The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (32 page)

the
beau l'homme
creeping towards you, front to back,

the ferny footed, faceless, mouse-eared elves,

these fables of the backward and the poor

marbled by moonlight, will grow white and richer.

Our myths are ignorance, theirs are literature.

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

    
Kaya now, got to have kaya now,

    
Got to have kaya now,

    
For the rain is falling.

                                  
BOB MARLEY

Marley was rocking on the transport's stereo

and the beauty was humming the choruses quietly.

I could see where the lights on the planes of her cheek

streaked and defined them; if this were a portrait

you'd leave the highlights for last, these lights

silkened her black skin; I'd have put in an earring,

something simple, in good gold, for contrast, but she

wore no jewelry. I imagined a powerful and sweet

odor coming from her, as from a still panther,

and the head was nothing else but heraldic.

When she looked at me, then away from me politely

because any staring at strangers is impolite,

it was like a statue, like a black Delacroix's

Liberty Leading the People
, the gently bulging

whites of her eyes, the carved ebony mouth,

the heft of the torso solid, and a woman's,

but gradually even that was going in the dusk,

except the line of her profile, and the highlit cheek,

and I thought, O Beauty, you are the light of the world!

It was not the only time I would think of that phrase

in the sixteen-seater transport that hummed between

Gros-Ilet and the Market, with its grit of charcoal

and the litter of vegetables after Saturday's sales,

and the roaring rum shops, outside whose bright doors

you saw drunk women on pavements, the saddest of all things,

winding up their week, winding down their week.

The Market, as it closed on this Saturday night,

remembered a childhood of wandering gas lanterns

hung on poles at street corners, and the old roar

of vendors and traffic, when the lamplighter climbed,

hooked the lantern on its pole and moved on to another,

and the children turned their faces to its moth, their

eyes white as their nighties; the Market

itself was closed in its involved darkness

and the shadows quarreled for bread in the shops,

or quarreled for the formal custom of quarreling

in the electric rum shops. I remember the shadows.

The van was slowly filling in the darkening depot.

I sat in the front seat, I had no need for time.

I looked at two girls, one in a yellow bodice

and yellow shorts, with a flower in her hair,

and lusted in peace, the other less interesting.

That evening I had walked the streets of the town

where I was born and grew up, thinking of my mother

with her white hair tinted by the dyeing dusk,

and the tilting box houses that seemed perverse

in their cramp; I had peered into parlors

with half-closed jalousies, at the dim furniture,

Morris chairs, a center table with wax flowers,

and the lithograph of
Christ of the Sacred Heart
,

vendors still selling to the empty streets—

sweets, nuts, sodden chocolates, nut cakes, mints.

An old woman with a straw hat over her headkerchief

hobbled towards us with a basket; somewhere,

some distance off, was a heavier basket

that she couldn't carry. She was in a panic.

She said to the driver: “
Pas quittez moi à terre
,”

which is, in her patois: “Don't leave me stranded,”

which is, in her history and that of her people:

“Don't leave me on earth,” or, by a shift of stress:

“Don't leave me the earth” (for an inheritance);

“
Pas quittez moi à terre
, Heavenly transport,

Don't leave me on earth, I've had enough of it.”

The bus filled in the dark with heavy shadows

that would not be left on earth; no, that would be left

on the earth, and would have to make out.

Abandonment was something they had grown used to.

And I had abandoned them, I knew that there

sitting in the transport, in the sea-quiet dusk,

with men hunched in canoes, and the orange lights

from the Vigie headland, black boats on the water;

I, who could never solidify my shadow

to be one of their shadows, had left them their earth,

their white rum quarrels, and their coal bags,

their hatred of corporals, of all authority.

I was deeply in love with the woman by the window.

I wanted to be going home with her this evening.

I wanted her to have the key to our small house

by the beach at Gros-Ilet, I wanted her to change

into a smooth white nightie that would pour like water

over the black rocks of her breasts, to lie

simply beside her by the ring of a brass lamp

with a kerosene wick, and tell her in silence

that her hair was like a hill forest at night,

that a trickle of rivers was in her armpits,

that I would buy her Benin if she wanted it,

and never leave her on earth. But the others, too.

Because I felt a great love that could bring me to tears,

and a pity that prickled my eyes like a nettle,

I was afraid I might suddenly start sobbing

on the public transport with the Marley going,

and a small boy peering over the shoulders

of the driver and me at the lights coming,

at the rush of the road in the country darkness,

with lamps in the houses on the small hills,

and thickets of stars; I had abandoned them,

I had left them on earth, I left them to sing

Marley's songs of a sadness as real as the smell

of rain on dry earth, or the smell of damp sand,

and the bus felt warm with their neighborliness,

their consideration, and the polite partings

in the light of its headlamps. In the blare,

in the thud-sobbing music, the claiming scent

that came from their bodies. I wanted the transport

to continue forever, for no one to descend

and say a good night in the beams of the lamps

and take the crooked path up to the lit door,

guided by fireflies; I wanted her beauty

to come into the warmth of considerate wood,

to the relieved rattling of enamel plates

in the kitchen, and the tree in the yard,

but I came to my stop. Outside the Halcyon Hotel.

The lounge would be full of transients like myself.

Then I would walk with the surf up the beach.

I got off the van without saying good night.

