The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (33 page)

“Will you laugh on the stair

at my fumbling key?

Will your bedroom mirror

stay all day empty?”

Thunderous traffic

shakes snow from a bridge.

Ice floes crack

from the flaw in marriage.

Wind taps my shoulder

to cross on my sign;

crouched engines shudder

at their starting line.

On the sidewalk's sludge

to our lightless house,

I pass the closed church

and its business hours,

along the burnt aisles

of skeletal trees

with no signs of a cardinal's

fiery surplice;

bursitic fingers

on a white fence contract

and the huge iris goes

gray with cataract,

while before me my wish

runs ahead to each room,

turning switch after switch

on to its own welcome;

one of mufflered shadows

on our street, I walk

past orange windows

where marriages work,

raking a moustache

with a tongue that tastes

not your lips, but ash,

in a cold fireplace,

that sour gray ash

such as birch logs make,

spiking every eyelash

in its neuralgic mask,

as the spreading lichen

multiplies its white cells,

our white block as stricken

as that hospital's,

where our child was lost,

as I watched through glass

the white-sheeted ghosts

of the mothers pass.

Snow climbs higher on

the railings, its drifts

shorten the black iron

spikes into arrowheads;

on Brookline's white prairie,

bent, shaggy forms blow—

heads down, thinning out yearly

like the buffalo

in this second Ice Age

that is promised us

by hot gospelers' rage

or white-smocked scientists,

and, at the last lamp,

before the dun door,

I feel winter's cramp

tighter than before.

Spidery damask

laces the panes; it freezes

until the arching mask

of Tragedy sneezes

on theater façades in our

comic opera, and plastic

flakes fall on the furniture

of shrouded Boston, and faster

than a mine shaft caving in

I can see the black hole

we have made of heaven.

I scrape each boot sole

on the step. Then stamp

at the ice-welded door.

I cannot break through its clamp

to the fire at earth's core.

I am growing more scared of

your queue of dresses

hanging like questions, the love

of a hairpin pierces

me. The key cannot fit.

Either it has swollen

or the brass shrunk. I fight

the lock. Then I lean,

gasping smoke. Despair

can be wide, it can whiten

the Arctic, but it's clear

as I force the door open

that it's not really the end of

this world, but our own,

that I have had enough

of any love with you gone.

The cold light in the oven

grins again at the news,

I tuck our quilt even.

I lie down in my shoes.

By the bed, brown silt

streaks my old coffee cup.

I forgot to buy salt.

I eat standing up.

My faith lost in answers,

apples, firelight, bread,

in windows whose branches

left you cold, and bored.

FOR ADRIAN

APRIL 14, 1986

to Grace, Ben, Judy, Junior, Norline, Katryn, Gem, Stanley, and Diana

Look, and you will see that the furniture is fading,

that a wardrobe is as insubstantial as a sunset,

that I can see through you, the tissue of your leaves,

the light behind your veins; why do you keep sobbing?

The days run through the light's fingers like dust

or a child's in a sandpit. When you see the stars

do you burst into tears? When you look at the sea

isn't your heart full? Do you think your shadow

can be as long as the desert? I am a child, listen,

I did not invite or invent angels. It is easy

to be an angel, to speak now beyond my eight years,

to have more vestal authority, and to know,

because I have now entered a wisdom, not a silence.

Why do you miss me? I am not missing you, sisters,

neither Judith, whose hair will banner like the leopard's

in the pride of her young bearing, nor Katryn, not Gem

sitting in a corner of her pain, nor my aunt, the one

with the soft eyes that have soothed the one who writes this,

I would not break your heart, and you should know it;

I would not make you suffer, and you should know it;

and I am not suffering, but it is hard to know it.

I am wiser, I share the secret that is only a silence,

with the tyrants of the earth, with the man who piles rags

in a creaking cart, and goes around a corner

of a square at dusk. You measure my age wrongly,

I am not young now, nor old, not a child, nor a bud

snipped before it flowered, I am part of the muscle

of a galloping lion, or a bird keeping low over

dark canes; and what, in your sorrow, in our faces

howling like statues, you call a goodbye

is—I wish you would listen to me—a different welcome,

which you will share with me, and see that it is true.

All this the child spoke inside me, so I wrote it down.

As if his closing grave were the smile of the earth.

GOD REST YE MERRY, GENTLEMEN: PART II

    
I saw Jesus in the Project.

                
RICHARD PRYOR

Every street corner is Christmas Eve

in downtown Newark. The Magi walk

in black overcoats hugging a fifth

of methylated spirits, and hookers hook

nothing from the dark cribs of doorways.

A crazy king breaks a bottle in praise

of Welfare, “I'll kill the motherfucker,”

and for black blocks without work

the sky is full of crystal splinters.

A bus breaks out of the mirage of water,

a hippo in wet streetlights, and grinds on

in smoke; every shadow seems to stagger

under the fiery acids of neon—

wavering like a piss, some l tt rs miss-

ing, extinguished—except for two white

nurses, their vocation made whiter

in darkness. It's two days from elections.

Johannesburg is full of starlit shebeens.

It is anti-American to make such connections.

