The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (34 page)

I waited for a while by the grass

of a urinous wall to let

the revolving red eye on top

of a cruising police car pass.

In an all-night garage I saw

the gums of a toothless sybil

in garage tires, and she said:

STAY BLACK AND INVISIBLE

TO THE SIRENS OF ARKANSAS.

The snakes coiled on the pumps

hissed with their metal mouth:

Your shadow still hurts the South,

like Lee's slowly reversing sword.

    
XI

There's nothing to understand

in hunger. I watched the shell

of a white sun tapping its yolk

on the dark crust of Fayetteville,

and hurried up in my walk

past warming brick to the smell

of hash browns. Abounding light

raced towards me like a mongrel

hoping that it would be caressed

by my cold, roughening hand,

and I prayed that all could be blest

down Highway 71, the gray calm

of the lanes where a lion

lies down on its traffic island,

a post chevroning into a palm.

The world warmed to its work.

    
XII

But two doors down, a cafeteria

reminded me of my race.

A soak cursed his vinyl table

steadily, not looking up.

A tall black cook setting glazed

pies, a beehive-blond waitress,

lips like a burst strawberry,

and her “Mornin'” like maple syrup.

Four
DEERE
caps talking deer hunting.

I looked for my own area.

The muttering black decanter

had all I needed; it could sign for

Sherman's smoking march to Atlanta

or the march to Montgomery.

I was still nothing. A cipher

in its bubbling black zeros, here.

    
XIII

The self-contempt that it takes

to find my place card among any

of the faces reflected in lakes

of lacquered mahogany

comes easily now. I have laughed

loudest until silence kills

the shoptalk. A fork clicks

on its plate; a cough's rifle shot

shivers the chandeliered room.

A bright arm shakes its manacles.

Every candle-struck face stares into

the ethnic abyss. In the oval

of a silver spoon, the window

bent in a wineglass, the offal

of flattery fed to my craft,

I watch the bright clatter resume.

    
XIV

I bagged the hot Styrofoam coffee

to the recently repealed law

that any black man out after curfew

could be shot dead in Arkansas.

Liberty turns its face; the doctrine

of Aryan light is upheld

as sunrise stirs the lion-

colored grasses of the veld.

Its seam glints in the mind

of the golden Witwatersrand,

whose clouds froth like a beer stein

in the Boer's sunburnt hand;

the world is flushed with fever.

In some plaid-flannel wood

a buck is roped to a fender—

it is something in their blood.

    
XV

In a world I saw without end as

one highway with signs, low brown

motels, burger haciendas,

a neat, evangelical town

now pointed through decorous oaks

its calendar comfort—scary

with its simple, God-fearing folks.

Evil was as ordinary

here as good. I kept my word.

This, after all, was the South,

whose plow was still the sword,

its red earth dust in the mouth,

whose gray divisions and dates

swirl in the pine-scented air—

wherever the heart hesitates

that is its true frontier.

    
XVI

On front porches every weak lamp

went out; on the frame windows

day broadened into the prose

of an average mid-American town.

My meter dropped its limp.

Sunlight flooded Arkansas.

Cold sunshine. I had to draw

my coat tight from the cold, or

suffer the nips of arthritis,

the small arrows that come with age;

the sun began to massage

the needles in the hill's shoulder

with its balsam, but hairs

fall on my collar as I write this

in shorter days, darker years,

more hatred, more racial rage.

    
XVII

The light, being amber, ignored

the red and green traffic stops,

and, since it had never met me,

went past me without a nod.

It sauntered past the shops,

peered into
AUTOMOBILE SALES
,

where a serenely revolving Saab

sneered at it. At
INDIAN CRAFTS

it regilded the Southern Gothic

sign, climbed one of the trails,

touching leaves as it sent

shadows squirreling. Its shafts,

like the lasers of angels, went

through the pines guarding each slab

of the Confederate Cemetery,

piercing the dead with the quick.

    
XVIII

Perhaps in these same pines runs,

with cross ties of bleeding thorns,

the track of the Underground Rail-

road way up into Canada,

and what links the Appalachians

is the tinkle of ankle chains

running north, where history is harder

to bear: the hypocrisy

of clouds with Puritan collars.

Wounds from the Indian wars

cut into the soft plank tables

by the picnic lake, and birches

peel like canoes, and the maple's

leaves tumble like Hessians;

hills froth into dogwood, churches

arrow into the Shawmut sky.

    
XIX

O lakes of pines and still water,

where the wincing muzzles of deer

make rings that widen the idea

of the state past the calendar!

Does this aging Democracy

remember its log-cabin dream,

the way that a man past fifty

imagines a mountain stream?

The pines huddle in quotas

on the lake's calm water line

that draws across them straight as

the stroke of a fountain pen.

My shadow's scribbled question

on the margin of the street

asks, Will I be a citizen

or an afterthought of the state?

    
XX

Can I bring a palm to my heart

and sing, with eyes on the pole

whose manuscript banner boasts

of the Union with thirteen stars

crossed out, but is borne by the ghosts

of sheeted hunters who ride

to the fire-white cross of the South?

Can I swear to uphold my art

that I share with them too, or worse,

pretend all is past and curse

from the picket lines of my verse

the concept of Apartheid?

