The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (16 page)

in the masochistic veneration of

chains, and the broken rum jugs of cutthroats.

Exegesis, exegesis, writers

giving their own sons homework.

Ratoon, ratoon,

immigrant hordes downed soughing,

sickled by fever,
mal d'estomac
,

earth-eating slaves fitted with masks against despair,

not mental despondence but helminthiasis.

Pour la dernière fois, nommez! Nommez!

Abouberika Torre commonly called Joseph Samson.

Hammadi Torrouke commonly called Louis Modeste.

Mandingo sergeants offered Africa back,

the boring process of repatriation,

while to the indentured Indians

the plains of Caroni seemed like the Gangetic plain,

our fathers' bones. Which father?

Burned in the pyre of the sun.

On the ashpit of the sand.

Also you, Grandfather. Rest, heaven, rest, hell.

I sit in the roar of that sun

like a lotus yogi folded on his bed of coals,

my head is circled with a ring of fire.

    
IV

O sun, on that morning,

did I not mutter towards your

holy, repetitive resurrection, “Hare

hare Krishna,” and then, politely,

“Thank you, life”? Not

to enter the knowledge of God

but to know that His name

had lain too familiar on my tongue,

as this one would say “bread,”

or “sun,” or “wine,” I staggered,

shaken at my remorse, as one

would say “bride,” or “bread,”

or “sun,” or “wine,” to believe—

and that you would rise again,

when I am not here, to catch

the air afire, that you need not

look for me, or need this prayer.

    
V

So, I shall repeat myself,

prayer, same prayer, towards fire, same fire,

as the sun repeats itself and the thundering waters

for what else is there

but books, books and the sea,

verandas and the pages of the sea,

to write of the wind and the memory of wind-whipped hair

in the sun, the color of fire?

I was eighteen then, now I am forty-one,

I have had a serpent for companion,

I was a heart full of knives,

but, my son, my sun,

holy is Rampanalgas and its high-circling hawks,

holy are the rusted, tortured, rust-caked, blind almond trees,

your great-grandfather's, and your father's torturing limbs,

holy the small, almond-leaf-shadowed bridge

by the small red shop, where everything smells of salt,

and holiest the break of the blue sea below the trees,

and the rock that takes blows on its back

and is more rock,

and the tireless hoarse anger of the waters

by which I can walk calm, a renewed, exhausted man,

balanced at its edge by the weight of two dear daughters.

    
VI

Holy were you, Margaret,

and holy our calm.

What can I do now

but sit in the sun to burn

with an ageing mirror that blinds,

combing, uncombing my hair—

escape? No, I am inured

only to the real, which

burns. Like the flesh

of my children afire.

Inured. Inward. As rock,

I wish, as the real

rock I make real,

to have burnt out desire,

lust, except for the sun

with her corona of fire.

Anna, I wanted to grow white-haired

as the wave, with a wrinkled

brown rock's face, salted,

seamed, an old poet,

facing the wind

and nothing, which is,

the loud world in his mind.

 

 

CHAPTER 23

    
I

At the Malabar Hotel cottage

I would wake every morning surprised

by the framed yellow jungle of

the groyned mangroves meeting

the groyned mangroves repeating

their unbroken water line.

Years. The island had not moved

from anchor.

                           Generations of waves,

generations of grass, like foam

petaled and perished in an instant.

I lolled in the shallows like an aging hammerhead

afraid of my own shadow, hungering there.

When my foot struck sand, the sky rang,

as I inhaled, a million leaves drew inward.

I bent towards what I remembered,

all was inevitably shrunken,

it was I who first extended my hand

to nameless arthritic twigs,

and a bush would turn in the wind

with a toothless giggle, and

certain roots refused English.

But I was the one in awe.

This was a new pain,

I mean the mimosa's averring

“You mightn't remember me,”

like the scars of that scrofulous sea-grape

where Gregorias had crucified a canvas,

and there, still dancing like the old woman

was the glory, the
gloricidia
.

I would not call up Anna.

I would not visit his grave.

    
II

They had not changed, they knew only

the autumnal hint of hotel rooms

the sea's engine of air-conditioners,

and the waitress in national costume

and the horsemen galloping past the single wave

across the line of Martinique, the horse or
la mer

out of Gauguin by the Tourist Board.

Hotel, hotel, hotel, hotel, hotel and a club: The Bitter End.

This is not bitter, it is harder

to be a prodigal than a stranger.

    
III

I looked from old verandas at

verandas, sails, the eternal summer sea

like a book left open by an absent master.

And what if it's all gone,

the hill's cut away for more tarmac,

the groves all sawn,

and bungalows proliferate on the scarred, hacked hillside,

the magical lagoon drained

for the Higher Purchase plan,

and they've bulldozed and bowdlerized our Vigie,

our
ocelle insularum
, our Sirmio

for a pink and pastel New Town where the shacks and huts stood

teetering and tough in unabashed unhope,

as twilight like amnesia blues the slope,

when over the untroubled ocean, the moon

will always swing its lantern

and evening fold the pages of the sea,

and peer like my lost reader silently

between the turning leaves

for the lost names

of Caribs, slaves and fishermen?