Think of Newark as Christmas Eve,

when all men are your brothers, even

these; bring peace to us in parcels,

let there be no more broken bottles in heaven

over Newark, let it not shine like spit

on a doorstep, think of the evergreen

apex with the gold star over it

on the Day-Glo bumper sticker a passing car sells.

Daughter of your own Son, Mother and Virgin,

great is the sparkle of the high-rise firmament

in acid puddles, the gold star in store windows,

and the yellow star on the night's moth-eaten sleeve

like the black coat He wore through blade-thin elbows

out of the ghetto into the cattle train

from Warsaw; nowhere is His coming more immanent

than downtown Newark, where three lights believe

the starlit cradle, and the evergreen carols

to the sparrow-child: a black coat-flapping urchin

followed by a white star as a police car patrols.

THE ARKANSAS TESTAMENT

for Michael Harper

    
I

Over Fayetteville, Arkansas,

a slope of memorial pines

guards the stone slabs of forces

fallen for the Confederacy

at some point in the Civil War.

The young stones, flat on their backs,

their beards curling like mosses,

have no names; an occasional surge

in the pines mutters their roster

while their centennial siege,

their entrenched metamorphosis

into cones and needles, goes on.

Over Arkansas, they can see

between the swaying cracks

in the pines the blue of the Union,

as the trunks get rustier.

    
II

It was midwinter. The dusk was

yielding in flashes of metal

from a slowly surrendering sun

on the billboards, storefronts, and signs

along Highway 71,

then on the brass-numbered doors

of my $17.50 motel,

and the slab of my cold key.

Jet-lagged and travel-gritty,

I fell back on the double bed

like Saul under neighing horses

on the highway to Damascus,

and lay still, as Saul does,

till my name reentered me,

and felt, through the chained door,

dark entering Arkansas.

    
III

I stared back at the Celotex

ceiling of room 16,

my coat still on, for minutes

as the key warmed my palm—

TV, telephone, maid service,

and a sense of the parking lot

through cinder blocks—homesick

for islands with fringed shores

like the mustard-gold coverlet.

A roach crossed its oceanic

carpet with scurrying oars

to a South that it knew, calm

shallows of crystalline green.

I studied again how glare

dies on a wall, till a complex

neon scribbled its signature.

    
IV

At the desk, crouched over Mr. _____

I had felt like changing my name

for one beat at the register.

Instead, I'd kept up the game

of pretending whoever I was,

or am, or will be, are the same:

“How'll you pay for this, sir?

Cash or charge?” I missed the

chance of answering, “In kind,

like my color.” But her gaze

was corn-country, her eyes frayed

denim. “American Express.”

On a pennant, with snarling tusk,

a razorback charged. A tress

of loose hair lifted like maize

in the lounge's indigo dusk.

    
V

I dozed off in the early dark

to a smell of detergent pine

and they faded with me: the rug

with its shag, pine-needled floor,

the without-a-calendar wall

now hung with the neon's sign,

no thin-lipped Gideon Bible,

no bed lamp, no magazine,

no bristle-faced fiddler

sawing at “Little Brown Jug,”

or some brochure with a landmark

by which you know Arkansas,

or a mountain spring's white babble,

nothing on a shelf, no shelves;

just a smudge on a wall, the mark

left by two uncoiling selves.

    
VI

I crucified my coat on one wire

hanger, undressed for bathing,

then saw that other, full-length,

alarmed in the glass coffin

of the bathroom door. Right there,

I decided to stay unshaven,

unsaved, if I found the strength.

Oh, for a day's dirt, unshowered,

no plug for my groveling razor,

to reek of the natural coward

I am, to make this a place for

disposable shavers as well

as my own disposable people!

On a ridge over Fayetteville,

higher than any steeple,

is a white-hot electric cross.

    
VII

It burns the back of my mind.

It scorches the skin of night;

as a candle repeats the moment

of being blown out, it remained

when I switched off the ceiling light.

That night I slept like the dead,

or a drunk in the tank, like moss

on a wall, like a lover happier

in the loss of love, like soldiers

under the pines, but, as I dreaded,

rose too early. It was four.

Maybe five. I only guessed

by the watch I always keep

when my own house is at rest.

I opened the motel door.

The hills never turned in their sleep.

    
VIII

Pajamas crammed in my jacket,

the bottoms stuffed into trousers

that sagged, I needed my fix—

my 5 a.m. caffeine addiction.

No rooster crew brassily back at

the white-neon crucifix,

and Arkansas smelt as sweet

as a barn door opening. Like horses

in their starlit, metallic sweat,

parked cars grazed in their stalls.

Dawn was fading the houses

to an even Confederate gray.

On the far side of the highway,

a breeze turned the leaves of an aspen

to the First Epistle of Paul's

to the Corinthians.

    
IX

The asphalt, quiet as a Sabbath,

by municipal sprinklers anointed,

shot its straight and narrow path

in the white, converging arrows

of Highway 71. They pointed

to Florida, as if tired warriors

dropped them on the Trail of Tears,

but nothing stirred in response

except two rabbinical willows

with nicotine beards, and a plaid

jacket Frisbeeing papers

from a bike to silvery lawns,

tires hissing the peace that passeth

understanding under the black elms,

and morning in Nazareth

was Fayetteville's and Jerusalem's.

    
X

Hugging walls in my tippler's hop—

the jive of shuffling bums,

a beat that comes from the chain—