The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (29 page)

The Dutch blood in me is drawn to detail.

I once brushed a drop of water from a Flemish still life

in a book of prints, believing it was real.

It reflected the world in its crystal, quivering with weight.

What joy in that sweat drop, knowing others will persevere!

Let them write, “At fifty he reversed the seasons,

the road of his blood sang with the chattering cicadas,”

as when I took to the road to paint in my eighteenth year.

XIX

    
GAUGUIN

    
I

On the quays of Papeete, the dawdling white-ducked colonists

drinking with whores whose skin is the copper of pennies

pretend, watching the wild skins of the light and shade,

that a straight vermouth re-creates the metropolis,

but the sun has scorched those memories from my head—

Cézanne bricking in color, each brick no bigger than a square inch,

the pointillists' dots like a million irises.

I saw in my own cheekbones the mule's head of a Breton,

the placid, implacable strategy of the Mongol,

the mustache like the downturned horns of a helmet;

the chain of my blood pulled me to darker nations,

though I looked like any other sallow, crumpled colon

stepping up to the pier that day from the customs launch.

I am Watteau's wild oats, his illegitimate heir.

Get off your arses, you clerks, and find your fate,

the devil's prayer book is the hymn of patience,

grumbling in the fog. Pack, leave! I left too late.

    
II

I have never pretended that summer was paradise,

or that these virgins were virginal; on their wooden trays

are the fruits of my knowledge, radiant with disease,

and they offer you this, in their ripe sea-almond eyes,

their clay breasts growing like ingots in a furnace.

No, what I have plated in amber is not an ideal, as

Puvis de Chavannes desired it, but corrupt—

the spot on the ginger lily's vulva, the plantain's phalloi,

the volcano that chafes like a chancre, the lava's smoke

that climbs to the sibilant goddess with its hiss.

I have baked the gold of their bodies in that alloy;

tell the Evangelists paradise smells of sulphur,

that I have felt the beads in my blood erupt

as my brush stroked their backs, the cervix

of a defrocked Jesuit numbering his chaplet.

I placed a blue death mask there in my Book of Hours

that those who dream of an earthly paradise may read it

as men. My frescoes in sackcloth to the goddess Maya.

The mangoes redden like coals in a barbecue pit,

patient as the palms of Atlas, the papaya.

XXI

A long, white, summer cloud, like a cleared linen table,

makes heaven emptier, like after-dinner Sundays

when the Bible begs to be lifted, and the old terrifying verses

raise a sandstorm and bone-white Palestinian rocks

where a ram totters for purchase, bleating like Isaiah.

Dry rage of the desert fathers that scared a child,

the Baptist crying by the cracked river basin, curses

that made the rose an intellectual fire.

Through the skull's stone eyes, the radiant logwood

consumes this August, and a white sun sucks

sweat from the desert. A shadow marks the Word.

I have forgotten a child's hope of the resurrection,

bodies locked up in musting cupboard drawers

among the fish knives and the napery (all the dead earth holds)

to be pulled open at the hour of our birth—

the cloud waits in emptiness for the apostles,

for the fruit, wine amphoras, mutton on groaning trestles,

but only the servant knows heaven is still possible,

some freckled Martha, radiant, dependable,

singing a hymn from your childhood while she folds

her Savior like a white napkin in the earth.

XXII

Rest, Christ! from the tireless war. See, it's midsummer,

but what roars in the throat of the oaks is martial man,

the marching hosannas darken the wheat of Russia,

the coiled ram hides in the rocks of Afghanistan.

Crowned hydrants gush, baptizing the street urchins,

the water cannons blot their screams in mist,

but snow does not melt from the furnace brow of Mahomet,

or napkins hemorrhage from the brow of Christ.

Along the island the almonds seethe with anger,

the wind that churns these orchards of white surf

and whistles dervishes up from the hot sand

revolves this globe, this painted O that spins,

reciting as it moves, tribes, frontiers,

dots that are sounds, cities that love their names,

while weather vanes still scrape the sky for omens.

Though they have different sounds for “God” or “hunger,”

the opposing alphabets in city squares

shout with one voice, nation takes on nation,

and, from their fury of pronunciation,

children lie torn on rubble for a noun.

XXIII

With the stampeding hiss and scurry of green lemmings,

midsummer's leaves race to extinction like the roar

of a Brixton riot tunneled by water hoses;

they seethe toward autumn's fire—it is in their nature,

being men as well as leaves, to die for the sun.

The leaf stems tug at their chains, the branches bending

like Boer cattle under Tory whips that drag every wagon

nearer to apartheid. And, for me, that closes

the child's fairy tale of an antic England—fairy rings,

thatched cottages fenced with dog roses,

a green gale lifting the hair of Warwickshire.

I was there to add some color to the British theater.

“But the blacks can't do Shakespeare, they have no experience.”

This was true. Their thick skulls bled with rancor

when the riot police and the skinheads exchanged quips

you could trace to the Sonnets, or the Moor's eclipse.

Praise had bled my lines white of any more anger,

and snow had inducted me into white fellowships,

while Calibans howled down the barred streets of an empire

that began with Caedmon's raceless dew, and is ending

in the alleys of Brixton, burning like Turner's ships.

XXVIII

Something primal in our spine makes the child swing

from the gnarled trapeze of a sea-almond branch.

I have been comparing the sea almond's shapes to the suffering

in van Gogh's orchards. And that, too, is primal. A bunch

of sea grapes hangs over the calm sea. The shadows

I shovel with a dry leaf are as warm as ash, as

noon jerks toward its rigid, inert center.