The shadow bends to the will

as our oaths of allegiance bend

to the state. What we know of evil

is that it will never end.

    
XXI

The original sin is our seed,

and that acorn fans into an oak;

the umbrella of Africa's shade,

despite this democracy's mandates,

still sprouts from a Southern street

that holds gray black men in a stoop,

their flintlock red eyes. We have shared

our passbook's open secret

in the hooded eyes of a cop,

the passerby's unuttered aside,

the gesture involuntary, signs,

the excessively polite remark

that turns an idea to acid

in the gut, and here I felt its

poison infecting the hill pines,

all the way to the top.

    
XXII

Sir, you urge us to divest

ourselves of all earthly things,

like these camphor cabinets

with their fake-pine coffins;

to empty the drawer of the chest

and look far beyond the hurt

on which a cross looks down,

as light floods this asphalt

car park, like the rush Tower

where Raleigh brushes his shirt

and Villon and his brothers cower

at the shadow of the still knot.

There are things that my craft cannot

wield, and one is power;

and though only old age earns the

right to an abstract noun

    
XXIII

this, Sir, is my Office,

my Arkansas Testament,

my two cupfuls of Cowardice,

my sure, unshaven Salvation,

my people's predicament.

Bless the increasing bliss

of truck tires over asphalt,

and these stains I cannot remove

from the self-soiled heart. This

noon, some broad-backed maid,

half-Indian perhaps, will smooth

this wheat-colored double bed,

and afternoon sun will reprint

the bars of a flag whose cloth—

over motel, steeple, and precinct—

must heal the stripes and the scars.

    
XXIV

I turned on the TV set.

A light, without any noise,

in amber successive stills,

stirred the waves off Narragansett

and the wheat-islanded towns.

I watched its gold bars explode

on the wagon axles of Mormons,

their brows and hunched shoulders set

toward Zion, their wide oxen road

raising dust in the gopher's nostrils;

then a gravelly announcer's voice

was embalming the Black Hills—

it bade the Mojave rejoice,

it switched off the neon rose

of Vegas, and its shafts came to

the huge organ pipes of sequoias,

the Pacific, and
Today
's news.

FROM

The Bounty

(1997)

THE BOUNTY

for Alix Walcott

    
I

Between the vision of the Tourist Board and the true

Paradise lies the desert where Isaiah's elations

force a rose from the sand. The thirty-third canto

cores the dawn clouds with concentric radiance,

the breadfruit opens its palms in praise of the bounty,

bois-pain
, tree of bread, slave food, the bliss of John Clare,

torn, wandering Tom, stoat-stroker in his county

of reeds and stalk-crickets, fiddling the dank air,

lacing his boots with vines, steering glazed beetles

with the tenderest prods, knight of the cockchafer,

wrapped in the mists of shires, their snail-horned steeples

palms opening to the cupped pool—but his soul safer

than ours, though iron streams fetter his ankles.

Frost whitening his stubble, he stands in the ford

of a brook like the Baptist lifting his branches to bless

cathedrals and snails, the breaking of this new day,

and the shadows of the beach road near which my mother lies,

with the traffic of insects going to work anyway.

The lizard on the white wall fixed on the hieroglyph

of its stone shadow, the palms' rustling archery,

the souls and sails of circling gulls rhyme with:

“
In la sua volontà è nostra pace
,”

In His will is our peace. Peace in white harbors,

in marinas whose masts agree, in crescent melons

left all night in the fridge, in the Egyptian labors

of ants moving boulders of sugar, words in this sentence,

shadow and light, who live next door like neighbors,

and in sardines with pepper sauce. My mother lies

near the white beach stones, John Clare near the sea-almonds,

yet the bounty returns each daybreak, to my surprise,

to my surprise and betrayal, yes, both at once.

I am moved like you, mad Tom, by a line of ants;

I behold their industry and they are giants.

    
II

There on the beach, in the desert, lies the dark well

where the rose of my life was lowered, near the shaken plants,

near a pool of fresh tears, tolled by the golden bell

of allamanda, thorns of the bougainvillea, and that is

their bounty! They shine with defiance from weed and flower,

even those that flourish elsewhere, vetch, ivy, clematis,

on whom the sun now rises with all its power,

not for the Tourist Board or for Dante Alighieri,

but because there is no other path for its wheel to take

except to make the ruts of the beach road an allegory

of this poem's career, of yours, that she died for the sake

of a crowning wreath of false laurel; so, John Clare, forgive me,

for this morning's sake, forgive me, coffee, and pardon me,

milk with two packets of artificial sugar,

as I watch these lines grow and the art of poetry harden me

into sorrow as measured as this, to draw the veiled figure

of Mamma entering the standard elegiac.

No, there is grief, there will always be, but it must not madden,

like Clare, who wept for a beetle's loss, for the weight

of the world in a bead of dew on clematis or vetch,

and the fire in these tinder-dry lines of this poem I hate

as much as I love her, poor rain-beaten wretch,

redeemer of mice, earl of the doomed protectorate

of cavalry under your cloak; come on now, enough!

    
III

Bounty!

              In the bells of tree-frogs with their steady clamor

in the indigo-dark before dawn, the fading morse

of fireflies and crickets, then light on the beetle's armor,