The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (35 page)

and the toad's too-late presages, nettles of remorse

that shall spring from her grave from the spade's heartbreak.

And yet not to have loved her enough is to love more,

if I confess it, and I confess it. The trickle of underground

springs, the babble of swollen gulches under drenched ferns,

loosening the grip of their roots, till their hairy clods

like unclenching fists swirl wherever the gulch turns

them, and the shuddering aftermath bends the rods

of wild cane. Bounty in the ant's waking fury,

in the snail's chapel stirring under wild yams,

praise in decay and process, awe in the ordinary

in wind that reads the lines of the breadfruit's palms

in the sun contained in a globe of the crystal dew,

bounty in the ants' continuing a line of raw flour,

mercy on the mongoose scuttling past my door,

in the light's parallelogram laid on the kitchen floor,

for Thine is the Kingdom, the Glory, and the Power,

the bells of Saint Clement's in the marigolds on the altar,

in the bougainvillea's thorns, in the imperial lilac

and the feathery palms that nodded at the entry

into Jerusalem, the weight of the world on the back

of an ass; dismounting, He left His cross there for sentry

and sneering centurion; then I believed in His Word,

in a widow's immaculate husband, in pews of brown wood,

when the cattle-bell of the chapel summoned our herd

into the varnished stalls, in whose rustling hymnals I heard

the fresh Jacobean springs, the murmur Clare heard

of bounty abiding, the clear language she taught us,

“as the hart panteth,” at this, her keen ears pronged

while her three fawns nibbled the soul-freshening waters,

“as the hart panteth for the water-brooks” that belonged

to the language in which I mourn her now, or when

I showed her my first elegy, her husband's, and then her own.

    
IV

But can she or can she not read this? Can you read this,

Mamma, or hear it? If I took the pulpit, lay-preacher

like tender Clare, like poor Tom, so that look, Miss!

the ants come to you like children, their beloved teacher

Alix, but unlike the silent recitation of the infants,

the choir that Clare and Tom heard in their rainy county,

we have no solace but utterance, hence this wild cry.

Snails move into harbor, the breadfruit plants on the
Bounty

will be heaved aboard, and the white God is Captain Bligh.

Across white feathery grave-grass the shadow of the soul

passes, the canvas cracks open on the cross-trees of the
Bounty
,

and the Trades lift the shrouds of the resurrected sail.

All move in their passage to the same mother-country,

the dirt-clawing weasel, the blank owl or sunning seal.

Faith grows mutinous. The ribbed body with its cargo

stalls in its doldrums, the God-captain is cast adrift

by a mutinous Christian, in the wake of the turning
Argo

plants bob in the ocean's furrows, their shoots dip and lift,

and the soul's Australia is like the New Testament

after the Old World, the code of an eye for an eye;

the horizon spins slowly and Authority's argument

diminishes in power, in the longboat with Captain Bligh.

This was one of your earliest lessons, how the Christ-Son

questions the Father, to settle on another island, haunted by Him,

by the speck of a raging deity on the ruled horizon,

diminishing in meaning and distance, growing more dim:

all these predictable passages that we first disobey

before we become what we challenged; but you never altered

your voice, either sighing or sewing, you would pray

to your husband aloud, pedaling the hymns we all heard

in the varnished pew: “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,”

“Jerusalem the Golden.” Your melody faltered

but never your faith in the bounty which is His Word.

    
V

All of these waves crepitate from the culture of Ovid,

its sibilants and consonants; a universal meter

piles up these signatures like inscriptions of seaweed

that dry in the pungent sun, lines ruled by miter

and laurel, or spray swiftly garlanding the forehead

of an outcrop (and I hope this settles the matter

of presences). No soul was ever invented,

yet every presence is transparent; if I met her

(in her nightdress ankling barefoot, crooning to the shallows),

should I call her shadow that of a pattern invented

by Greco-Roman design, columns of shadows

cast by the Forum, Augustan perspectives—

poplars, casuarina-colonnades, the in-and-out light of almonds

made from original Latin, no leaf but the olive's?

Questions of pitch. Faced with seraphic radiance

(don't interrupt!), mortals rub their skeptical eyes

that hell is a beach-fire at night where embers dance,

with temporal fireflies like thoughts of Paradise;

but there are inexplicable instincts that keep recurring

not from hope or fear only, that are real as stones,

the faces of the dead we wait for as ants are transferring

their cities, though we no longer believe in the shining ones.

I half-expect to see you no longer, then more than half,

almost never, or never then—there I have said it—

but felt something less than final at the edge of your grave,

some other something somewhere, equally dreaded,

since the fear of the infinite is the same as death,

unendurable brightness, the substantial dreading

its own substance, dissolving to gases and vapors,

like our dread of distance; we need a horizon,

a dividing line that turns the stars into neighbors

though infinity separates them, we can think of only one sun:

all I am saying is that the dread of death is in the faces

we love, the dread of our dying, or theirs;

therefore we see in the glint of immeasurable spaces

not stars or falling embers, not meteors, but tears.

    
VI

The mango trees serenely rust when they are in flower,

nobody knows the name for that voluble cedar

whose bell-flowers fall, the pomme-arac purples its floor.

The blue hills in late afternoon always look sadder.

The country night waiting to come in outside the door;

the firefly keeps striking matches, and the hillside fumes

with a bluish signal of charcoal, then the smoke burns

into a larger question, one that forms and unforms,

then loses itself in a cloud, till the question returns.

