The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (36 page)

that forbade graven images makes indifferent sense.

    
IV

That cloud was Europe, dissolving past the thorn branches

of the lignum-vitae, the tree of life. A thunderhead remains

over these islands in crests of arrested avalanches,

a blizzard on a screen in snow-speckled campaigns,

the same old news just changing its borders and policies,

beyond which wolves founder, with red berries for eyes,

and their unheard howling trails off in wisps of smoke

like the frozen cloud over bridges. The barge of Poland

is slowly floating downstream with magisterial

scansion, St. Petersburg's minarets a cloud. Then clouds

are forgotten like battles. Like snow in spring. Like evil.

All that seems marmoreal is only a veil.

Play Timon then, and curse all endeavor as vile,

let the combers continue to crest, to no avail.

Your shadow stays with you, startling the quick crabs

that stiffen until you pass. That cloud means spring

to the Babylonian willows of Amsterdam budding again

like crowds in Pissarro along a wet boulevard's branches,

and the drizzle that sweeps its small wires enshrouds

Notre Dame. In the distance the word Cracow

sounds like artillery. Tanks and snow. Crowds.

Walls riddled with bullet-holes that, like cotton-wool, close.

5   PARANG

 

    
I   CHRISTMAS EVE

Can you genuinely claim these, and do they reclaim you

from your possible margin of disdain, of occasional escape:

the dusk in the orange yards of the shacks, the waxen blue-

green of the breadfruit leaves, the first bulb in the kitchens—shape

and shadow so familiar, so worn, like the handles of brooms

in old women's hands? The small river, the crammed shop

and the men outside it, and the stars that nail down their day.

In short, this affection for what is simple and known,

the direct faces, the deprived but resigned ones

whom you have exalted: are they utterly your own

as surely as your shadow is a thing of the sun's?

The sound rushing past the car windows, not the sea but cane,

the night wind in your eyes like a woman's hair, the fresh

fragrances, then the lights on the hills over Port of Spain,

the nocturnal intimacies that stroke the flesh.

Again, the night grows its velvet, the frogs croak

behind fences, the dogs bark at ghosts, and certainties

settle in the sky, the stars that are no longer questions.

Yes, they reclaim you in a way you need not understand:

candles that never gutter and go out in the breeze,

or tears that glint on night's face for every island.

    
II

Days change, the sunlight goes, then it returns, and wearily,

under intense mental pain, I remember a corner

of brilliant Saddle Road climbing out of the valley

of leaf-quiet Santa Cruz, a passage with a bridge, one the

desperate memory fastens on even as it passes all the

other possible places; why this particular one?

Perhaps because it disembodies, it neutralizes distance

with the shadows of leaves on the road and the bridge in the sun,

proving that it will remain in any of two directions,

leaving life and approaching the calm of extinction

with the blissful indifference with which a small stream

runs alongside the bridge and the flecked hills of Paramín

and the certainties (they were often of goodness)

that outweigh our coarse needs and the continuous amen

of the brown-shallowed river. Because memory is less

than the place which it cherishes, frames itself from nowhere

except to say that even with the shit and the stress

of what we do to each other, the running stream's bliss

contradicts the self-importance of despair

by these glittering simplicities, water, leaves, and air,

that elate dissolution which goes beyond happiness.

    
III

Remember childhood? Remember a faraway rain?

Yesterday I wrote a letter and tore it up. Clouds carried bits under the hills

like gulls through the steam of the valley to Port of Spain;

then my eyes began to brim from all the old ills

as I lay face-up in bed, muffling the thunder

of a clouded heart while the hills dissolved in ruin.

This is how the rain descends into Santa Cruz,

with wet cheeks, with the hills holding on to snatches of sunlight

until they fade, then the far sound of a river, and surging grass,

the mountains loaded as the clouds that have one bright

fissure that closes into smoke, and things returning to fable

and rumor and the way it was once, it was like this once …

Remember the small red berries shaped like a bell

by the road bushes, and a church at the end of innocence,

and the sound of
la rivière Dorée
, through the trees to Choiseul,

the scent of hog plums that I have never smelled since,

the long-shadowed emptiness of small roads, when a singed smell rose

from the drizzling asphalt, the way rain hazes the chapel

of La Divina Pastora, and a life of incredible errors?

6

It depends on how you look at the cream church on the cliff

with its rusted roof and a stunted bell tower in the garden

off the road edged with white hard lilies. It could seem sad if

you were from another country, and your doubt did not harden

into pity for the priest in boots and muddy clothes who comes

from a county in Ireland you can't remember, where you felt

perhaps the same sadness for a stone chapel and low walls

heavy with time, an iron sea, and the history of the Celt

told as a savagery of bagpipes and drums.

Turn into this Catholic station, a peaked, brown vestry

and a bleating lamb in the grass. So the visitor believes

the wounded trunk in the shade of large almond leaves.

On a Saturday, shut, and a temperate sky, Blanchisseuse

closed and an elsewhere-remembering sea,

you too could succumb to a helpless shrug that says,

“God! the sad magic that is the hope of black people.

All their drumming and dancing, the ceremonies, the chants.

The
chantwell
screeching like a brass cock on a steeple.

The intricate, unlit labyrinth of their ignorance.”

But I feel the love in his veined, mottled hands,

his lilt that lengthens “the road” and makes it Ireland's.

