The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (31 page)

yet light on the tongue

of their native road;

but drawing towards

my pegged-out twine

with beveled boards

of unpainted pine,

like muttering shale

exhaling trees refresh

memory with their smell:

bois canot, bois campêche
,

hissing:
What you wish

from us will never be,

your words is English,

is a different tree.

    
II

In the rivulet's gravel

light gutturals begin,

in the valley, a mongrel,

a black vowel barking,

sends up fading ovals;

by a red iron bridge,

menders with shovels

scrape bubbling pitch,

every grating squeak

reaching this height

a tongue they speak

in, but cannot write.

Like the lost idea

of the visible soul

still kindled here

on illiterate soil,

blue smoke climbs far

up, its vein unveering,

from that ochre scar

of a charcoal clearing.

Crusted clouds open

like the pith of loaves

in a charred clay oven

wrapped in fig leaves.

In a rain barrel, water

unwrinkles to glass;

a lime tree's daughter

there studies her face.

The sapling forks into

a girl racing upstairs

from the yard, to enter

this stanza. Now tears

fill her eyes, a mirror's

tears, as her nape knot is

pulled by her mother's

comb; the mother notices,

saying: “In His countenance

are all the valleys made

shining.” Her swift hands

plait the rivulet's braid.

Chalk flowers that scribble

the asphalt's black slate

and the hibiscus-bell

tell her she is late,

as surf in the branches

increases like the shoal

of blue-and-white benches

in the government school,

reciting this language

that, on a blackboard,

blinds her like a page

of glare on the road,

so she ambles towards

an inner silence along

a red track the forest

swallows like a tongue.

    
III

Noon. Dry cicadas whine

like the rusting pedals

of her mother's machine,

then stop. Lime petals

drift like snipt cloth

in the stitched silence;

like pollen, their growth

means her providence.

Noon hems a lime tree

with irregular shade;

from so much symmetry

her back is tired.

The row of Sphinxes

that my eyes rest on

are hills as fixed as

their stony question:

“Can you call each range

by its right name, aloud,

while our features change

between light and cloud?”

But my memory is small

as the sea's thin sound,

what I vaguely recall

is a line of white sand

and lines in the mahogany

of cured faces and stones

muttering under a stony

river, but the questions

dissolving will unravel

their knots—mountain

springs whose gravel

grows hoarse in rain—

as a woodsman relaxes

to hear the sky split

seconds after the axe's

stroke, the names fit

their echo: Mahaut!

Forestière! And far,

the leaf-hoarse echo

of Mabouya! And, ah!

the hill rises and eats

from my hand, the mongrel

yelping happily, repeats

vowel after vowel,

the boughs bow to me,

the dialects applaud

as the sap of memory

races upward.

    
IV

West of each stanza

that the sunrise made,

banana fields answer

their light; overhead,

a hawk that wheeled,

my heart in its beak,

to the rim of the world

is bringing it back

to the fading bridge,

to the river that turns

in its bed, to the ridge

where the tree returns

from her lessons, late.

Which shack was hers?

Now she climbs straight

up the steps of this verse,

and sits to a supper

of bread and fry-fish

as trees repeat her

darkening English.

Shack windows flare.

Green fireflies arc,

igniting Forestière,

Orléans, Fond St. Jacques,

and the forest runs

sleeping, its eyes shut,

except for one glance

from a lamplit hut;

now, above the closed text

of small shacks that slid

by the headlights: the apex

of a hill like a pyramid.

In the oven-warm night

embers fly. A shop door

flings a panel of light

on the road and an odor

of saltfish. A dry sand

pile scatters in stars.

Catlike, Pigeon Island

pins the sea in its claws.

THE THREE MUSICIANS

for Hunter François

“Once Christmas coming

it have a breeze as

fresh as Bethlehem in

the glorious cedars.

From town to Vieuxfort,

Vieuxfort to Castries,

it does varnish the road

through the villages.

We does put red tins

on the porch for pardon,

we whitewash the stones

from the first garden;

in the sprinkled yard

by the white rose tree

is the soft dent made

by an angel's knee,

whose robes so pure

they does pleat like when

water twists from a ewer

of porcelain;

so for young and old

like refresh. That week,

break a lime leaf, it cold

as an archangel's cheek,

whose shadow, swift

up the hillside grass,

does make cedars lift

so his wings can pass,”

sings Madame Isidor,

her front step scoured

for her first visitor,

Our barefoot Lord.

He was poorer than them,

no place for his bed;

“My parlor is Jerusalem,

my table, Gilead.”

Whole week she practice

her bow: “Pleased to meet you;

this one here? That is

Joseph, carpenter too.”

And that whole week self,

if one vex, next one laugh;

from the glass case Joseph

sets the silver carafe

by two pillars of gold

Johnnie Walker whiskey,

let old people get old,

not Joseph, he brisk, brisk, he

hugging her like his craft,

he stop going to café,

he only singing: “Half

the Herald Angels”; Saturday

he come in a transport from

the market straight home;

a cannon of linoleum

unfurls in their room.

Now the ham there bubbling

for all it's worth

in a kerosene tin

wrapped tight in gray cloth,

and everywhere the earth

smell of raisins, a black cake

she will cut for the birth

of the child she can't make.

