The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (19 page)

gray has grown strong to me,

it's no longer neutral,

no longer the dirty flag

of courage going under,

it is speckled with hues

like quartz, it's as

various as boredom,

gray is now a crystal

haze, a dull diamond,

stone-dusted and stoic,

gray is the heart at peace,

tougher than the warrior

as it bestrides factions,

it is the great pause

when the pillars of the temple

rest on Samson's palms

and are held, held,

that moment

when the heavy rock of the world

like a child sleeps

on the trembling shoulders of Atlas

and his own eyes close,

the toil that is balance.

Seneca, that fabled bore,

and his gnarled, laborious Latin

I can read only in fragments

of broken bark, his

heroes tempered by whirlwinds,

who see with the word

senex, with its two eyes,

through the boles of this tree,

beyond joy,

beyond lyrical utterance,

this obdurate almond

going under the sand

with this language, slowly,

by sand grains, by centuries.

FROM

The Star-Apple Kingdom

(1979)

THE SCHOONER
FLIGHT

    
1
ADIOS, CARENAGE

In idle August, while the sea soft,

and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim

of this Caribbean, I blow out the light

by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion

to ship as a seaman on the schooner
Flight
.

Out in the yard turning gray in the dawn,

I stood like a stone and nothing else move

but the cold sea rippling like galvanize

and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof,

till a wind start to interfere with the trees.

I pass me dry neighbor sweeping she yard

as I went downhill, and I nearly said:

“Sweep soft, you witch, 'cause she don't sleep hard,”

but the bitch look through me like I was dead.

A route taxi pull up, park-lights still on.

The driver size up my bags with a grin:

“This time, Shabine, like you really gone!”

I ain't answer the ass, I simply pile in

the back seat and watch the sky burn

above Laventille pink as the gown

in which the woman I left was sleeping,

and I look in the rearview and see a man

exactly like me, and the man was weeping

for the houses, the streets, that whole fucking island.

Christ have mercy on all sleeping things!

From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road

to when I was a dog on these streets;

if loving these islands must be my load,

out of corruption my soul takes wings.

But they had started to poison my soul

with their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl,

coolie, nigger, Syrian, and French Creole,

so I leave it for them and their carnival—

I taking a sea bath, I gone down the road.

I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,

a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes

that they nickname Shabine, the patois for

any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw

when these slums of empire was paradise.

I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,

I had a sound colonial education,

I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,

and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.

But Maria Concepcion was all my thought

watching the sea heaving up and down

as the port side of dories, schooners, and yachts

was painted afresh by the strokes of the sun

signing her name with every reflection;

I knew when dark-haired evening put on

her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea,

sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh,

that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting.

Is like telling mourners round the graveside

about resurrection, they want the dead back,

so I smile to myself as the bow rope untied

and the
Flight
swing seaward: “Is no use repeating

that the sea have more fish. I ain't want her

dressed in the sexless light of a seraph,

I want those round brown eyes like a marmoset, and

till the day when I can lean back and laugh,

those claws that tickled my back on sweating

Sunday afternoons, like a crab on wet sand.”

As I worked, watching the rotting waves come

past the bow that scissor the sea like silk,

I swear to you all, by my mother's milk,

by the stars that shall fly from tonight's furnace,

that I loved them, my children, my wife, my home;

I loved them as poets love the poetry

that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea.

You ever look up from some lonely beach

and see a far schooner? Well, when I write

this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt;

I go draw and knot every line as tight

as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech

my common language go be the wind,

my pages the sails of the schooner
Flight
.

But let me tell you how this business begin.

    
2
RAPTURES OF THE DEEP

Smuggled Scotch for O'Hara, big government man,

between Cedros and the Main, so the Coast Guard couldn't touch us,

and the Spanish pirogues always met us halfway,

but a voice kept saying: “Shabine, see this business

of playing pirate?” Well, so said, so done!

That whole racket crash. And I for a woman,

for her laces and silks, Maria Concepcion.

Ay, ay! Next thing I hear, some Commission of Inquiry

was being organized to conduct a big quiz,

with himself as chairman investigating himself.

Well, I knew damn well who the suckers would be,

not that shark in shark skin, but his pilot fish,

khaki-pants red niggers like you and me.

What worse, I fighting with Maria Concepcion,

plates flying and thing, so I swear: “Not again!”

It was mashing up my house and my family.

I was so broke all I needed was shades and a cup

or four shades and four cups in four-cup Port of Spain,

all the silver I had was the coins on the sea.

You saw them ministers in
The Express
,

guardians of the poor—one hand at their back,

and one set o' police only guarding their house,

and the Scotch pouring in through the back door.

As for that minister-monster who smuggled the booze,

that half-Syrian saurian, I got so vex to see

that face thick with powder, the warts, the stone lids

like a dinosaur caked with primordial ooze

by the lightning of flashbulbs sinking in wealth,

that I said: “Shabine, this is shit, understand!”

But he get somebody to kick my crutch out his office

like I was some artist! That bitch was so grand,

couldn't get off his high horse and kick me himself.

I have seen things that would make a slave sick

in this Trinidad, the Limers' Republic.