Good night would be full of inexpressible love.

They went on in their transport, they left me on earth.

Then, a few yards ahead, the van stopped. A man

shouted my name from the transport window.

I walked up towards him. He held out something.

A pack of cigarettes had dropped from my pocket.

He gave it to me. I turned, hiding my tears.

There was nothing they wanted, nothing I could give them

but this thing I have called “The Light of the World.”

OCEANO NOX

for Robert Lee

What sort of moon will float up through the almonds

like a bobbing marker in the surf of trees?

A quarter-moon, like an Iranian dagger?

A capitol with wide spheres of influence?

One with a birthmark like Gorbachev's head?

A local moon, full of its own importance,

a watchman's flashlight with fresh batteries,

startling the trickle from a kitchen drain,

pinning a crab to the hotel's wire fence,

changing its mind like a cat burglar,

probing locked harbors, rattling the foam's chain.

Calm as a kitchen clock without the hands

high on a cupboard shelf of this beach house,

the moon stares on a plastic tablecloth,

where she reprints the shadow of a mouse

bent like a friar nibbling his rosary's

berries with fingers quicker than his mouth;

then islands were the gems of an Infanta,

and tiny armored ants, in Indian file,

hoisted their banners, singing “Sancta, Sancta

Regina,” then scattered in armadas

to the cracked wedding cake of her fixed smile.

Her forehead bound as tightly as a nun's

or a black laundress who has pinned the sails,

forgotten, on a clothesline, she was once

the Virgin Queen whose radiance drew the snails

of her horned galleons with their silvery slime,

pale slugs in sand. Insomniac remorse.

Beyond all that now, and way past her prime

her mind is wandering in another tense;

she hears the cannon's surf, the palm frond's gales,

and sees, through the erasures of her face,

those wrecks she christened:
Invincible
,
Revenge
.

Oceano Nox. Night whispers to the Ocean.

A watchman in a constable's cloak patrols

the hotel's wire boundary. I answer his good night.

His flashlight swivels through a spume of salt,

it passes over the old hill of skulls

made by husked coconut shells, the original fault

unsettled by the shallows' dark commotion;

he sings a reggae in a moon so bright

you can read palms by it. A steel band rolls

glissandos of surf round the hotel pool's

gazebo, doubling the moon's arc light.

A wave of sound, an echo overhead

(not shaking the moon's oval in the pool),

that pulses in the memory, when, from school

to college, I cherished the theater

of high Marlovian clouds, my heritage

of that great globe herself, and what I read

sank in like surf reopening the wet

pores of sand, and swirls in the cave's head,

till on this beach-house wall, centuries later,

I mutter the sea's lines, and they recede

to the emerald and ruby of a fading jet:

“Black is the beauty of the brightest day,”

black the circumference around her rings

that radiate from black invisibly,

black is the music which her round mouth sings,

black is the backcloth on which diadems shine,

black, night's perfection, which conceals its flaws

except the crack of the horizon's line;

now all is changing but my focus was

once on the full moon, not what surrounds the moon,

upon a watchman's flashlight not the watchman,

the mesmerizing wake of History.

I have rehearsed their beauty all this week,

and her white disk moves like a camera's lens

along the ebony of a high-boned cheek,

I mean Anne Daniels's, Lauretta Etienne's,

their bow-carved mouths, their half-globed eyes serene,

surfaces so polished that their skin would squeak

if you pushed your forefinger up the bone,

their laughter white as breakers in their grin,

too modest to be actresses, each one

wrapped in sea cotton, intact from Benin.

Oceano Nox. The clocks resume their motion,

a laser from the lighthouse skims a wave;

a different age is whispering to the ocean,

the fronds will take the old moon by the hand

and lead her gently into a cloud's grave;

I cross the darkened grass back to the house;

then all her radiance comes back again,

making the frogs sundials on the lawn;

there is a ring around her, meaning rain,

and meaning nothing more, in that blank face,

than History's innocence or its remorse.

So let her light dissolve into the sable

and velvet memory of a collared cloud,

dimming the square tiles on a kitchen table,

dulling the cheers of an applauding crowd

of breakers flinging whitecaps into space

when you close in the door and ram the latch, as

you think of women with their necks as supple

as bowing palms, and watch the mouse scuttle

back to its hole. A palm's nib scratches

the roof's parchment. At a brass lamp's base,

new rainflies, and the masts of wooden matches.

A scribbling plague of rainflies. Go to bed.

After the morning rain, the shuddering almond

will shake the sweat of nightmare from its bent head.

The surf will smooth the sand's page and even

the cumuli change their idea of heaven

as the sun wipes the nib of a palm frond,

and from the wet hills, parishes of birds

test a new tongue, because these are their shores,

while the old moon gapes at a loss for words

like any ghost at cockcrow, as a force

threshes the palms, lifting their hearts and yours.

TO NORLINE

This beach will remain empty

for more slate-colored dawns

of lines the surf continually

erases with its sponge,

and someone else will come

from the still-sleeping house,

a coffee mug warming his palm

as my body once cupped yours,

to memorize this passage

of a salt-sipping tern,

like when some line on a page

is loved, and it's hard to turn.

WINTER LAMPS

Are they earlier, these

days without afternoons,

whose lamps like crosiers

ask the same questions?