Buckets clatter under pipes, villages begin at corners.

A man and his trotting dog come back from their garden.

The sea blazes beyond the rust roofs, dark is on us

before we know it. The earth smells of what's done,

small yards brighten, day dies and its mourners

begin, the first wreath of gnats; this was when we sat down

on bright verandas watching the hills die. Nothing is trite

once the beloved have vanished; empty clothes in a row,

but perhaps our sadness tires them who cherished delight;

not only are they relieved of our customary sorrow,

they are without hunger, without any appetite,

but are part of earth's vegetal fury; their veins grow

with the wild mammy-apple, the open-handed breadfruit,

their heart in the open pomegranate, in the sliced avocado;

ground-doves pick from their palms; ants carry the freight

of their sweetness, their absence in all that we eat,

their savor that sweetens all of our multiple juices,

their faith that we break and chew in a wedge of cassava,

and here at first is the astonishment: that earth rejoices

in the middle of our agony, earth that will have her

for good: wind shines white stones and the shallows' voices.

    
VII

In spring, after the bear's self-burial, the stuttering

crocuses open and choir, glaciers shelve and thaw,

frozen ponds crack into maps, green lances spring

from the melting fields, flags of rooks rise and tatter

the pierced light, the crumbling quiet avalanches

of an unsteady sky; the vole uncoils and the otter

worries his sleek head through the verge's branches;

crannies, culverts, and creeks roar with wrist-numbing water.

Deer vault invisible hurdles and sniff the sharp air,

squirrels spring up like questions, berries easily redden,

edges delight in their own shapes (whoever their shaper).

But here there is one season, our viridian Eden

is that of the primal garden that engendered decay,

from the seed of a beetle's shard or a dead hare

white and forgotten as winter with spring on its way.

There is no change now, no cycles of spring, autumn, winter,

nor an island's perpetual summer; she took time with her;

no climate, no calendar except for this bountiful day.

As poor Tom fed his last crust to trembling birds,

as by reeds and cold pools John Clare blest these thin musicians,

let the ants teach me again with the long lines of words,

my business and duty, the lesson you taught your sons,

to write of the light's bounty on familiar things

that stand on the verge of translating themselves into news:

the crab, the frigate that floats on cruciform wings,

and that nailed and thorn-riddled tree that opens its pews

to the blackbird that hasn't forgotten her because it sings.

2   SIGNS

for Adam Zagajewski

    
I

Europe fulfilled its silhouette in the nineteenth century

with steaming train-stations, gas-lamps, encyclopedias,

the expanding waists of empires, an appetite for inventory

in the novel as a market roaring with ideas.

Bound volumes echoed city-blocks of paragraphs

with ornate parenthetical doorways, crowds on one margin

waiting to cross to the other page; as pigeons gurgle epigraphs

for the next chapter, in which old cobbles begin

the labyrinth of a twisted plot; quiet heresies

over anarchic coffee in steaming cafés (too cold outdoors).

Opposite the closed doors of the Opera two green bronze horses

guard a locked square like bookends, while odors

of the decaying century drift over the gardens

with the smell of books chained in the National Library.

Cross a small bridge into our time under the pardons

of minor medieval saints and the light grows ordinary.

Look back down a linden boulevard that hazes

into a green mist that muffles its clopping horses,

its silk-hats, carriages, the moral width that was, say, Balzac's;

then return to this century of gutted, ashen houses

to the smoke that plumes from distant chimney stacks.

    
II

Far from streets seething like novels with the century's sorrow,

from charcoal sketches by Kollwitz, the émigré's pain

is feeling his language translated, the synthetic aura

of an alien syntax, an altered construction that will drain

the specific of detail, of damp: creaks of sunlight

on a window-ledge, under a barn door in the hay country

of boyhood, the linen of cafés in an academic light—

in short, the fiction of Europe that turns into theater.

In this dry place without ruins, there is only an echo

of what you have read. It is only much later

that print became real: canals, churches, willows, filthy snow.

This is the envy we finally commit; this happens

to us readers, distant devourers, that its pages whiten

our minds like pavements, or fields where a pen's

track furrows a ditch. We become one of those, then,

who convert the scarves of cirrus at dusk to a diva's

adieu from an opera balcony, ceilings of cherubs, cornucopia

disgorging stone fruit, the setting for a believer's

conviction in healing music: then huge clouds pass,

enormous cumuli rumble like trucks with barrels of news-

print and the faith of redemptive art begins to leave us

as we turn back old engravings to the etched views

that are streaked with soot in wet cobbles and eaves.

    
III

The cobbles huddle like shorn heads, gables are leaning

over a street to whisper, the walls are scraped of signs

condemning David's star. Gray faces are screening

themselves (like the moon drawing thin curtains

to the tramp of jackboots, as shattered glass rains

diamonds on the pavement). A remorseless silence

took the old tenants away; now there are signs

the streets dare not pronounce, far more their meaning,

why they occurred, but today the repetitions;

the fog clouding the cobbles, the ethnic cleaning.

Arc-lamps come on, and with them, the movie-setting,

the swastika shadows, and the gas-lamps punctuating

a street's interminable sentence. Linden leaves

blow past the closed Opera, and soot-eyed extras are waiting

for one line in a breadline. The shot elegiacally grieves

and the sequel moves with the orchestration of conscience

around the Expressionist corners of the Old Town.

Over accurate paraphernalia, the repeated signs

of a sequel, the cantor's echo, until the ancient tongue