The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (28 page)

that your exiled country will soon learn by heart,

to a flaking, sunlit ledge where a pigeon gurgles.

Midsummer's furnace casts everything in bronze.

Traffic flows in slow coils, like the doors of a baptistry,

and even the kitten's eyes blaze with Byzantine icons.

That old woman in black, unwrinkling your sheet with a palm,

her home is Rome, its history is her house.

Every Caesar's life has shrunk to a candle's column

in her saucer. Salt cleans their bloodstained togas.

She stacks up the popes like towels in cathedral drawers;

now in her stone kitchen, under the domes of onions,

she slices a light, as thick as cheese, into epochs.

Her kitchen wall flakes like an atlas where, once,

Ibi dracones
was written, where unchristened cannibals

gnawed on the dry heads of coconuts as Ugolino did.

Hell's hearth is as cold as Pompeii's. We're punished by bells

as gentle as lilies. Luck to your Roman elegies

that the honey of time will riddle like those of Ovid.

Corals up to their windows in sand are my sacred domes,

gulls circling a seine are the pigeons of my St. Mark's,

silver legions of mackerel race through our catacombs.

III

At the Queen's Park Hotel, with its white, high-ceilinged rooms,

I reenter my first local mirror. A skidding roach

in the porcelain basin slides from its path to Parnassus.

Every word I have written took the wrong approach.

I cannot connect these lines with the lines in my face.

The child who died in me has left his print on

the tangled bed linen, and it was his small voice

that whispered from the gargling throat of the basin.

Out on the balcony I remember how morning was:

It was like a granite corner in Piero della Francesca's

“Resurrection,” the cold, sleeping foot

prickling like the small palms up by the Hilton.

On the dewy Savannah, gently revolved by their grooms,

snorting, delicate-ankled racehorses exercise,

as delicate-ankled as brown smoke from the bakeries.

Sweat darkens their sides, and dew has frosted the skins

of the big American taxis parked all night on the street.

In black asphalt alleys marked by a ribbon of sunlight,

the closed faces of shacks are touched by that phrase in Traherne:

“The corn was orient and immortal wheat,”

and the canefields of Caroni. With all summer to burn,

a breeze strolls down to the docks, and the sea begins.

IV

This Spanish port, piratical in diverseness,

with its one-eyed lighthouse, this damned sea of noise,

this ochre harbor, mantled by its own scum,

offers, from white wrought-iron balconies,

the nineteenth-century view. You can watch it become

more African hourly—crusted roofs, hot as skillets

peppered with cries; between fast-fry wagons,

floating seraphic Muslims cannot make it hush.

By the pitch of noon, the one thing wanting

is a paddle-wheeler with its rusty parrot's scream,

whistling in to be warped, and Mr. Kurtz on the landing.

Stay on the right bank in the imperial dream—

the Thames, not the Congo. From the small-island masts

of the schooner basin to the plate-glass fronts

of the Holiday Inn is one step, and from need to greed

through the river of clogged, circling traffic is

a few steps more. The world had no time to change

to a doorman's braid from the loincloths of Africa.

So, when the stores draw their blinds, like an empire's ending,

and the banks fade like the peaks of the Hindu Kush,

a cloaked wind, bent like a scavenger, rakes the trash

in the gutters. It is hard not to see the past's

vision of lampposts branching over streets of bush,

the plazas cracked by the jungle's furious seed.

V

The hemispheres lie sweating, flesh to flesh,

on a damp bed. The far ocean grinds in waves

of air-conditioning. The air is scaled like a fish

that leaves dry salt on the hands, and one believes

only in ice, the white zones of refrigerators.

In muslin midsummer along Fourteenth Street, hucksters

with cardboard luggage stacked near the peeling rind

of advertisements have made the Big Apple a mango;

shy as wallflowers at first, the dazed high-rises

rock to reggae and salsa; democracy's price is

two steps forward and three steps back in the Aztec tango

of assimilation, with no bar to the barrio.

On Fridays, an exodus crawls to the Hamptons.

Spit dries on the lips of the curb, and sweat

makes the furniture float away in islands.

Walk the breezy scrub dunes from Montauk to Amagansett,

while the salt of the earth turns into dirt in the cities. The vista

in dusty travel windows blooms with umbrellas

that they cannot go back to. Rats, biting the hands

that fed them. In that drugged dance of dealers,

remote-controlled by a Walkman like he can't stop,

Jesus propositions a seersucker suit, “Hey, mister,

just a sec…” The thumb of an Irish cop

rolls his bullets like beads. Glued to his own transistor.

VI

Midsummer stretches beside me with its cat's yawn.

Trees with dust on their lips, cars melting down

in its furnace. Heat staggers the drifting mongrels.

The capitol has been repainted rose, the rails

round Woodford Square the color of rusting blood.

Casa Rosada, the Argentinian mood,

croons from the balcony. Monotonous lurid bushes

brush the damp clouds with the ideograms of buzzards

over the Chinese groceries. The oven alleys stifle.

In Belmont, mournful tailors peer over old machines,

stitching June and July together seamlessly.

And one waits for midsummer lightning as the armed sentry

in boredom waits for the crack of a rifle.

But I feed on its dust, its ordinariness,

on the faith that fills its exiles with horror,

on the hills at dusk with their dusty orange lights,

even on the pilot light in the reeking harbor

that turns like a police car's. The terror

is local, at least. Like the magnolia's whorish whiff.

All night, the barks of a revolution crying wolf.

The moon shines like a lost button.

The yellow sodium lights on the wharf come on.

In streets, dishes clatter behind dim windows.

