The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (38 page)

I am considering a world without stars and opposites. When?

23

I saw stones that shone with stoniness, I saw thorns

steady in their inimical patience. Now I see nothing after

the lizard has scuttled; I create each response

when there is no balance, neither tears nor laughter

nor life nor death, nor the sequence of tenses;

that is, I can see no past and foresee no future,

for the stones shine in their stoniness, and the logwood thorns

are waiting for nothing, not to be plaited into a crown,

or the lizard to throb on the side of the road as the frog would

till I passed. I see this also as beyond declension,

and not a commemoration of the invincible
IS

that changes itself as it proceeds, the past's extension,

or the afternoon-long shadows that are the future's.

Therefore, I foresee myself as blessedly invisible,

anonymous and transparent as the wind, a leaf-light traveller

between branches and stones, the clear, the unsayable

voice that moves over the uncut grass and the yellow

bell of an allamanda by the wall. All of this will soon

be true, but without sorrow, the way stones allow

everything to happen, the way the sea shines in the sun,

silver and bountiful in the slow afternoon.

26

The sublime always begins with the chord “And then I saw,”

following which apocalyptic cumuli curl and divide

and the light with its silently widening voice might say:

“From that whirling rose that broadens its rings in the void

here come my horsemen: Famine, Plague, Death, and War.”

Then the clouds are an avalanche of skulls torrentially rolling

over a still, leaden sea. And here beginneth the season

when the storm-birds panic differently and a bell starts tolling

in the mind from the rocking sea-wash (there is no such sound),

but that is the sway of things, which has the necks of the coconuts

bending like grazing giraffes. I stood on the dark sand

and then I saw that darkness which I gradually accepted

grow startling in its joy, its promised anonymity

in its galloping breakers, in time and the space that kept it

immortal and changing without the least thought of me,

the serrated turret of a rock and the white horse that leapt it,

that spumed and vaulted with the elation of its horsemen,

a swallowing of turmoil of a vertiginous chaos,

the delight of a leaf in a sudden gust of force when

between gray channels the islands are slowly erased

and one dare not ask of the thunder what is its cause.

Let it be written: The dark days also I have praised.

28

Awaking to gratitude in this generous Eden,

far from frenzy and violence in the discretion of distance,

my debt, in Yeats's phrase, to “the bounty of Sweden”

that has built this house facing white combers that stands

for hot, rutted lanes far from the disease of power,

spreads like that copper-beech tree whose roots are Ireland's,

with a foam-haired man pacing around a square tower

muttering to a gray lake stirred by settling swans,

in the glare of reputation; whose declining hour

is exultation and fury both at once.

There is no wood whose branches bear gules of amber

that scream when they are broken, no balsam cure,

nothing beyond those waves I care to remember,

but a few friends gone, and that is a different care

in this headland without distinction, where December

is as green as May and the waves soothe in their unrest.

I heard the brass leaves of the roaring copper-beech,

saw the swans white as winter, names carved on the breast

of the tree trunk in the light and lilt of great speech,

and the prayer of a clock's hands at noon that come to rest

over Ireland's torment. No bounty is greater

than walking to the edge of the rocks where the headland's

detonations exult in their natural meter,

like white wings at Coole, the beat of his clapping swans.

30

for Sigrid

The sea should have settled him, but its noise is no help.

I am talking about a man whose doors invite a sail

to cross a kitchen-sill at sunrise, to whom the reek of kelp

drying in the sunlit wind on the chattering shoal

or the veils of a drizzle hazing a narrow cave

are a phantom passion; who hears in the feathering lances

of grass a soundless siege, who, when a bird skips a wave,

feels an arrow shoot from his heart and his wrist dances.

He sees the full moon in daylight, the sky's waning rose,

the gray wind, his nurse trawling her shawl of white lace;

whose wounds were sprinkled with salt but who turns over their horrors

with each crinkling carapace. I am talking about small odysseys

that, with the rhythm of a galley, launch his waking house

in the thinning indigo hour, as he mutters thanks over

the answer of a freckled, forgiving back in creased linen,

its salt neck and damp hair, and, rising from cover,

to the soundless pad of a leopard or a mewing kitten,

unscrews the coffee-jar and measures two and a half spoons,

and pauses, paralyzed by a sail crossing blue windows,

then dresses in the half-dark, dawn-drawn by the full moon's

magnet, until her light-heaving back is a widow's.

She drags the tides and she hauls the heart by hawsers

stronger than any devotion, and she creates monsters

that have pulled god-settled heroes from their houses

and shawled women watching the fading of the stars.

31   ITALIAN ECLOGUES

for Joseph Brodsky

    
I

On the bright road to Rome, beyond Mantua,

there were reeds of rice, and I heard, in the wind's elation,

the brown dogs of Latin panting alongside the car,

their shadows sliding on the verge in smooth translation,

past fields fenced by poplars, stone farms in character,

nouns from a schoolboy's text, Vergilian, Horatian,

phrases from Ovid passing in a green blur,

heading towards perspectives of noseless busts,

open-mouthed ruins and roofless corridors

of Caesars whose second mantle is now the dust's,

and this voice that rustles out of the reeds is yours.

To every line there is a time and a season.

You refreshed forms and stanzas; these cropped fields are

your stubble grating my cheeks with departure,

gray irises, your corn-wisps of hair blowing away.

Say you haven't vanished, you're still in Italy.

