The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (25 page)

by the wide sea. Let's hold it on the sea

as we establish their ancient interaction,

a hint of the Homeric, a little poetry

before the whole mess hits the bloody fan.

All these islands that you love, I guaran-

tee we'll work them in as background, with

generous establishing shots from Jim's car and

even a few harbors and villages,
if

we blow the tanker up and get the flames

blazing with oil, and Sophia, if she's free,

daintily smudged, with her slip daintily torn,

is climbing down this rope ladder, and we shoot up

from Coburn's P.O.V.—he's got the gems—

that's where we throw in Charlotte Amalie

and the waterfront bars, and this Danish alley

with the heavies chasing, and we can keep all the

business of Jim on the rail; that lyric stuff

goes with the credits if you insist on keeping it tend-

er; I can see it, but things must get rough

pretty damn fast, or else you lose them, pally,

or, tell you what, let's save it for
THE END.

JEAN RHYS

In their faint photographs

mottled with chemicals,

like the left hand of some spinster aunt,

they have drifted to the edge

of verandas in Whistlerian

white, their jungle turned tea-brown—

even its spiked palms—

their features pale,

to be penciled in:

bone-collared gentlemen

with spiked mustaches

and their wives embayed in the wickerwork

armchairs, all looking colored

from the distance of a century

beginning to groan sideways from the axe stroke!

Their bay horses blacken

like spaniels, the front lawn a beige

carpet, brown moonlight and a moon

so sallow, so pharmaceutical

that her face is a feverish child's,

some malarial angel

whose grave still cowers

under a fury of bush,

a mania of wild yams

wrangling to hide her from ancestral churchyards.

And the sigh of that child

is white as an orchid

on a crusted log

in the bush of Dominica,

a V of Chinese white

meant for the beat of a seagull

over a sepia souvenir of Cornwall,

as the white hush between two sentences.

Sundays! Their furnace

of boredom after church.

A maiden aunt canoes through lilies of clouds

in a Carib hammock, to a hymn's metronome,

and the child on the varnished, lion-footed couch

sees the hills dip and straighten with each lurch.

The green-leaved uproar of the century

turns dim as the Atlantic, a rumorous haze

behind the lime trees, breakers

advancing in decorous, pleated lace;

the cement grindstone of the afternoon

turns slowly, sharpening her senses,

the bay below is green as calalu, stewing Sargasso.

In that fierce hush

between Dominican mountains

the child expects a sound

from a butterfly clipping itself to a bush

like a gold earring to a black maid's ear—

one who goes down to the village, visiting,

whose pink dress wilts like a flower between the limes.

There are logs

wrinkled like the hand of an old woman

who wrote with a fine courtesy to that world

when grace was common as malaria,

when the gas lanterns' hiss on the veranda

drew the aunts out like moths

doomed to be pressed in a book, to fall

into the brown oblivion of an album,

embroiderers of silence

for whom the arches of the Thames,

Parliament's needles,

and the petit-point reflections of London Bridge

fade on the hammock cushions from the sun,

where one night

a child stares at the windless candle flame

from the corner of a lion-footed couch

at the erect white light,

her right hand married to
Jane Eyre
,

foreseeing that her own white wedding dress

will be white paper.

THE SPOILER'S RETURN

for Earl Lovelace

I sit high on this bridge in Laventille,

watching that city where I left no will

but my own conscience and rum-eaten wit,

and limers passing see me where I sit,

ghost in brown gabardine, bones in a sack,

and bawl: “Ay, Spoiler, boy! When you come back?”

And those who bold don't feel they out of place

to peel my limeskin back, and see a face

with eyes as cold as a dead macajuel,

and if they still can talk, I answer: “Hell.”

I have a room there where I keep a crown,

and Satan send me to check out this town.

Down there, that Hot Boy have a stereo

where, whole day, he does blast my caiso;

I beg him two weeks' leave and he send me

back up, not as no bedbug or no flea,

but in this limeskin hat and floccy suit,

to sing what I did always sing: the truth.

Tell Desperadoes when you reach the hill,

I decompose, but I composing still:

I going to bite them young ladies, partner,

like a hogdog or a hamburger

and if you thin, don't be in a fright

is only big fat women I going to bite.

The shark, racing the shadow of the shark

across clear coral rocks, does make them dark—

that is my premonition of the scene

of what passing over this Caribbean.

Is crab climbing crab-back, in a crab-quarrel,

and going round and round in the same barrel,

is sharks with shirt-jacks, sharks with well-pressed fins,

ripping we small fry off with razor grins;

nothing ain't change but color and attire,

so back me up, Old Brigade of Satire,

back me up, Martial, Juvenal, and Pope

(to hang theirself I giving plenty rope),

join Spoiler' chorus, sing the song with me,

Lord Rochester, who praised the nimble flea:

Were I, who to my cost already am

One of those strange, prodigious creatures, Man,

A spirit free, to choose for my own share,

What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,

I hope when I die, after burial,

To come back as an insect or animal.

I see these islands and I feel to bawl,

“area of darkness” with V. S. Nightfall.

Lock off your tears, you casting pearls of grief

on a duck's back, a waxen dasheen leaf,

the slime crab's carapace is waterproof

and those with hearing aids turn off the truth,

and their dark glasses let you criticize

your own presumptuous image in their eyes.

Behind dark glasses is just hollow skull,

and black still poor, though black is beautiful.