Sunbathers broil on their grid, the shallows they enter

are so warm that out in the reef the blear grouper lunges

at nothing, teased by self-scaring minnows.

Abruptly remembering its job, a breaker glazes

the sand that dries fast. For hours, without a heave,

the sea suspires through the deep lungs of sponges.

In the thatched beach bar, a clock tests its stiff elbow

every minute and, outside, an even older iguana

climbs hand over claw, as unloved as Quasimodo,

into his belfry of shade, swaying there. When a

cloud darkens, my terror caused it. Lizzie and Anna

lie idling on different rafts, their shadows under them.

The curled swell has the clarity of lime.

In two more days my daughters will go home.

The frame of human happiness is time,

the child's swing slackens to a metronome.

Happiness sparkles on the sea like soda.

XXIX

Perhaps if I'd nurtured some divine disease,

like Keats in eternal Rome, or Chekhov at Yalta,

something that sharpened the salt fragrance of sweat

with the lancing nib of my pen, my gift would increase,

as the hand of a cloud turning over the sea will alter

the sunlight—clouds smudged like silver plate,

leaves that keep trying to summarize my life.

Under the brain's white coral is a seething anthill.

You had such a deep faith in that green water, once.

The skittering fish were harried by your will—

the stingray halved itself in clear bottom sand,

its tail a whip, its back as broad as a shovel;

the sea horse was fragile as glass, like grass, every tendril

of the wandering medusa: friends and poisons.

But to curse your birthplace is the final evil.

`You could map my limitations four yards up from a beach—

a boat with broken ribs, the logwood that grows only thorns,

a fisherman throwing away fish guts outside his hovel.

What if the lines I cast bulge into a book

that has caught nothing? Wasn't it privilege

to have judged one's work by the glare of greater minds,

though the spool of days that midsummer's reel rewinds

comes bobbling back with its question, its empty hook?

XXX

Gold dung and urinous straw from the horse garages,

click-clop of hooves sparking cold cobblestone.

From bricked-in carriage yards, exhaling arches

send the stale air of transcendental Boston—

tasseled black hansoms trotting under elms,

tilting their crops to the shade of Henry James.

I return to the city of my exile down Storrow Drive,

the tunnel with its split seraphs flying
en face
,

with finite sorrow; blocks long as paragraphs

pass in a style to which I'm not accustomed,

since, if I were, I would have been costumed

to drape the cloaks of couples who arrive

for dinner, drawing their chairs from tables where each glass,

catching the transcendental clustered lights,

twirled with perceptions. Style is character—

so my forehead crusts like brick, my sockets char

like a burnt brownstone in the Negro Quarter;

but when a fog obscures the Boston Common

and, up Beacon Hill, the old gas standards stutter

to save their period, I see a black coachman,

with gloves as white as his white-ankled horse,

who counts their laughter, their lamplit good nights,

then jerks the reins of his brass-handled hearse.

XXXI

Along Cape Cod, salt crannies of white harbors,

white spires, white filling stations, the orthodox

New England offering of clam-and-oyster bars,

like drying barnacles leech harder to their docks

as their day ebbs. Colonies of dark seamen,

whose ears were tuned to their earringed ancestors'

hymn of the Mediterranean's ground bass,

thin out like flocks of some endangered species,

their gutturals, like a parched seal's, on the rocks.

High on the hillsides, the crosstrees of pines

endure the Sabbath with the nerves of aspens.

They hear the Pilgrim's howl changed from the sibyl's,

that there are many nations but one God,

black hat, black-suited with his silver buckle,

damning the rock pool for its naiad's chuckle,

striking this coast with his priapic rod.

A chilling wind blows from my Methodist childhood.

The Fall is all around us—it is New England's

hellfire sermon, and my own voice grows hoarse in

the fog whose bellowing horn is the sea siren's:

a trawler groping from the Port of Boston,

snow, mixed with steam, blurring the thought of islands.

XXXIV

Thalassa! Thalassa! The thud of that echoing blue

on the heart! Going to the Eastern shuttle at LaGuardia,

I mistook a swash of green-painted roof for the sea.

And my ears, that second, were shells that held the roar

of a burnished army scrambling down troughs of sand

in an avalanche of crabs, to the conch's horn in Xenophon.

My eyes flashed a watery green, I felt through each hand,

channel and vein, the startling change in hue

made by the current between Pigeon Point and Store

Bay, my blood royaled by that blue.

I know midsummer is the same thing everywhere—

Aix, Santa Fe, dust powdering the poplars of Arles,

that it swivels like a dog at its shadow by the Charles

when the footpaths swirl with dust, not snow, in eddies—

but my nib, like the beak of the sea-swift heads nowhere else;

to where the legions sprawl like starfish sunning themselves

till the conch's moan calls the slanted spears

of the rain to march on in Anabasis.

The sun has whitened the legions to brittle shells.

Homer, who tired of wars and gods and kings,

had the sea's silence for prologue and epilogue.

That old wave-wanderer with his drowsing gaze is

a pelican rocked on the stern of an empty pirogue,

a salt-grizzled gaffer, shaking rain from his wings.

XXXV

Mud. Clods. The sucking heel of the rain-flinger.

Sometimes the gusts of rain veered like the sails

of dragon-beaked vessels dipping to Avalon

and mist. For hours, driving along

the skittering ridges of Wales, we carried the figure

of Langland's Plowman on the rain-seeded glass,

matching the tires with his striding heels,

while splintered puddles dripped from the roadside grass.

Once, in the drizzle, a crouched, clay-covered ghost

rose in his pivot, and the turning disk of the fields

with their plowed stanzas sang of a freshness lost.

Villages began. We had crossed into England—