

useful object

holding the clear water of their simple troubles,

he who returned their tribal names

to the adze, mattock, midden, and cookingpot.

A tang of white rum on the tongue of the mandolin,

a young bay, parting its mouth,

a heron silently named or a night-moth,

or the names of villages plaited into one map,

in the evocation of scrubbed backyard smoke,

and he is a man no more

but the fervor and intelligence

of a whole country.

Leonce, Placide, Alcindor,

Dominic, from whose plane vowels were shorn

odorous as forest,

ask the charcoal-burner to look up

with his singed eyes,

ask the lip-cracked fisherman three miles at sea

with nothing between him and Dahomey's coast

to dip rain-water over his parched boards

for Monsieur Simmons,
pour
Msieu Harry Simmons,

let the husker on his pyramid of coconuts

rest on his tree.

Blow out the eyes in the unfinished portraits.

And the old woman who danced

with a spine like the “glory cedar,”

so lissome that her veins bulged evenly

upon the tightened drumskin of the earth,

her feet nimbler than the drummer's fingers,

let her sit in her corner and become evening

for a man the color of her earth,

for a cracked claypot full of idle brushes,

and the tubes curl and harden,

except the red,

except the virulent red!

His island forest, open and enclose him

like a rare butterfly between its leaves.

 

 

CHAPTER 21

    
I

Why?

You want to know why?

Go down to the shacks then,

like shattered staves

bound in old wire

at the hour when

the sun's wrist bleeds in

the basin of the sea,

and you will sense it,

or follow the path

of the caked piglet through

the sea-village's midden,

past the repeated

detonations of spray,

where the death-rattle

gargles in the shale,

and the crab,

like a letter, slides

into its crevice,

and you may understand this,

smell the late, ineradicable reek

of stale rags like rivers

at daybreak, or the dark corner

of the salt-caked shop where the cod-

barrel smells of old women,

and you can start then,

to know how the vise

of horizon tightens

the throat, when the first sulphur star

catches the hum

of insects round the gas lantern

like flies round a sore.

No more? Then hang round the lobby

of the one cinema too early

in the hour between two illusions

where you startle at the chuckle

of water under the shallop

of the old schooner basin,

or else it is still under all

the frighteningly formal

marches of banana groves,

the smell from the armpits of cocoa,

from the dead, open mouths

of husked nuts

on the long beach at twilight,

old mouths filled with water,

or else with no more to say.

    
II

So you have ceased to ask yourself,

nor do these things ask you,

for the bush too is an answer

without a question,

as the sea is a question, chafing,

impatient for answers,

and we are the same.

They do not ask us, master,

do you accept this?

A nature reduced to the service

of praising or humbling men,

there is a yes without a question,

there is assent founded on ignorance,

in the mangroves plunged to the wrist, repeating

the mangroves plunging to the wrist,

there are spaces

wider than conscience.

Yet, when I continue to see

the young deaths of others,

even of lean old men, perpetually young,

when the alphabet I learnt as a child

will not keep its order,

see the young wife, self-slain

like scentful clove in the earth,

a skin the color of cinnamon,

there is something which balances,

I see him bent under the weight of the morning,

against its shafts,

devout, angelical,

the easel rifling his shoulder,

the master of Gregorias and myself,

I see him standing over the bleached roofs

of the salt-streaked villages,

each steeply pricked

by its own wooden star.

I who dressed too early for the funeral of this life,

who saw them all, as pilgrims of the night.

    
III

And do I still love her, as I love you?

I have loved all women who have evolved from her,

fired by two marriages

to have her gold ring true.

And on that hill, that evening,

when the deep valley grew blue with forgetting,

why did I weep,

why did I kneel,

whom did I thank?

I knelt because I was my mother,

I was the well of the world,

I wore the stars on my skin,

I endured no reflections,

my sign was water,

tears and the sea,

my sign was Janus,

I saw with twin heads,

and everything I say is contradicted.

I was fluent as water,

I would escape

with the linear elation of an eel,

a vase of water in its vase of clay,

my clear tongue licked the freshness of the earth,

and when I leapt from that shelf

of rock, an abounding bolt of lace,

I leapt for the pride of that race

at Sauteurs! An urge more than mine,

so, see them as heroes or as the Gadarene swine,

let it be written, I shared, I shared,

I was struck like rock, and I opened

to His gift!

I laughed at my death-gasp in the rattle

of the sea-shoal.

You want to see my medals? Ask the stars.

You want to hear my history? Ask the sea.

And you, master and friend,

forgive me!

Forgive me, if this sketch should ever thrive,

or profit from your gentle, generous spirit.

When I began this work, you were alive,

and with one stroke, you have completed it!

O simultaneous stroke of chord and light,

O tightened nerves to which the soul vibrates,

some flash of lime-green water, edged with white—

“I have swallowed all my hates.”

    
IV

For I have married one whose darkness is a tree,

bayed in whose arms I bring my stifled howl,

love and forgive me!

Who holds my fears at dusk like birds which take

the lost or moonlit color of her leaves,

in whom our children

and the children of friends settle

simply, like rhymes,

in whose side, in the grim times

when I cannot see light for the deep leaves,

sharing her depth, the whole lee ocean grieves.

