The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (39 page)

and reads the ornate cyrillics of gesturing fronds

as the silent council of cumuli begins convening

over an Atlantic whose light is as calm as a pond's

and lamps bud like fruit in the village, above roofs, and the hive

of constellations appears, evening after evening,

your voice, through the dark reeds of lines that shine with life.

32

She returns to her role as a seagull. The wind

flaps the shredded wings of the open-air theater

which a different role, in life, made her leave behind.

The lake shines with vanished voices. Nina, years later,

who was a small white body trembling for balance,

has calmed her fright, when one of her first tasks

was learning to control the small storm of her hands.

She wrings your heart like a gull's neck when she asks:

“Remember how it was, Kostia?” Yes. Like this cottage

on a wet day with its salt-rusted bolts, its plants

trying to peer through the windows, its black cortege,

some with umbrella petals of funeral ants

for the child, cyrillics on the thin, translucent page

that she once held to the light; remembered lines

like the shallows, the laughable speech she learns

with joy in their future. The stage with its buried sound

of the lake's polite applause. A seagull returns

like a tilted, balancing N for something it remembers.

She remembers the laughter as his demon burns

behind the wings with its eyes like growing embers,

meaning the evil to come. Perhaps the hills were greener

then, and the trees turned excited pages. Remember, Kostia?

Wind rattles the cottage door and his hands open

it and he stares at her, unchanging, and whispers, “Nina?”

as a flock of white papers rises from a desk dustier

than the years when she spread her wings wide for his pen.

34

At the end of this line there is an opening door

that gives on a blue balcony where a gull will settle

with hooked fingers, then, like an image leaving an idea,

beat in slow scansion across the hammered metal

of the afternoon sea, a sheet that my right hand steers

a small sail making for Martinique or Sicily.

In the lilac-flecked distance, the same headlands rust

with flecks of houses blown from the spume of the trough,

and the echo of a gull where a gull's shadow raced

between sunlit seas. No cry is exultant enough

for my thanks, for my heart that flings open its hinges

and slants my ribs with light. At the end, a shadow

slower than a gull's over water lengthens, by inches,

and covers the lawn. There is the same high ardor

of rhetorical sunsets in Sicily as over Martinique,

and the same horizon underlines their bright absence,

the long-loved shining there who, perhaps, do not speak

from unutterable delight, since speech is for mortals,

since at the end of each sentence there is a grave

or the sky's blue door or, once, the widening portals

of our disenfranchised sublime. The one light we have

still shines on a spire or a conch-shell as it falls

and folds this page over with a whitening wave.

37

After the plague, the city-wall caked with flies, the smoke's amnesia,

learn, wanderer, to go nowhere like the stones since

your nose and eyes are now your daughter's hand;

go where the repetition of the breakers grows easier

to bear, no father to kill, no citizens to convince,

and no longer force your memory to understand

whether the dead elect their own government

under the jurisdiction of the sea-almonds;

certain provisions of conduct seal them to a silence

none dare break, and one noun made them transparent,

where they live beyond the conjugations of tense

in their own white city. How easily they disown us,

and everything else here that undermines our toil.

Sit on your plinth in the last light of Colonus,

let your knuckled toes root deep in their own soil.

A butterfly quietly alights on a tyrant's knee;

sit among the sea-eaten boulders and

let the night wind sweep the terraces of the sea.

This is the right light, this pewter shine on the water,

not the carnage of clouds, not the expected wonder

of self-igniting truth and oracular rains,

but these shallows as gentle as the voice of your daughter,

while the gods fade like thunder in the rattling mountains.

FROM

Tiepolo's Hound

(2000)

I

    
1

They stroll on Sundays down Dronningens Street,

passing the bank and the small island shops

quiet as drawings, keeping from the heat

through Danish arches until the street stops

at the blue, gusting harbor, where like commas

in a shop ledger gulls tick the lined waves.

Sea-light on the cod barrels writes:
St. Thomas
,

the salt breeze brings the sound of Mission slaves

chanting deliverance from all their sins

in tidal couplets of lament and answer,

the horizon underlines their origins—

Pissarros from the ghetto of Braganza

who fled the white hoods of the Inquisition

for the bay's whitecaps, for the folding cross

of a white herring gull over the Mission

droning its passages from Exodus.

Before the family warehouse, near the Customs,

his uncle jerks the locks, rattling their chains,

and lifts his beard to where morning comes

across wide water to the Gentile mountains.

Out of the cobalt bay, her blunt bow cleaving

the rising swell that racing bitterns skip,

the mail boat moans. They feel their bodies leaving

the gliding island, not the blowing ship.

A mongrel follows them, black as its shadow,

nosing their shadows, scuttling when the bells

exult with pardon. Young Camille Pissarro

studies the schooners in their stagnant smells.

He and his starched Sephardic family,

followed from a nervous distance by the hound,

retrace their stroll through Charlotte Amalie

in silence as its Christian bells resound,

sprinkling the cobbles of Dronningens Gade,

the shops whose jalousies in blessing close,

through repetitions of the oval shade

of Danish arches to their high wooden house.

The Synagogue of Blessing and Peace and Loving Deeds

is shut for this Sabbath. The mongrel cowers

through a park's railing. The bells recede.

The afternoon is marked by cedar flowers.

Their street of letters fades, this page of print

in the bleached light of last century recalls

with the sharp memory of a mezzotint:

days of cane carts, the palms' high parasols.

