The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (26 page)

all those whose anger for the poor on earth

made them weep with a laughter beyond mirth,

names wide as oceans when compared with mine

salted my songs, and gave me their high sign.

All you excuse me, Spoiler was in town;

you pass him straight, so now he gone back down.

THE HOTEL NORMANDIE POOL

    
I

Around the cold pool in the metal light

of New Year's morning, I choose one of nine

cast-iron umbrellas set in iron tables

for work and coffee. The first cigarette

triggers the usual fusillade of coughs.

After a breeze the pool settles the weight

of its reflections on one line. Sunshine

lattices a blank wall with the shade of gables,

stirs the splayed shadows of the hills like moths.

Last night, framed in the binding of that window,

like the great chapter in some Russian novel

in which, during the war, the prince comes home

to watch the soundless waltzers dart and swivel,

like fishes in their lamplit aquarium,

I stood in my own gauze of swirling snow

and, through the parted hair of ribboned drapes,

felt, between gusts of music, the pool widen

between myself and those light-scissored shapes.

The dancers stiffened and, like fish, were frozen

in panes of ice blocked by the window frames;

one woman fanned, still fluttering on a pin,

as a dark fusillade of kettledrums

and a piercing cornet played “Auld Lang Syne”

while a battalion of drunk married men

reswore their vows. For this my fiftieth year,

I muttered to the ribbon-medaled water,

“Change me, my sign, to someone I can bear.”

Now my pen's shadow, angled at the wrist

with the chrome stanchions at the pool's edge,

dims on its lines like birches in a mist

as a cloud fills my hand. A drop punctuates

the startled paper. The pool's iron umbrellas

ring with the drizzle. Sun hits the water.

The pool is blinding zinc. I shut my eyes,

and as I raise their lids I see each daughter

ride on the rayed shells of both irises.

The prayer is brief: That the transparent wrist

would not cloud surfaces with my own shadow,

and that this page's surface would unmist

after my breath as pools and mirrors do.

But all reflection gets no easier,

although the brown, dry needles of that palm

quiver to stasis and things resume their rhyme

in water, like the rubber ring that is a

red rubber ring inverted at the line's center.

Into that ring my younger daughter dived

yesterday, slithering like a young dolphin,

her rippling shadow hungering under her,

with nothing there to show how well she moved

but in my mind the veer of limb and fin.

Transparent absences! Love makes me look

through a clear ceiling into rooms of sand;

I ask the element that is my sign,

“Oh, let her lithe head through that surface break!”

Aquarian, I was married to water;

under that certain roof, I would lie still

next to my sister spirit, horizontal

below what stars derailed our parallel

from our far vow's undeviating course;

the next line rises as they enter it,

Peter, Anna, Elizabeth—Margaret

still sleeping with one arm around each daughter,

in the true shape of love, beyond divorce.

Time cuts down on the length man can endure

his own reflection. Entering a glass

I surface quickly now, prefer to breathe

the fetid and familiar atmosphere

of work and cigarettes. Only tyrants believe

their mirrors, or Narcissi, brooding on boards,

before they plunge into their images;

at fifty I have learnt that beyond words

is the disfiguring exile of divorce.

    
II

Across blue seamless silk, iron umbrellas

and a brown palm burn. A sandaled man comes out

and, in a robe of foam-frayed terry cloth,

with Roman graveness buries his room key,

then, mummy-oiling both forearms and face

with sunglasses still on, stands, fixing me,

and nods. Some petty businessman who tans

his pallor a negotiable bronze,

and the bright nod would have been commonplace

as he uncurled his shades above the pool's

reflecting rim—white towel, toga-slung,

foam hair repeated by the robe's frayed hem—

but, in the lines of his sun-dazzled squint,

a phrase was forming in that distant tongue

of which the mind keeps just a mineral glint,

the lovely Latin lost to all our schools:

“Quis te misit, Magister?”
And its whisper went

through my cold body, veining it in stone.

On marble, concrete, or obsidian,

your visit, Master, magnifies the lines

of our small pool to that Ovidian

thunder of surf between the Baltic pines.

The light that swept Rome's squares and palaces,

washing her tangled fountains of green bronze

when you were one drop in a surf of faces—

a fleck of spittle from the she-wolf's tooth—

now splashes a palm's shadow at your foot.

Turn to us, Ovid. Our emerald sands

are stained with sewage from each tin-shacked Rome;

corruption, censorship, and arrogance

make exile seem a happier thought than home.

“Ah, for the calm proconsul with a voice

as just and level as this Roman pool,”

our house slaves sigh; the field slaves scream revenge;

one moves between the flatterer and the fool

yearning for the old bondage from both ends.

And I, whose ancestors were slave and Roman,

have seen both sides of the imperial foam,

heard palm and pine tree alternate applause

as the white breakers rose in galleries

to settle, whispering at the tilted palm

of the boy-god, Augustus. My own face

held negro Neros, chalk Caligulas;

my own reflection slid along the glass

of faces foaming past triumphal cars.

Master, each idea has become suspicious

of its shadow. A lifelong friend whispers

in his own house as if it might arrest him;

markets no more applaud, as was their custom,

our camouflaged, booted militias

roaring past on camions, the sugar-apples

of grenades growing on their belts; ideas

with guns divide the islands; in dark squares

the poems gather like conspirators.

