The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (40 page)

of rusted galvanize, a dialect forged

from burning asphalt, and a sky that moves

with thunderhead cumuli grumbling with rain,

and mongrels staggering to cross the pitch

under the olive Morne that held the ruin

of the barracks, yet all was privilege;

especially if, across the harbor, noon

struck its ring of waves, and the ochre walls

of the old cantonment in the still lagoon

reflected their Italian parallels.

Hill towns in rock light, Giotto, Giorgione,

and later the edges of Cézanne's L'Estaque,

not for these things alone, and yet only

for what they were, themselves, my joy comes back.

    
2

From my father's cabinet I trace his predecessors

in a small blue book:
The English Topographical Draughtsmen
,

his pencil studies, delicately firm as theirs,

the lyrical, light precision of these craftsmen—

Girtin, Sandby, and Cotman, Peter De Wint,

meadows with needle spires in monochrome,

locks and canals with enormous clouds that went

rolling over England, postcards from home,

his namesake's county, Warwickshire. His own

work was a double portrait, a cherished oval

of his wife in oil, his own face, with a soft frown

that seemed to clarify the gentle evil

of an early death. A fine sketch of a cow,

a copy of Millet's
The Gleaners
, Turner's

The Fighting Téméraire
, the gathering blow

of a storm with tossing gulls, more than a learner's

skill in them, more than mimicry, a gift.

But a ticking clerk in a colonial government,

his time stopped at the wharf where seagulls lift

and pick at a liner's wake in argument.

There nodding schooners confirmed their names

in oily water, in their Sabbath mooring,

but just as real were etchings of the Thames

by Whistler, coal docks and gulls soaring.

Cross-hatching strokes, and Battersea dividing,

and joining by division, the smoky Thames,

the same bronze stallion, its ringleted king riding,

the barges sliding where the broken water flames.

    
3

Without ever knowing my father it seems to me now

(I thought I saw him pause in the parenthesis

of our stairs once), from the blank unfurrowed brow

of his self-portrait, that he embodied the tenderness

of water, his preferred medium, its English reticence

but also its fragile delight, like a prediction

of his own passing, its tinted mist and essence,

and the verse that made him my precocious fiction.

The precise furrows of a landscape from which a lark arrows

while, under her parted hood, a blind girl listens,

some sunlit shire behind her, all with a rainbow's

benediction, the light that brims and glistens

like tears in Millais's work were like my mother's

belief in triumph over affliction. A peasant sows

his seeds with a scything motion, the lark's good news

is beyond his hearing, striding these humped furrows

a clod trampling clods in sabots, his wooden shoes

riding the troughs of plowed soil, these boots

my father drew from Millet. These distant landscapes

which his devotion copied, did they despise the roots

and roofs of his island as inferior shapes

in the ministry of apprenticeship? Learning

did not betray his race if he copied a warship's

final berth, a cinder in a Turner sunset burning,

any more than the clouds that hid the lark's
trill-trill
,

or whatever its sound, behind creamy cumuli

over Pontoise, over the flecked Morne or gray hill

above Pontoise, or the stroke in a hound's thigh,

the stroke, the syllable, planted in the furrows

of page and canvas, in varnished pews whose doors

let in the surf of trees, carrying the echoes

of another light, of Venice, of Pontoise.

    
4

How little we had to go by! At the library window,

I remember one picture,
A Silvery Day near the Needles
,

bright wind on water, one I wanted to do

for its salt, fast clouds, sharp rocks were “the Needles.”

Fragile little booklets, reproductions in monochrome,

RENOIR
,
DÜRER
, several Renaissance masters

were our mobile museum, the backyards of home

were the squares of Italy, its piazzas our thick pastures.

Burnt hills that plunged the pilgrim into Umbria,

Giotto's grottoes, cliffs dotted with trees,

cities like colors, Siena; we could see the

Madonna's blue mantle in the sea around Canaries.

All that was radiant, complete, and lovely

was shared in secular ecstasy between us,

the apostolic succession of the

reproductions; Botticelli's Venus,

the stone arches winged like the kneeling

angel in Fra Angelico's
Annunciation
,

astonishing mastery, details revealing

themselves to rapturous examination.

A hill town in Mantegna, afternoon light

across Les Cayes, and dusks of golden wheat,

as pupils we needed both worlds for the sight:

of Troumassee's shallows at the Baptist's feet.

Paintings so far from life fermenting around us!

The skeletal, scabrous mongrels foraging garbage,

the moss-choked canals, backyards with contending odors

purifying in smoke, then to turn a sepia page

from the canals of Guardi, from a formal battle with banners,

the carnival lances of Uccello's pawing horses,

to the chivalric panoply of tossing green bananas

and the prongs of the ginger lily. No metamorphosis

was required by the faiths that made all one:

rock quarries with lions and crouched saints,

or raindrop and dewdrop in measured incantation

on the palm of a yam leaf, the communion of paints.

Whenever a conflagration of sea-almonds

and fat-pork bushes caught the brittle drought

and their copper leaves clattered over the Morne's

redoubts or Vigie barracks, my joy would shout

to the stained air, my body's weight through it

lighter than a spinning leaf, my young head

chattering with birdsong, a bird-pecked fruit;

I saw how the dove's wings were eyed and spotted

and how brief its flight was, but not how long

I would keep such lightness until my sins

crippled and caged me. I felt I would belong

to the dirt road forever, my palette's province,

an irrepressible April with its orange,

yellow, tan, rust, red, and vermilion note

on the bars of dry branches in a language

cooing one vowel from the shell of the dove's throat.