So, crown and miter me Bedbug the First—

the gift of mockery with which I'm cursed

is just a insect biting Fame behind,

a vermin swimming in a glass of wine,

that, dipped out with a finger, bound to bite

its saving host, ungrateful parasite,

whose sting, between the cleft arse and its seat,

reminds Authority man is just meat,

a moralist as mordant as the louse

that the good husband brings from the whorehouse,

the flea whose itch to make all Power wince,

will crash a fête, even at his life's expense,

and these pile up in lime pits by the heap,

daily, that our deliverers may sleep.

All those who promise free and just debate,

then blow up radicals to save the state,

who allow, in democracy's defense,

a parliament of spiked heads on a fence,

all you go bawl out, “Spoils, things ain't so bad.”

This ain't the Dark Age, is just Trinidad,

is human nature, Spoiler, after all,

it ain't big genocide, is just bohbohl;

safe and conservative, 'fraid to take side,

they say that Rodney commit suicide,

is the same voices that, in the slave ship,

smile at their brothers, “Boy, is just the whip,”

I free and easy, you see me have chain?

A little censorship can't cause no pain,

a little graft can't rot the human mind,

what sweet in goat-mouth sour in his behind.

So I sing with Attila, I sing with Commander,

what right in Guyana, right in Uganda.

The time could come, it can't be very long,

when they will jail calypso for picong,

for first comes television, then the press,

all in the name of Civic Righteousness;

it has been done before, all Power has

made the sky shit and maggots of the stars,

over these Romans lying on their backs,

the hookers swaying their enormous sacks,

until all language stinks, and the truth lies,

a mass for maggots and a fête for flies;

and, for a spineless thing, rumor can twist

into a style the local journalist—

as bland as a green coconut, his manner

routinely tart, his sources the Savannah

and all pretensions to a native art

reduced to giggles at the coconut cart,

where heads with reputations, in one slice,

are brought to earth, when they ain't eating nice;

and as for local Art, so it does go,

the audience have more talent than the show.

Is Carnival, straight Carnival that's all,

the beat is base, the melody bohbohl,

all Port of Spain is a twelve-thirty show,

some playing Kojak, some Fidel Castro,

some Rastamen, but, with or without locks,

to Spoiler is the same old khaki socks,

all Frederick Street stinking like a closed drain,

Hell is a city much like Port of Spain,

what the rain rots, the sun ripens some more,

all in due process and within the law,

as, like a sailor on a spending spree,

we blow our oil-bloated economy

on projects from here to eternity,

and Lord, the sunlit streets break Spoiler's heart,

to have natural gas and not give a fart,

to see them line up, pitch-oil tin in hand:

each independent, oil-forsaken island,

like jeering at some scrunter with the blues,

while you lend him some need-a-half-sole shoes,

some begging bold as brass, some coming meeker,

but from Jamaica to poor Dominica

we make them know they begging, every loan

we send them is like blood squeezed out of stone,

and giving gives us back the right to laugh

that we couldn't see we own black people starve,

and, more we give, more we congratulate

we-self on our own self-sufficient state.

In all them project, all them Five-Year Plan,

what happen to the Brotherhood of Man?

Around the time I dead it wasn't so,

we sang the Commonwealth of caiso,

we was in chains, but chains made us unite,

now who have, good for them, and who blight, blight;

my bread is bitterness, my wine is gall,

my chorus is the same: “I want to fall.”

O, wheel of industry, check out your cogs!

Between the knee-high trash and khaki dogs

Arnold's Phoenician trader reach this far,

selling you half-dead batteries for your car;

the children of Tagore, in funeral shroud,

curry favor and chicken from the crowd;

as for the Creoles, check their house, and look,

you bust your brain before you find a book,

when Spoiler see all this, ain't he must bawl,

“area of darkness,” with V. S. Nightfall?

Corbeaux like cardinals line the La Basse

in ecumenical patience while you pass

the Beetham Highway—Guard corruption's stench,

you bald, black justices of the High Bench—

and beyond them the firelit mangrove swamps,

ibises practicing for postage stamps,

Lord, let me take a taxi South again

and hear, drumming across Caroni Plain,

the tabla in the Indian half hour

when twilight fills the mud huts of the poor,

to hear the tattered flags of drying corn

rattle a sky from which all the gods gone,

their bleached flags of distress waving to me

from shacks, adrift like rafts on a green sea,

“Things ain't go change, they ain't go change at all,”

to my old chorus: “Lord, I want to bawl.”

The poor still poor, whatever arse they catch.

Look south from Laventille, and you can watch

the torn brown patches of the Central Plain

slowly restitched by needles of the rain,

and the frayed earth, crisscrossed like old bagasse,

spring to a cushiony quilt of emerald grass,

and who does sew and sow and patch the land?

The Indian. And whose villages turn sand?

The fishermen doomed to stitching the huge net

of the torn foam from Point to La Fillette.

One thing with Hell, at least it organize

in soaring circles, when any man dies

he must pass through them first, that is the style,

Jesus was down here for a little while,

cadaverous Dante, big-guts Rabelais,

all of them wave to Spoiler on their way.

Catch us in Satan tent, next carnival:

Lord Rochester, Quevedo, Juvenal,

Maestro, Martial, Pope, Dryden, Swift, Lord Byron,

the lords of irony, the Duke of Iron,

hotly contending for the monarchy

in couplets or the old re-minor key,

all those who gave earth's pompous carnival

fatigue, and groaned “O God, I feel to fall!”