Forgive me, you folk,

who exercise a patience

subtler, stronger than the muscles

in the wave's wrist,

and you, sea, with the mouth

of that old gravekeeper

white-headed, lantern-jawed,

forgive our desertions, you islands

whose names dissolve like sugar

in a child's mouth. And you, Gregorias.

And you, Anna. Rest.

    
IV

But ah, Gregorias,

I christened you with that Greek name because

it echoes the blest thunders of the surf,

because you painted our first, primitive frescoes,

because it sounds explosive,

a black Greek's! A sun that stands back

from the fire of itself, not shamed, prizing

its shadow, watching it blaze!

You sometimes dance with that destructive frenzy

that made our years one fire.

Gregorias listen, lit,

we were the light of the world!

We were blest with a virginal, unpainted world

with Adam's task of giving things their names,

with the smooth white walls of clouds and villages

where you devised your inexhaustible,

impossible Renaissance,

brown cherubs of Giotto and Masaccio,

with the salt wind coming through the window,

smelling of turpentine, with nothing so old

that it could not be invented,

and set above it your crude wooden star,

its light compounded in that mortal glow:

Gregorias, Apilo!

April 1965–April 1972

FROM

Sea Grapes

(1976)

SEA GRAPES

That little sail in light

which tires of islands,

a schooner beating up the Caribbean

for home, could be Odysseus,

home-bound on the Aegean,

that father and husband's

longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is

like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name

in every gull's outcry;

This brings nobody peace. The ancient war

between obsession and responsibility

will never finish and has been the same

for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore

now wriggling on his sandals to walk home,

since Troy lost its old flame,

and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough

from whose ground-swell the great hexameters come

to finish up as Caribbean surf.

The classics can console. But not enough.

ADAM'S SONG

The adulteress stoned to death,

is killed in our own time

by whispers, by the breath

that films her flesh with slime.

The first was Eve,

who horned God for the serpent,

for Adam's sake; which makes

everyone guilty or Eve innocent.

Nothing has changed

for men still sing the song that Adam sang

against the world he lost to vipers,

the song to Eve

against his own damnation;

he sang it in the evening of the world

with the lights coming on in the eyes

of panthers in the peaceable kingdom

and his death coming out of the trees,

he sings it, frightened

of the jealousy of God and at the price

of his own death,

the song ascends to God who wipes his eyes:

“Heart, you are in my heart as the bird rises,

heart, you are in my heart while the sun sleeps,

heart, you lie still in me as the dew is,

you weep within me, as the rain weeps.”

PARTY NIGHT AT THE HILTON

In our upside-down hotel, in that air-conditioned

roomful of venal, vengeful party-hacks,

lunch-drunk, scotch-drunk, cigar and brandy-stoned,

arguing, insulting till coherence cracks,

poor voice on the rock of power, drained

of every sense but retching indignation

before these pimp Nkrumahs! Their minds

greased by infanticide, generation on generation

heaped in a famine of imagination,

while dacrons sleek their paunches and behinds

with air, hot air. Guilt, sweated

out in glut, while outside, a black wind,

circles the room with jasmine, like a whore's

perfume or second secretary's lotion. Fear those laws

which ex-slaves praise with passion. Pissed, dead

drunk, I soar to hellish light. In the lobby,

cigars with eyes like agents drilling me.

THE LOST FEDERATION

You should crawl into rocks away from

the stare of the fisherman,

you, yes, you!

Don't you remember the hustings by the beach

with their sulphurous lanterns,

and your lies in the throat of the sea?

You should get your arse baked till your back

is an old map of blisters,

and your lips crack

like the soil for the water you promised

on the dais, with the sound system

and the sisters calling you Jesus,

and come back with a sieve for your heart,

your brain like a rusted can,

and your bilge reeking,

turn your head, man, I'm speaking

now, I haven't spoken enough, I am speaking

so do what you want, man!

When the first roar came you were astounded,

it was sweeping your heart like a hurricane;

but what are your promises? A grounded

ribbed vessel that the naked

children play through. Listen, you

could still come with me again,

to watch the rain coming from far

like rain, not like votes,

like the ocean, like the wind,

not like an overwhelming majority,

you, who served the people a dung cake of maggots,

that rain cannot extinguish

the processional flambeaux of the poui,

the immortelles, feel it with me

again, you bastard papas,

how it seeps through the pores,

how it loads the sponge of the heart

with the grief of a people,

or smile at this rage, then,

buzzard in a conference coat,

bishop in a buzzard's surplice,

crows circling like shadows

over this page,

ministers administering

the last rights to a people,

cabinet, crowded with skeletons,

here's a swinging convocation of bishops

and ministers on the old beach.

Corbeaux. And nobody here with a flashbulb!

PARADES, PARADES

There's the wide desert, but no one marches

except in the pads of old caravans,

there is the ocean, but the keels incise

the precise, old parallels,

there's the blue sea above the mountains

but they scratch the same lines

in the jet trails,

so the politicians plod

without imagination, circling

the same somber gardens

with its fountain dry in the forecourt,

the gri-gri palms desiccating

dung pods like goats,

the same lines rule the White Papers,

the same steps ascend Whitehall,