The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (21 page)

in that gray vault. The sea. The sea

has locked them up. The sea is History.

First, there was the heaving oil,

heavy as chaos;

then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,

and that was Genesis.

Then there were the packed cries,

the shit, the moaning:

Exodus.

Bone soldered by coral to bone,

mosaics

mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.

Then came from the plucked wires

of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage,

as the white cowries clustered like manacles

on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets

of the Song of Solomon,

but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History.

Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors

who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,

leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,

then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,

and that was Jonah,

but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea sands

out there past the reef's moiling shelf,

where the men-o'-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.

It's all subtle and submarine,

through colonnades of coral,

past the gothic windows of sea fans

to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,

blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

and these groined caves with barnacles

pitted like stone

are our cathedrals,

and the furnace before the hurricanes:

Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills

into marl and cornmeal,

and that was Lamentations—

that was just Lamentations,

it was not History;

then came, like scum on the river's drying lip,

the brown reeds of villages

mantling and congealing into towns,

and at evening, the midges' choirs,

and above them, the spires

lancing the side of God

as His son set, and that was the New Testament.

Then came the white sisters clapping

to the waves' progress,

and that was Emancipation—

jubilation, O jubilation—

vanishing swiftly

as the sea's lace dries in the sun,

but that was not History,

that was only faith,

and then each rock broke into its own nation;

then came the synod of flies,

then came the secretarial heron,

then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,

fireflies with bright ideas

and bats like jetting ambassadors

and the mantis, like khaki police,

and the furred caterpillars of judges

examining each case closely,

and then in the dark ears of ferns

and in the salt chuckle of rocks

with their sea pools, there was the sound

like a rumor without any echo

of History, really beginning.

EGYPT, TOBAGO

for N.M.

There is a shattered palm

on this fierce shore,

its plumes the rusting helm-

et of a dead warrior.

Numb Antony, in the torpor

stretching her inert

sex near him like a sleeping cat,

knows his heart is the real desert.

Over the dunes

of her heaving,

to his heart's drumming

fades the mirage of the legions,

across love-tousled sheets,

the triremes fading.

At the carved door of her temple

a fly wrings its message.

He brushes a damp hair

away from an ear

as perfect as a sleeping child's.

He stares, inert, the fallen column.

He lies like a copper palm

tree at three in the afternoon

by a hot sea

and a river, in Egypt, Tobago.

Her salt marsh dries in the heat

where he foundered

without armor.

He exchanged an empire for her beads of sweat,

the uproar of arenas,

the changing surf

of senators, for

this silent ceiling over silent sand—

this grizzled bear, whose fur,

molting, is silvered—

for this quick fox with her

sweet stench. By sleep dismembered,

his head

is in Egypt, his feet

in Rome, his groin a desert

trench with its dead soldier.

He drifts a finger

through her stiff hair

crisp as a mare's fountaining tail.

Shadows creep up the palace tile.

He is too tired to move;

a groan would waken

trumpets, one more gesture,

war. His glare,

a shield

reflecting fires,

a brass brow that cannot frown

at carnage, sweats the sun's force.

It is not the turmoil

of autumnal lust,

its treacheries, that drove

him, fired and grimed with dust,

this far, not even love,

but a great rage without

clamor, that grew great

because its depth is quiet;

it hears the river

of her young brown blood,

it feels the whole sky quiver

with her blue eyelid.

She sleeps with the soft engine of a child,

that sleep which scythes

the stalks of lances, fells the

harvest of legions

with nothing for its knives,

that makes Caesars,

sputtering at flies,

slapping their foreheads

with the laurel's imprint,

drunkards, comedians.

All-humbling sleep, whose peace

is sweet as death,

whose silence has

all the sea's weight and volubility,

who swings this globe by a hair's trembling breath.

Shattered and wild and

palm-crowned Antony,

rusting in Egypt,

ready to lose the world,

to Actium and sand,

everything else

is vanity, but this tenderness

for a woman not his mistress

but his sleeping child.

The sky is cloudless. The afternoon is mild.

R.T.S.L.

(1917–1977)

As for that other thing

which comes when the eyelid is glazed

and the wax gleam

from the unwrinkled forehead

asks no more questions

of the dry mouth,

whether they open the heart like a shirt

to release a rage of swallows,

whether the brain

is a library for worms,

on the instant that knowledge

of the moment

when everything became so stiff,

so formal with ironical adieux,

organ and choir,

and I must borrow a black tie,

and at what moment in the oration

shall I break down and weep—

there was the startle of wings

breaking from the closing cage

of your body, your fist unclenching

these pigeons circling serenely

over the page,

and,

as the parentheses lock like a gate

1917 to 1977,

the semicircles close to form a face,

a world, a wholeness,

an unbreakable O,

and something that once had a fearful name

walks from the thing that used to wear its name,

transparent, exact representative,

so that we can see through it

churches, cars, sunlight,

and the Boston Common,

not needing any book.