 

 

CHAPTER 22

    
I

Miasma, acedia, the enervations of damp,

as the teeth of the mold gnaw, greening the carious stump

of the beaten, corrugated silver of the marsh light,

where the red heron hides, without a secret,

as the cordage of mangrove tightens

bland water to bland sky

heavy and sodden as canvas,

where the pirogue foundered with its caved-in stomach

(a hulk, trying hard to look like

a paleolithic, half-gnawed memory of pre-history)

as the too green acid grasses set the salt teeth on edge,

acids and russets and watercolored water,

let the historian go mad there

from thirst. Slowly the water rat takes up its reed pen

and scribbles. Leisurely, the egret

on the mud tablet stamps its hieroglyph.

The explorer stumbles out of the bush crying out for myth.

The tired slave vomits his past.

The Mediterranean accountant, with the nose of the water rat,

ideograph of the egret's foot,

calculates his tables,

his eyes reddening like evening in the glare of the brass lamp;

the Chinese grocer's smile is leaden with boredom:

so many lbs. of cod,

                          so many bales of biscuits,

on spiked shop paper,

the mummified odor of onions,

spikenard, and old Pharaohs peeling like onionskin

to the archaeologist's finger—all that

is the muse of history. Potsherds,

and the crusted amphora of cutthroats.

Like old leather,

tannic, stinking, peeling in a self-contemptuous

curl away from itself,

the yellowing poems, the spiked brown paper,

the myth of the golden Carib,

like a worn-out film,

the lyrical arrow in the writhing Arawak maiden

broken under the leaf-light.

                                        The astigmatic geologist

stoops, with the crouch of the heron,

deciphering—not a sign.

All of the epics are blown away with the leaves,

blown with the careful calculations on brown paper;

these were the only epics: the leaves.

No horsemen here, no cuirasses

crashing, no fork-bearded Castilians,

only the narrow, silvery creeks of sadness

like the snail's trail,

only the historian deciphering, in invisible ink,

its patient slime,

no cataracts abounding down gorges

like bolts of lace,

while the lizards are taking a million years to change,

and the lopped head of the coconut rolls to gasp on the sand,

its mouth open at the very moment

of forgetting its name.

That child who sets his half-shell afloat

in the brown creek that is Rampanalgas River—

my son first, then two daughters—

towards the roar of waters,

towards the Atlantic with a dead almond leaf for a sail,

with a twig for a mast,

was, like his father, this child,

a child without history, without knowledge of its pre-world,

only the knowledge of water runneling rocks,

and the desperate whelk that grips the rock's outcrop

like a man whom the waves can never wash overboard;

that child who puts the shell's howl to his ear,

hears nothing, hears everything

that the historian cannot hear, the howls

of all the races that crossed the water,

the howls of grandfathers drowned

in that intricately swiveled Babel,

hears the fellaheen, the Madrasi, the Mandingo, the Ashanti,

yes, and hears also the echoing green fissures of Canton,

and thousands without longing for this other shore

by the mud tablets of the Indian Provinces,

robed ghostly white and brown, the twigs of uplifted hands,

of manacles, mantras, of a thousand kaddishes,

whorled, drilling into the shell,

see, in the evening light by the saffron, sacred Benares,

how they are lifting like herons,

robed ghostly white and brown,

and the crossing of water has erased their memories.

And the sea, which is always the same,

accepts them.

And the shore, which is always the same,

accepts them.

In the shallop of the shell,

in the round prayer,

in the palate of the conch,

in the dead sail of the almond leaf

are all of the voyages.

    
II

And those who gild cruelty,

who read from the entrails of disemboweled Aztecs

the colors of Hispanic glory

greater than Greece,

greater than Rome,

than the purple of Christ's blood,

the golden excrement on barbarous altars

of their beaked and feathered king,

and the feasts of human flesh,

those who remain fascinated,

in attitudes of prayer,

by the festering roses made from their fathers' manacles,

or upraise their silver chalices flecked with vomit,

who see a golden, cruel, hawk-bright glory

in the conquistador's malarial eye,

crying, at least here

something happened—

they will absolve us, perhaps, if we begin again,

from what we have always known, nothing,

from that carnal slime of the garden,

from the incarnate subtlety of the snake,

from the Egyptian moment of the heron's foot

on the mud's entablature,

by this augury of ibises

flying at evening from the melting trees,

while the silver-hammered charger of the marsh light

brings towards us, again and again, in beaten scrolls,

nothing, then nothing,

and then nothing.

    
III

                           Here, rest. Rest, heaven. Rest, hell.

Patchwork, sunfloor, seafloor of pebbles at Resthaven, at Rampanalgas.

Sick of black angst.

Too many penitential histories passing

for poems. Avoid:

                           1857 Lucknow and Cawnpore.

The process of history machined through fact,

for the poet's cheap alcohol,

lines like the sugarcane factory's mechanization of myth

ground into rubbish.

                           1834 Slavery abolished.

A century later slavishly revived

for the nose of the water rat, for the literature of the factory,