Then Ovid said, “When I was first exiled,

I missed my language as your tongue needs salt,

in every watery shape I saw my child,

no bench would tell my shadow ‘Here's your place';

bridges, canals, willow-fanned waterways

turned from my parting gaze like an insult,

till, on a tablet smooth as the pool's skin,

I made reflections that, in many ways,

were even stronger than their origin.

“Tiled villas anchored in their foaming orchards,

parched terraces in a dust cloud of words,

among clod-fires, wolfskins, starving herds,

Tibullus' flute faded, sweetest of shepherds.

Through shaggy pines the beaks of needling birds

pricked me at Tomis to learn their tribal tongue,

so, since desire is stronger than its disease,

my pen's beak parted till we chirped one song

in the unequal shade of equal trees.

“Campaigns enlarged our frontiers like clouds,

but my own government was the bare boards

of a plank table swept by resinous pines

whose boughs kept skittering from Caesar's eye

with every yaw. There, hammering out lines

in that green forge to fit me for the horse,

I bent on a solitude so tyrannous

against the once seductive surf of crowds

that no wife softens it, or Caesar's envy.

“And where are those detractors now who said

that in and out of the imperial shade

I scuttled, showing to a frowning sun

the fickle dyes of the chameleon?

Romans”—he smiled—“will mock your slavish rhyme,

the slaves your love of Roman structures, when,

from Metamorphoses to Tristia,

art obeys its own order. Now it's time.”

Tying his toga gently, he went in.

There, at the year's horizon, he had stood,

as if the pool's meridian were the line

that doubled the burden of his solitude

in either world; and, as one leaf fell,

his echo rippled: “Why here, of all places,

a small, suburban tropical hotel,

its pool pitched to a Mediterranean blue,

its palms rusting in their concrete oasis?

Because to make my image flatters you.”

    
III

At dusk, the sky is loaded like watercolor paper

with an orange wash in which every edge frays—

a painting with no memory of the painter—

and what this pool recites is not a phrase

from an invisible, exiled laureate,

where there's no laurel, but the scant applause

of one dry, scraping palm tree as blue eve-

ning ignites its blossoms from one mango flower,

and something, not a leaf, falls like a leaf,

as swifts with needle-beaks dart, panicking over

the pool's cloud-closing light. For an envoi,

write what the wrinkled god repeats to the boy-

god: “May the last light of heaven pity us

for the hardening lie in the face that we did not tell.”

Dusk. The trees blacken like the pool's umbrellas.

Dusk. Suspension of every image and its voice.

The mangoes pitch from their green dark like meteors.

The fruit bat swings on its branch, a tongueless bell.

EASTER

Anna, my daughter,

you have a black dog

that noses your heel,

selfless as a shadow;

here is a fable

about a black dog:

On the last sunrise

the shadow dressed with Him,

it stretched itself also—

they were two big men

with one job to do.

But life had been lent to one

only for this life.

They strode in silence toward

uncontradicting night.

The rats at the Last Supper

shared crumbs with their shadows,

the shadow of the bread

was shared by the bread;

when the candles lowered,

the shadow felt larger,

so He ordered it to leave;

He said where He was going

it would not be needed,

for there there'd be either

radiance or nothing.

It stopped when He turned

and ordered it home,

then it resumed the scent;

it felt itself stretching

as the sun grew small

like the eyes of the soldiers

receding into holes

under the petrified

serpents on their helmets;

the narrowing pupils

glinted like nailheads,

so before He lay back

it crept between the wood

as if it were the pallet

they had always shared;

it crept between the wood

and the flesh nailed to the wood

and it rose like a black flag

as the crossbeam hoisted

itself and the eyes

closed very slowly

extinguishing the shadow—

everything was nothing.

Then the shadow slunk away,

crawling low on its belly,

and it left there knowing

that never again

would He ever need it;

it reentered the earth,

it didn't eat for three days,

it didn't go out,

then it peeped out carefully

like a mole from its hole,

like a wolf after winter,

like a surreptitious serpent,

looking for those forms

that could give back its shape;

then it ran out when the bells

began making wide rings

and rings of radiance;

it keeps nosing for His shape

and it finds it again, in

the white echo of a pigeon

with its wings extended

like a shirt on a clothesline,

like a white shirt on Monday

dripping from a clothesline,

like the greeting of a scarecrow

or a man yawning

at the end of a field.

THE FORTUNATE TRAVELLER

for Susan Sontag

    
And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say,

    
A measure of wheat for a penny,

    
and three measures of barley for a penny;

    
and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.

                                                                          Revelation 6:6

    
I

It was in winter. Steeples, spires

congealed like holy candles. Rotting snow

flaked from Europe's ceiling. A compact man,

I crossed the canal in a gray overcoat,

on one lapel a crimson buttonhole

for the cold ecstasy of the assassin.

In the square coffin manacled to my wrist:

small countries pleaded through the mesh of graphs,

in treble-spaced, Xeroxed forms to the World Bank

on which I had scrawled the one word,
MERCY
;

                      I sat on a cold bench

under some skeletal lindens.

Two other gentlemen, black skins gone gray

as their identical, belted overcoats,