FOREST OF EUROPE

for Joseph Brodsky

The last leaves fell like notes from a piano

and left their ovals echoing in the ear;

with gawky music stands, the winter forest

looks like an empty orchestra, its lines

ruled on these scattered manuscripts of snow.

The inlaid copper laurel of an oak

shines through the brown-bricked glass above your head

as bright as whiskey, while the wintry breath

of lines from Mandelstam, which you recite,

uncoils as visibly as cigarette smoke.

“The rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva.”

Under your exile's tongue, crisp under heel,

the gutturals crackle like decaying leaves,

the phrase from Mandelstam circles with light

in a brown room, in barren Oklahoma.

There is a Gulag Archipelago

under this ice, where the salt, mineral spring

of the long Trail of Tears runnels these plains

as hard and open as a herdsman's face

sun-cracked and stubbled with unshaven snow.

Growing in whispers from the Writers' Congress,

the snow circles like cossacks round the corpse

of a tired Choctaw till it is a blizzard

of treaties and white papers as we lose

sight of the single human through the cause.

So every spring these branches load their shelves,

like libraries with newly published leaves,

till waste recycles them—paper to snow—

but, at zero of suffering, one mind

lasts like this oak with a few brazen leaves.

As the train passed the forest's tortured icons,

the floes clanging like freight yards, then the spires

of frozen years, the stations screeching steam,

he drew them in a single winter's breath

whose freezing consonants turned into stones.

He saw the poetry in forlorn stations

under clouds vast as Asia, through districts

that could gulp Oklahoma like a grape,

not these tree-shaded prairie halts but space

so desolate it mocked destinations.

Who is that dark child on the parapets

of Europe, watching the evening river mint

its sovereigns stamped with power, not with poets,

the Thames and the Neva rustling like banknotes,

then, black on gold, the Hudson's silhouettes?

From frozen Neva to the Hudson pours,

under the airport domes, the echoing stations,

the tributary of emigrants whom exile

has made as classless as the common cold,

citizens of a language that is now yours,

and every February, every “last autumn,”

you write far from the threshing harvesters

folding wheat like a girl plaiting her hair,

far from Russia's canals quivering with sunstroke,

a man living with English in one room.

The tourist archipelagoes of my South

are prisons too, corruptible, and though

there is no harder prison than writing verse,

what's poetry, if it is worth its salt,

but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?

From hand to mouth, across the centuries,

the bread that lasts when systems have decayed,

when, in his forest of barbed-wire branches,

a prisoner circles, chewing the one phrase

whose music will last longer than the leaves,

whose condensation is the marble sweat

of angels' foreheads, which will never dry

till Borealis shuts the peacock lights

of its slow fan from L.A. to Archangel,

and memory needs nothing to repeat.

Frightened and starved, with divine fever

Osip Mandelstam shook, and every

metaphor shuddered him with ague,

each vowel heavier than a boundary stone,

“to the rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva,”

but now that fever is a fire whose glow

warms our hands, Joseph, as we grunt like primates

exchanging gutturals in this winter cave

of a brown cottage, while in drifts outside

mastodons force their systems through the snow.

KOENIG OF THE RIVER

Koenig knew now there was no one on the river.

Entering its brown mouth choking with lilies

and curtained with midges, Koenig poled the shallop

past the abandoned ferry and the ferry piles

coated with coal dust. Staying aboard, he saw, up

in a thick meadow, a sand-colored mule,

untethered, with no harness, and no signs

of habitation round the ruined factory wheel

locked hard in rust, and through whose spokes the vines

of wild yam leaves leant from overweight;

the wild bananas in the yellowish sunlight

were dugged like aching cows with unmilked fruit.

This was the last of the productive mines.

Only the vegetation here looked right.

A crab of pain scuttled shooting up his foot

and fastened on his neck, at the brain's root.

He felt his reason curling back like parchment

in this fierce torpor. Well, he no longer taxed

and tired what was left of his memory;

he should thank heaven he had escaped the sea,

and anyway, he had demanded to be sent

here with the others—why get this river vexed

with his complaints? Koenig wanted to sing,

suddenly, if only to keep the river company—

this was a river, and Koenig, his name meant King.

They had all caught the missionary fever:

they were prepared to expiate the sins

of savages, to tame them as he would tame this river

subtly, as it flowed, accepting its bends;

he had seen how other missionaries met their ends—

swinging in the wind, like a dead clapper when

a bell is broken, if that sky was a bell—

for treating savages as if they were men,

and frightening them with talk of Heaven and Hell.

But I have forgotten our journey's origins,

mused Koenig, and our purpose. He knew it was noble,

based on some phrase, forgotten, from the Bible,

but he felt bodiless, like a man stumbling from

the pages of a novel, not a forest,

written a hundred years ago. He stroked his uniform,