The night is companionable, the future as fierce as

tomorrow's sun everywhere. I can understand

Borges's blind love for Buenos Aires,

how a man feels the streets of a city swell in his hand.

VII

Our houses are one step from the gutter. Plastic curtains

or cheap prints hide what is dark behind windows—

the pedaled sewing machine, the photos, the paper rose

on its doily. The porch rail is lined with red tins.

A man's passing height is the same size as their doors,

and the doors themselves, usually no wider than coffins,

sometimes have carved in their fretwork little half-moons.

The hills have no echoes. Not the echo of ruins.

Empty lots nod with their palanquins of green.

Any crack in the sidewalk was made by the primal fault

of the first map of the world, its boundaries and powers.

By a pile of red sand, of seeding, abandoned gravel

near a burnt-out lot, a fresh jungle unfurls its green

elephants' ears of wild yams and dasheen.

One step over the low wall, if you should care to,

recaptures a childhood whose vines fasten your foot.

And this is the lot of all wanderers, this is their fate,

that the more they wander, the more the world grows wide.

So, however far you have travelled, your

steps make more holes and the mesh is multiplied—

or why should you suddenly think of Tomas Venclova,

and why should I care about whatever they did to Heberto

when exiles must make their own maps, when this asphalt

takes you far from the action, past hedges of unaligned flowers?

XIII

Today I respect structure, the antithesis of conceit.

The overworked muck of my paintings, my bad plots! But always,

when the air is empty, I hear actors talking,

the resonance of what is both ordinary and wise.

Specters multiply with age, the peopled head

is crossed by impatient characters, the ears clamped shut;

behind them I hear the actors mutter and shout—

the lit stage is empty, the set prepared,

and I cannot find the key to let them out.

O Christ, my craft, and the long time it is taking!

Sometimes the flash is seen, a sudden exultation

of lightning fixing earth in its place; the asphalt's skin

smells freshly of childhood in the drying rain.

Then I believe that it is still possible, the happiness

of truth, and the young poet who stands in the mirror

smiles with a nod. He looks beautiful from this distance.

And I hope I am what he saw, an enduring ruin.

XIV

With the frenzy of an old snake shedding its skin,

the speckled road, scored with ruts, smelling of mold,

twisted on itself and reentered the forest

where the dasheen leaves thicken and folk stories begin.

Sunset would threaten us as we climbed closer

to her house up the asphalt hill road, whose yam vines

wrangled over gutters with the dark reek of moss,

the shutters closing like the eyelids of that mimosa

called Ti-Marie; then—lucent as paper lanterns,

lamplight glowed through the ribs, house after house—

there was her own lamp at the black twist of the path.

There's childhood, and there's childhood's aftermath.

She began to remember at the minute of the fireflies,

to the sound of pipe water banging in kerosene tins,

stories she told to my brother and myself.

Her leaves were the libraries of the Caribbean.

The luck that was ours, those fragrant origins!

Her head was magnificent, Sidone. In the gully of her voice

shadows stood up and walked, her voice travels my shelves.

She was the lamplight in the stare of two mesmerized boys

still joined in one shadow, indivisible twins.

XV

I can sense it coming from far, too, Maman, the tide

since day has passed its turn, but I still note

that as a white gull flashes over the sea, its underside

catches the green, and I promise to use it later.

The imagination no longer goes as far as the horizon,

but it keeps coming back. At the edge of the water

it returns clean, scoured things that, like rubbish,

the sea has whitened, chaste. Disparate scenes.

The pink and blue chattel houses in the Virgins

in the trade winds. My name caught in

the kernel of my great-aunt's throat.

A yard, an old brown man with a mustache

like a general's, a boy drawing castor-oil leaves in

great detail, hoping to be another Albrecht Dürer.

I have cherished these better than coherence

as the same tide for us both, Maman, comes nearer—

the vine leaves medaling an old wire fence

and, in the shade-freckled yard, an old man like a colonel

under the green cannonballs of calabash.

XVI

So what shall we do for the dead, to whose conch-bordered

tumuli our lifelong attraction is drawn

as to a magnetic empire, whose cities lie ordered

with streets and rational avenues, exact as the grid

of our vibrating metropolis? In our arrogance, we imagine

that they, too, share the immense, inaudible pulse

of the clock-shaped earth, slower than ours, maybe, but within

our dimension, our simple mathematical formulae.

Any peace so indifferent, where all our differences fuse,

is an insult to imagine; what use is any labor we

accept? They must find our prayers boring, for one prays

that they will keep missing us when they have no urge

to be ever-remembered, they cannot see what we hoard—

photograph, letter, keepsake, muttered or knitted homily—

as we change flags and houses. We still wish them to serve

us, expecting from death what we expect of our prayers—

that their hearts lift like ours with the surge

of the surf and the cupolas of the sunset, that the kingfisher

startles their darkness sometimes. But each one prefers

the silence that was his birthright, and the shore

where the others wait neither to end nor begin.

XVII

I pause to hear a racketing triumph of cicadas

setting life's pitch, but to live at their pitch

of joy is unendurable. Turn off

that sound. After the plunge of silence,

the eye gets used to the shapes of furniture, and the mind

to darkness. The cicadas are frantic as my mother's

feet, treading the needles of approaching rain.

Days thick as leaves then, close to each other as hours,

and a sunburnt smell rose up from the drizzled road.

I stitch her lines to mine now with the same machine.

What work lies ahead of us, what sunlight for generations!—

The lemon-rind light in Vermeer, to know it will wait

there for others, the broken eucalyptus

leaf, still sharply smelling of turpentine,

the breadfruit's foliage, rust-edged like van Ruysdael.