Yeah. Very still. God. Still as the turning fields

of Lombardy, still as the white wastes of that prison

like pages erased by a regime. Though his landscape heals

the exile you shared with Naso, poetry is still treason

because it is truth. Your poplars spin in the sun.

    
II

Whir of a pigeon's wings outside a wooden window,

the flutter of a fresh soul discarding the exhausted heart.

Sun touches the bell-towers. Clangor of the
cinquecento
,

at wave-slapped landings vaporettos warp and depart

leaving the traveller's shadow on the swaying stage

who looks at the glints of water that his ferry makes

like a comb through blond hair that plaits after its passage,

or book covers enclosing the foam of their final page,

or whatever the whiteness that blinds me with its flakes

erasing pines and conifers. Joseph, why am I writing this

when you cannot read it? The windows of a book spine open

on a courtyard where every cupola is a practice

for your soul encircling the coined water of Venice

like a slate pigeon and the light hurts like rain.

Sunday. The bells of the campaniles' deranged tolling

for you who felt this stone-laced city healed our sins,

like the lion whose iron paw keeps our orb from rolling

under guardian wings. Craft with the necks of violins

and girls with the necks of gondolas were your province.

How ordained, on your birthday, to talk of you to Venice.

These days, in bookstores I drift towards Biography,

my hand gliding over names with a pigeon's opening claws.

The cupolas enclose their parentheses over the sea

beyond the lagoon. Off the ferry, your shade turns the corners

of a book and stands at the end of perspective, waiting for me.

    
III

In this landscape of vines and hills you carried a theme

that travels across your raked stanzas, sweating the grapes

and blurring their provinces: the slow northern anthem

of fog, the country without borders, clouds whose shapes

change angrily when we begin to associate them

with substantial echoes, holes where eternity gapes

in a small blue door. All solid things await them,

the tree into kindling, the kindling to hearth-smoke,

the dove in the echo of its flight, the rhyme its echo,

the horizon's hyphen that fades, the twigs' handiwork

on a blank page and what smothers their cyrillics: snow,

the white field that a raven crosses with its black caw,

they are a distant geography and not only now,

you were always in them, the fog whose pliant paw

obscures the globe; you were always happier

with the cold and uncertain edges, not blinding sunlight

on water, in this ferry sidling up to the pier

when a traveller puts out the last spark of a cigarette

under his heel, and whose loved face will disappear

into a coin that the fog's fingers rub together.

    
IV

The foam out on the sparkling strait muttering Montale

in gray salt, a slate sea, and beyond it flecked lilac

and indigo hills, then the sight of cactus in Italy

and palms, names glittering on the edge of the Tyrrhenian.

Your echo comes between the rocks, chuckling in fissures

when the high surf vanishes and is never seen again!

These lines flung for sprats or a catch of rainbow fishes,

the scarlet snapper, the parrot fish, argentine mullet,

and the universal rank smell of poetry, cobalt sea,

and self-surprised palms at the airport; I smell it,

weeds like hair swaying in water, mica in Sicily,

a smell older and fresher than the Norman cathedrals,

or restored aqueducts, the raw hands of fishermen

their anchor of dialect, and phrases drying on walls

based in moss. These are its origins, verse, they remain

with the repeated lines of waves and their crests, oars

and scansion, flocks and one horizon, boats with keels

wedged into sand, your own island or Quasimodo's

or Montale's lines wriggling like a basket of eels.

I am going down to the shallow edge to begin again,

Joseph, with a first line, with an old net, the same expedition.

I will study the opening horizon, the scansion's strokes of the rain,

to dissolve in a fiction greater than our lives, the sea, the sun.

    
V

My colonnade of cedars between whose arches the ocean

drones the pages of its missal, each trunk a letter

embroidered like a breviary with fruits and vines,

down which I continue to hear an echoing architecture

of stanzas with St. Petersburg's profile, the lines

of an amplified cantor, his tonsured devotion.

Prose is the squire of conduct, poetry the knight

who leans into the flaming dragon with a pen's lance,

is almost unhorsed like a picador, but tilts straight

in the saddle. Crouched over paper with the same stance,

a cloud in its conduct repeats your hair-thinning shape.

A conduct whose meter and poise were modeled on Wystan's,

a poetry whose profile was Roman and open, the bust

of a minor Caesar preferring a province of distance

to the roar of arenas, a duty obscured by dust.

I am lifted above the surf's missal, the columned cedars,

to look down on my digit of sorrow, your stone, I have drifted

over books of cemeteries to the Atlantic whose shores

shrivel, I am an eagle bearing you towards Russia,

holding in my claws the acorn of your heart that restores

you past the Black Sea of Publius Naso

to the roots of a beech-tree; I am lifted with grief and praise, so

that your speck widens with elation, a dot that soars.

    
VI

Now evening after evening after evening,

August will rustle from the conifers, an orange light

will seep through the stones of the causeway, shadows

lie parallel as oars across the long hull of asphalt,

the heads of burnished horses shake in parched meadows

and prose hesitates on the verge of meter. The vault

increases, its ceiling crossed by bats or swallows,

the heart climbs lilac hills in the light's declension,

and grace dims the eyes of a man nearing his own house.

The trees close their doors, and the surf demands attention.

Evening is an engraving, a silhouette's medallion

darkens loved ones in their profile, like yours,

whose poetry transforms reader into poet. The lion

of the headland darkens like St. Mark's, metaphors

breed and flit in the cave of the mind, and one hears

in the waves' incantation and the August conifers,