Ah, Christmas, Christmas morning!

They hear on the wind,

the whine and warning

of Ti-Boy's violin;

they feel the Blood

of the Innocents pass

through the Roman blade

of poinsettias,

as the three musicians

passing yard after yard,

where the ginger's fragrance

is spikenard;

the cuatro strumming

to their gravelly carol,

they reach. “Come in, come in,

it have whiskey, sorrel—”

Sorrel with its bloody crown

of thorns, by the fence

where the lace bush kneels down

in penitence—

“Joseph, bring three chairs!”

They bow at her door.

Three felt hats. One says,

“
Bon Noel
, Ma' Isidor,

I am Frank Incense,

Mr. Gold, Mr. Myrrh.”

They rest their instruments

with care in a corner.

New hats on their knees,

they nod at how neat

everything is, a breeze

dries their trickling sweat.

One lifts his shot glass

with curled finger, so,

toasting the Mistress,

'cause all of them know

she dream of white lace

on soft ebony skin,

but is somehow God's grace

she cannot make children;

the lifting curtains

brighten the linoleum,

they bring a child's presence

to her varnished room.

They eat in silence

the black cake that she brings,

next to their instruments,

three stiff-backed kings,

who hand back their plates

with a piece on the side

for manners, belt two straights,

then start singing like shite;

in the fiddler's screels

they hunger and thirst

for the child. Joseph feels

that his heart will burst.

SAINT LUCIA'S FIRST COMMUNION

At dusk, on the edge of the asphalt's worn-out ribbon,

in white cotton frock, cotton stockings, a black child stands.

First her, then a small field of her. Ah, it's First Communion!

They hold pink ribboned missals in their hands,

the stiff plaits pinned with their white satin moths.

The caterpillar's accordion, still pumping out the myth

along twigs of cotton from whose parted mouths

the wafer pods in belief without an “if”!

So, all across Saint Lucia thousands of innocents

were arranged on church steps, facing the sun's lens,

erect as candles between squinting parents,

before darkness came on like their blinded saint's.

But if it were possible to pull up on the verge

of the dimming asphalt, before its headlights lance

their eyes, to house each child in my hands,

to lower the window a crack, and delicately urge

the last moth delicately in, I'd let the dark car

enclose their blizzard, and on some black hill,

their pulsing wings undusted, loose them in thousands to stagger

heavenward before it came on: the prejudice, the evil!

GROS-ILET

From this village, soaked like a gray rag in salt water,

a language came, garnished with conch shells,

with a suspicion of berries in its armpits

and elbows like flexible oars. Every ceremony commenced

in the troughs, in the middens, at the daybreak and the daydark funerals

attended by crabs. The odors were fortified

by the sea. The anchor of the islands went deep

but was always clear in the sand. Many a shark,

and often the ray, whose wings are as wide as sails,

rose with insomniac stare from the wavering corals,

and a fisherman held up a catfish like a tendriled head.

And the night with its certain, inextinguishable candles

was like All Souls' Night upside down, the way a bat keeps

its own view of the world. So their eyes looked down, amused,

on us, and found we were walking strangely,

and wondered about our sense of balance, how we slept

as if we were dead, how we confused

dreams with ordinary things like nails, or roses,

how rocks aged quickly with moss,

the sea made furrows that had nothing to do with time,

and the sand started whirlwinds with nothing to do at all,

and the shadows answered to the sun alone.

And sometimes, like the top of an old tire,

the black rim of a porpoise. Elpenor, you

who broke your arse, drunk, tumbling down the bulkhead,

and the steersman who sails, like the ray under the breathing waves,

keep moving, there is nothing here for you.

There are different candles and customs here, the dead

are different. Different shells guard their graves.

There are distinctions beyond the paradise

of our horizon. This is not the grape-purple Aegean.

There is no wine here, no cheese, the almonds are green,

the sea grapes bitter, the language is that of slaves.

WHITE MAGIC

for Leo St. Helene

The
gens-gagée
kicks off her wrinkled skin.

Clap her soul in a jar! The half-man wolf

can trot with bending elbows, rise, and grin

in lockjawed lycanthropia. Censers dissolve

the ground fog with its whistling, wandering souls,

the unbaptized, unfinished, and uncursed

by holy fiat. The island's griots love

our mushroom elves, the devil's parasols

who creep like grubs from a trunk's rotten holes,

their mouths a sewn seam, their clubfeet reversed.

Exorcism cannot anachronize

those signs we hear past midnight in a wood

where a pale woman like a blind owl flies

to her forked branch, with scarlet moons for eyes

bubbling with doubt. You heard a silver splash?

It's nothing. If it slid from mossed rocks

dismiss it as a tired crab, a fish,

unless our water-mother with dank locks

is sliding under this page below your pen,

only a simple people think they happen.

Dryads and hamadryads were engrained

in the wood's bark, in papyrus, and this paper;

but when our dry leaves crackled to the deer-

footed, hobbling hunter, Papa Bois,

he's just Pan's clone, one more translated satyr.

The crone who steps from her jute sugar sack

(though you line moonlit lintels with white flour),