    
2

My wooden window frames the Sunday street

which a black dog crosses into Woodford Square.

From a stone church, tribal voices repeat

the tidal couplets of lament and prayer.

Behind the rusted lances of a railing

stands the green ribbed fan of a Traveller's Tree;

an iron gate, its croton hedge availing

itself of every hue, screeches on entry.

Walk down the path, enter the yawning stone,

its walls as bare as any synagogue

of painted images. The black congregation

frown in the sun at the sepulchral dog.

There was a shul in old-time Port of Spain,

but where its site precisely was is lost

in the sunlit net of maps whose lanes contain

a spectral faith, white as the mongrel's ghost.

Stiller the palms on Sunday, fiercer the grass,

blacker the shade under the boiling trees,

sharper the shadows, quieter the grace

of afternoon, the city's emptiness.

And over the low hills there is the haze

of heat and a smell of rain in the noise

of trees lightly thrashing where one drop has

singed the scorched asphalt as more petals rise.

A silent city, blest with emptiness

like an engraving. Ornate fretwork eaves,

and the heat rising from the pitch in wires,

from empty backyards with calm breadfruit leaves,

their walls plastered with silence, the same streets

with the same sharp shadows, laced verandas closed

in torpor, until afternoon repeats

the long light with its croton-colored crowds

in the Savannah, not the Tuileries, but

still the Rock Gardens' brush-point cypresses

like a Pissarro canvas, past the shut

gate of the President's Palace, flecked dresses

with gull cries, white flowers and cricketers,

coconut carts, a frilled child with the hoop

of the last century, and, just as it was

in Charlotte Amalie, a slowly creaking sloop.

Laventille's speckled roofs, just as it was

in Cazabon's day, the great Savannah cedars,

the silent lanes at sunrise, parked cars

quiet at their culverts, trainers, owners, breeders

before they moved the paddocks, the low roofs

under the low hills, the sun-sleeved Savannah

under the elegance of grass-muffled hooves,

the cantering snort, the necks reined in; a

joy that was all smell, fresh dung; the jokes

of the Indian grooms, that civilizing

culture of horses, the
fin de siècle
spokes

of trotting carriages, and egrets rising,

as across olive hills a flock of pigeons,

keeping its wide ellipse over dark trees

to the Five Islands, soundlessly joins

its white flecks to the sails on quiet seas.

The white line of chalk birds draws on an Asia

of white-lime walls, prayer flags, and minarets,

blackbirds bring Guinea to thorns of acacia,

and in the saffron of Tiepolo sunsets,

the turbulent paradise of bright rotundas

over aisles of cane, and censer-carried mists,

then, blazing from the ridges of Maracas—

the croton hues of the Impressionists.

    
3

On my first trip to the Modern I turned a corner,

rooted before the ridged linen of a Cézanne.

A still life. I thought how clean his brushes were!

Across that distance light was my first lesson.

I remember stairs in couplets. The Metropolitan's

marble authority, I remember being

stunned as I studied the exact expanse

of a Renaissance feast, the art of seeing.

Then I caught a slash of pink on the inner thigh

of a white hound entering the cave of a table,

so exact in its lucency at
The Feast of Levi
,

I felt my heart halt. Nothing, not the babble

of the unheard roar that rose from the rich

pearl-lights embroidered on ballooning sleeves,

sharp beards, and gaping goblets, matched the bitch

nosing a forest of hose. So a miracle leaves

its frame, and one epiphanic detail

illuminates an entire epoch:

a medal by Holbein, a Vermeer earring, every scale

of a walking mackerel by Bosch, their sacred shock.

Between me and Venice the thigh of a hound;

my awe of the ordinary, because even as I write,

paused on a step of this couplet, I have never found

its image again, a hound in astounding light.

Everything blurs. Even its painter. Veronese

or Tiepolo in a turmoil of gesturing flesh,

drapery, columns, arches, a crowded terrace,

a balustrade with leaning figures. In the mesh

of Venetian light on its pillared arches

Paolo Veronese's
Feast in the House of Levi

opens on a soundless page, but no shaft catches

my memory: one stroke for a dog's thigh!

    
4

But isn't that the exact perspective of loss,

that the loved one's features blur, in dimming detail,

the smile with its dimpled corners, her teasing voice

rasping with affection, as Time draws its veil,

until all you remember are her young knees

gleaming from an olive dress, her way of walking,

as if on a page of self-arranging trees,

hair a gold knot, rose petals silently talking?

I catch an emerald sleeve, light knits her hair,

in a garland of sculpted braids, her burnt cheeks;

catch her sweet breath, be the blest one near her

at that Lucullan table, lean when she speaks,

as clouds of centuries pass over the brilliant ground

of the fresco's meats and linen, while her wrist

in my forced memory caresses an arched hound,

as all its figures melt in the fresco's mist.

II

    
1

What should be true of the remembered life

is a freshness of detail: this is how it was—

the almond's smell from a torn almond leaf,

the spray glazing your face from the bursting waves.

And I, walking like him around the wharf's

barrels and schooners, felt a steady love

growing in me, plaited with the strong weaves

of a fish pot, watching its black hands move,

saw in the shadows in which it believes,

in ruined lanes, and rusted roofs above

the lanes, a language, light, and the dark lives

in sour doorways, an alighting dove.

Our street of smoke and fences, gutters gorged

with weed and reeking, scorching iron grooves