III

    
1

Flattered by any masterful representation

of things we knew, from Rubens's black faces

devoutly drawn, to the fountaining elation

of feathery palms in an engraving's stasis,

we caught in old prints their sadness, an acceptance

of vacancy in bent cotton figures

through monochrome markets, a distant tense

for a distant life, still, in some ways, ours.

The St. Thomas drawings have it, the taint

of complicit time, the torpor of ex-slaves

and benign planters, suffering made quaint

as a Danish harbor with its wooden waves.

And what of the world, burning outside the library,

the harbor's cobalt, every hot iron roof,

and its mongrel streets? That ordinary

alchemical indifference of youth

transformed by a page's altar, even then,

loved the false pastorals of Puvis de Chavannes,

until the light of redemption came with Gauguin,

our creole painter of
anses
,
mornes
, and
savannes
,

of olive hills, immortelles. He made us seek

what we knew and loved: the burnished skins

of pawpaws and women, a hill in Martinique.

Our martyr. Unique. He died for our sins.

He, Saint Paul, saw the color of his Muse

as a glowing ingot, her breasts were bronze

under the palm of a breadfruit's fleur-de-lys,

his red road to Damascus through our mountains.

Saint Paul, Saint Vincent, in the hallowed toil

of crowning a wave, as green as our
savannes

shining with wind; pouring linseed oil

and turpentine in cruses with scared hands.

Precious, expensive in its metal cruse,

and poured like secular, sacramental wine,

I smell linseed oil in the wild views

of villages and the tang of turpentine.

This was the edge of manhood, this a boy's

precocious vow, sworn over the capped tubes

like a braced regiment, as his hand deploys

them to assault a barrack's arching cubes.

Where did we get the money from to paint?

Out in the roaring sun, each road was news,

and the cheap muscatel, bought by the pint?

Salt wind encouraged us, and the surf's white noise.

    
2

The turgid masonry of the village churches,

in scale provincial cathedrals, loomed over tin

fences and salt-bleached streets, their verges'

stagnant gutters. Rounding a mountain

road they held their station by a sea

of processional crests, saying their Rosaries

to the brown lace altars of Micoud and Dennery,

then, to leeward, softly, at Anse La Raye, Canaries,

Soufrière, Choiseul, Laborie, Vieuxfort, that were

given echoes drawn from the map of France,

its dukedoms pronounced in the verdant patois

of bamboo letters, a palm's sibilance.

There is a D'Ennery in the private maps

Pissarro did of his province, its apostrophe

poised like a gull over these furrowing whitecaps,

these distant breakers with their soundless spray.

Vernacular shallows muttered under bridges

on whose banks cane lances fluttered as the sail

of a wading egret rose towards the ridges

of mountain ferns until the roof grew small.

The coastal road giddied down precipices

to the sweep of Dennery, two sea-gnawed islets

shielding its bay as they endured the size

of shawling Atlantic combers. Their sunsets

were rose as cathedral ceilings with saffron

canyons of cumuli. The chronology of clouds

contained the curled charts of navigation,

battles with smoke and pennants, shrouds

of settling canvas, as afternoon descended

past the cobalt wall of the sea to a faint

vermilion and orange, and the sky overhead

ripened to a Tiepolo ceiling. All was paint

and the light in paint, in the dusty olive

of Cézanne's trees, from Impressionist prints

the clumps of mangoes, from brush and palette knife,

Canaries framed in the cubes of Aix-en-Provence.

Fond St. Jacques, D'elles Soeurs, La Fargue, Moule à Chique

trees from Courbet and Corot, Bal en Bouche,

our landscapes emerging in French though we speak

English as we work. My pen replaced a brush.

    
3

I matched the first paragraph of
The Red and the Black

in translation to a promontory on the sky of the page

resting on the harbor line with the recumbent arc

of the Vigie peninsula, across the sea from the college.

Even in translation a crispness in the Stendhal

shone from the barrack's gamboge arches, a prose

bracing in its width; so every village cathedral,

with its rusted zinc roofs through clumps of almonds, rose

in inheritance from Stendhal or Cézanne's L'Estaque,

the impasto indigo bay, the ochre walls of Provence,

organic examples from a veranda, the barrack

arches were Stendhal's brick consonants.

I resolved, from example, that nothing matched the vow,

not even a line of verse like a street with shacks,

a blue sea at the end of the line, that could show

the texture of grass in light, its little shocks.

    
4

Despite their middens' excremental stench,

their pristine rivulets so clogged with garbage,

the villages clung to a false pride, their French

namesakes; in faith, in carpentry, in language,

so that the harbor with its flour-bag sails,

the rusted vermilion of the market's roofs

made every wharf a miniature Marseilles

when, slow as a cloud, a high cruise ship arrives.

We saw it through guarded gates that shrank our stature,

it loomed as close as paradise and as forbidden;

it was a separate city, with its own legislature

of perfection, its braided ruler hidden.

Its immaculate officers lined up at the rails,

like settling gulls; then, with a long moan at dusk,

its cabin lights budded high over the lateen sails

of tree canoes, it blocked the sun's orange disc

and left us to empty streets and the lapping wharves

and the remembering bollards where it had moored,

to the astonished gossip of small waves,

and the light of cities in the word “abroad.”

XX

    
1

Over the years the feast's details grew fainter,

less urgent, and with it this: I could not recall