I couldn't shake the sea noise out of my head,

the shell of my ears sang Maria Concepcion,

so I start salvage diving with a crazy Mick,

name O'Shaugnessy, and a limey named Head;

but this Caribbean so choke with the dead

that when I would melt in emerald water,

whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent,

I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea fans,

dead-men's-fingers, and then, the dead men.

I saw that the powdery sand was their bones

ground white from Senegal to San Salvador,

so, I panic third dive, and surface for a month

in the Seamen's Hostel. Fish broth and sermons.

When I thought of the woe I had brought my wife,

when I saw my worries with that other woman,

I wept under water, salt seeking salt,

for her beauty had fallen on me like a sword

cleaving me from my children, flesh of my flesh!

There was this barge from St. Vincent, but she was too deep

to float her again. When we drank, the limey

got tired of my sobbing for Maria Concepcion.

He said he was getting the bends. Good for him!

The pain in my heart for Maria Concepcion,

the hurt I had done to my wife and children,

was worse than the bends. In the rapturous deep

there was no cleft rock where my soul could hide

like the boobies each sunset, no sandbar of light

where I could rest, like the pelicans know,

so I got raptures once, and I saw God

like a harpooned grouper bleeding, and a far

voice was rumbling, “Shabine, if you leave her,

if you leave her, I shall give you the morning star.”

When I left the madhouse I tried other women

but, once they stripped naked, their spiky cunts

bristled like sea eggs and I couldn't dive.

The chaplain came round. I paid him no mind.

Where is my rest place, Jesus? Where is my harbor?

Where is the pillow I will not have to pay for,

and the window I can look from that frames my life?

    
3
SHABINE LEAVES THE REPUBLIC

I had no nation now but the imagination.

After the white man, the niggers didn't want me

when the power swing to their side.

The first chain my hands and apologize, “History”;

the next said I wasn't black enough for their pride.

Tell me, what power, on these unknown rocks—

a spray-plane Air Force, the Fire Brigade,

the Red Cross, the Regiment, two, three police dogs

that pass before you finish bawling “Parade!”?

I met History once, but he ain't recognize me,

a parchment Creole, with warts

like an old sea bottle, crawling like a crab

through the holes of shadow cast by the net

of a grille balcony; cream linen, cream hat.

I confront him and shout, “Sir, is Shabine!

They say I'se your grandson. You remember Grandma,

your black cook, at all?” The bitch hawk and spat.

A spit like that worth any number of words.

But that's all them bastards have left us: words.

I no longer believed in the revolution.

I was losing faith in the love of my woman.

I had seen that moment Aleksandr Blok

crystallize in
The Twelve
. Was between

the Police Marine Branch and Hotel Venezuelana

one Sunday at noon. Young men without flags

using shirts, their chests waiting for holes.

They kept marching into the mountains, and

their noise ceased as foam sinks into sand.

They sank in the bright hills like rain, every one

with his own nimbus, leaving shirts in the street,

and the echo of power at the end of the street.

Propeller-blade fans turn over the Senate;

the judges, they say, still sweat in carmine,

on Frederick Street the idlers all marching

by standing still, the Budget turns a new leaf.

In the 12:30 movies the projectors best

not break down, or you go see revolution. Aleksandr Blok

enters and sits in the third row of pit eating choc-

olate cone, waiting for a spaghetti West-

ern with Clint Eastwood and featuring Lee Van Cleef.

    
4
THE
FLIGHT,
PASSING BLANCHISSEUSE

Dusk. The
Flight
passing Blanchisseuse.

Gulls wheel like from a gun again,

and foam gone amber that was white,

lighthouse and star start making friends,

down every beach the long day ends,

and there, on that last stretch of sand,

on a beach bare of all but light,

dark hands start pulling in the seine

of the dark sea, deep, deep inland.

    
5
SHABINE ENCOUNTERS THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

Man, I brisk in the galley first thing next dawn,

brewing li'l coffee; fog coil from the sea

like the kettle steaming when I put it down

slow, slow, 'cause I couldn't believe what I see:

where the horizon was one silver haze,

the fog swirl and swell into sails, so close

that I saw it was sails, my hair grip my skull,

it was horrors, but it was beautiful.

We float through a rustling forest of ships

with sails dry like paper, behind the glass

I saw men with rusty eyeholes like cannons,

and whenever their half-naked crews cross the sun,

right through their tissue, you traced their bones

like leaves against the sunlight; frigates, barkentines,

the backward-moving current swept them on,

and high on their decks I saw great admirals,

Rodney, Nelson, de Grasse, I heard the hoarse orders

they gave those Shabines, and that forest

of masts sail right through the
Flight
,

and all you could hear was the ghostly sound

of waves rustling like grass in a low wind

and the hissing weeds they trailed from the stern;

slowly they heaved past from east to west

like this round world was some cranked water wheel,

every ship pouring like a wooden bucket

dredged from the deep; my memory revolve

on all sailors before me, then the sun

heat the horizon's ring and they was mist.

Next we pass slave ships. Flags of all nations,

our fathers below deck too deep, I suppose,