8   HOMECOMING

    
I

My country heart, I am not home till Sesenne sings,

a voice with woodsmoke and ground-doves in it, that cracks

like clay on a road whose tints are the dry season's,

whose cuatros tighten my heartstrings. The shac-shacs

rattle like cicadas under the fur-leaved nettles

of childhood, an old fence at noon,
bel-air
,
quadrille
,

la comette
, gracious turns, until delight settles.

A voice like rain on a hot road, a smell of cut grass,

its language as small as the cedar's and sweeter than any

wherever I have gone, that makes my right hand Ishmael,

my guide the star-fingered frangipani.

Our kings and our queens march to her floral reign,

wooden swords of the Rose and the Marguerite, their chorus

the lances of feathered reeds, ochre cliffs and soft combers,

and bright as drizzling banjos the coming rain

and the drizzle going back to Guinea, trailing her hem

like a country dancer. Shadows cross the plain

of Vieuxfort with her voice. Small grazing herds

of horses shine from a passing cloud; I see them

in broken sunlight, like singers remembering the words

of a dying language. I watch the bright wires follow

Sesenne's singing, sunlight in fading rain,

and the names of rivers whose bridges I used to know.

    
II

The blades of the oleander were rattling like green knives,

the palms of the breadfruit shrugged, and a hissing ghost

recoiled in the casuarinas—they are as alien as olives—

the bougainvillea's lips divided, its mouth aghast;

it was on an ochre road I caught the noise of their lives,

how their rage was rooted, shaking with every gust:

their fitful disenchantment with all my turned leaves,

for all of the years while theirs turned to mulch, then dust.

“We offered you language early, an absolute choice;

you preferred the gutturals of low tide sucked by the shoal

on the gray strand of cities, the way Ireland offered Joyce

his own unwritten dirt road outside Choiseul.”

“I have tried to serve both,” I said, provoking a roar

from the leaves, shaking their heads, defying translation.

“And there's your betrayal,” they said. I said I was sure

that all the trees of the world shared a common elation

of tongues, gommier with linden,
bois-campêche
with the elm.

“You lie, your right hand forgot its origin, O Jerusalem,

but kept its profitable cunning. We remain unuttered, undefined,”

and since road and sun were English words, both of them

endured in their silence the dividing wind.

    
III

When the violin whines its question and the banjo answers,

my pain increases in stabs, my severances

from odors and roots, the homemade
shac-shac
scraping,

the dip and acknowledgment of courteous country dances,

the smoke I would hold in my arms always escaping

like my father's figure, and now my mother's; let me

for invocation's sacred sake, for the lonely hallowing

of leaves and turning corners, come on the breaking sea

around the sharp brown cliffs of Les Cayes, billowing

breaker, the salt Atlantic wind; I hear a language receding,

unwritten by you, and the voices of children reading

your work in one language only when you had both.

I should ask the clouds to stop moving, for the shadows

to pause, because I can feel it dying and the growth

of all that besieges it, the courtly gestures of grace.

My fingers are like thorns and my eyes are wet

like logwood leaves after a drizzle, the kind in which

the sun and the rain contend for the same place

like the two languages I know—one so rich

in its imperial intimacies, its echo of privilege,

the other like the orange words of a hillside in drought—

but my love of both wide as the Atlantic is large.

10

New creatures ease from earth, nostrils nibbling air,

squirrels abound and repeat themselves like questions,

worms keep inquiring till leaves repeat who they are,

but here we have merely a steadiness without seasons,

and no history, which is boredom interrupted by war.

Civilization is impatience, a frenzy of termites

round the anthills of Babel, signaling antennae

and messages; but here the hermit crab cowers when it meets

a shadow and stops even that of the hermit.

A dark fear of my lengthened shadow, to that I admit,

for this crab to write “Europe” is to see that crouching child

by a dirty canal in Rimbaud, chimneys, and butterflies, old bridges

and the dark smudges of resignation around the coal eyes

of children who all look like Kafka. Treblinka and Auschwitz

passing downriver with the smoke of industrial barges

and the prose of a page from which I brush off the ashes,

the tumuli of the crab holes, the sand hourglass of ages

carried over this bay like the dust of the Harmattan

of our blown tribes dispersing over the islands,

and the moon rising in its search like Diogenes' lantern

over the headland's sphinx, for balance and justice.

16   SPAIN

for José Antonio

    
I

Near our ochre pastures with real bulls, your clay one

braces the kitchen lintel. How earthen every noun sounds

with red tiles, bell-tower in level light—Rioja, Aragon!

It stands on its four-square shadow with crescent horns

alert for a shaken red leaf, for the rising sounds,

like the shoal, an inlet of intaken breath, then the roar

as it lowers and gallops on feather hooves hooking air

near the cockerel's strut of the spangled man turning away

from a mirror of sand with “Yes, but I am not ready.”

The wave-roar of
olés
cresting from the arena

where the earth is cracked and the only things green are

the spiked agave on the cliff bringing the dust of Navarre

across the ocean. I was never warned about this,

that your flame-straight cypresses sway like our casuarinas,

that those who have seen Spain in the oven of August

are scorched in their hearts forever as herds of dust

drift with these bulls whose model is this small clay ghost.

Swallow of my memory, let us fly south to fierce spaces,

arrowing to Granada through monotonous olives,

towards faint blue mountains to a folk fierce and gracious,

along iron gorges whose springs glitter like knives.

 

    
II   GRANADA

Red earth and raw, the olive clumps olive and silver