The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (41 page)

my first love's features; memory was my painter,

but her gold-haired figure rose and left its wall.

She had become as spectral as the hound,

a paint-thin phantom of real flesh and voice

on a flaking wall; but time has always found

ways to erase the outlines of our joys.

Paint would preserve her white wax hand that fed

the hound, the light on her rich sleeve, but she,

whom my young adoration once compared

to the fresco's replica, had moved away from me.

The dying light will alchemize the harbor,

whiten the schooners' hulls, and the immense

clouds change their ceiling on bright water.

She lives in paint that cannot change its tense.

Was the name Tiepolo there for euphony?

No skill in the depiction of the beast

ageless, perfection, any one of the

two names might have done it; who painted it best

was not at issue, mastery grew easy,

but where I first beheld the spectral hound.

I would say Veronese for Ver-o-nes-e,

I heard the echo and took it for the sound.

Over the years the arc of the lost hound

faded further; its phantom had appeared

when I, mounting the stairs of these couplets, found

the frame of memory again, but its rust never cleared.

It faded like a pattern Time unstitched

from a hunting tapestry, like a daylight owl.

Was the white beast old age or only a long-wished-

for death, or simply the transparent soul?

    
2

I ravaged a volume on Tiepolo later.

I was searching for myself now, and I found

The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra
,

I was that gray Moor clutching a wolfhound,

tan and excitable the dog frets at her,

the Queen gliding in jewels and her train.

Venice is dimming, her diadems in eclipse,

her fleet foundering at Actium, once again

the pages turn their sails, this time:
The Banquet

of Antony and Cleopatra
. Here the Queen

poises a pearl over a goblet; in the quiet,

a Moor in a doublet and brown hound frame the scene.

This was something I had not seen before,

since every figure lent the light perfection,

that every hound had its attendant Moor

restraining it with dutiful affection.

I riffled through the derisive catalogue

determined that the fact was not a vision.

(The dog, the dog, where was the goddamned dog?)

Their postures wrong. Nothing confirmed my version.

The prints confirmed his debt to Veronese,

his distant master; tiringly inspired,

he learnt from him to keep his gestures busy

and the light clear; by now he has acquired

the weight and flourish of a public syntax

Veron-easy with colloquial scholarship,

the repetition of deep-fissured backs

and saffron clouds bearing their Virgin up.

Enormous banners gusting in the wind,

golden clouds lift the apostolic host,

their postures born from Veronese's mind,

he is their shaper, their instructive ghost.

Bright-bellied stallions neigh, and chariots

stir tinted smoke, not dust, their pawing hooves

trample the light, the bright rotunda riots

with fury that is motionless but moves.

O turbulence, astounding in its stasis;

O bright and paradisal wind conveying

the swirl of robes, the light-uplifted faces

to the clouds' core, ascending and yet staying

with their bare soles as if their legion spun

like leaves in an autumn gust, but noiselessly,

a saffron glow, not from our mortal sun

that sets and rises, shadowless ecstasy

ordained, we understand that orthodox

depiction, but joy carries it away

to weightless grace, the way a pilgrim walks

on cloud-paths to the Holy Family.

    
3

They evolve via Veronese, his

bodies that tumble in bright buoyancy

and lift above cloud-chasmed crevices,

their robes in a vertiginous argosy,

his
putti
, light and smooth as bubbles blown

by a saffron wind; it is always late

afternoon in his paradise, in the blest stone

bay of a ceiling busy with its freight;

Venice inverted, hectic with the sails

of crossing saints and, above them, the Star

of the coined water, weighed in her scales

commerce and faith, money and mystery.

Dante in paint, but not quite paradise; yet

there is a fixed sublime in Tiepolo,

whose light is always a little before sunset,

a sweet dissolving like high summer snow,

a vision so acclimatized to faith

and orthodoxy that when we look on her

we see a breathless beauty without breath,

the Infant-cradling, cloud-enthroned Madonna.

    
4

I had followed in the footprints of the hound,

and not the hound my shadow, the hound was white,

if that were all, then nothing had been found.

It stands as still as when he painted it.

I still believe its phantom and the event

that, from apprenticeship, led me so far,

when the bright startling thigh before me went

like its own candle, separate, secular.

Where it had led me, the desperate, tenuous claim,

the thread that kept its labyrinthine course

through the brocaded channels whose jewels flame

when sunrise strikes the water with such force?

To History, a bellowing Minotaur

pursued and slain, following, as termites do,

these furrowing tunnels, couplets to where

this mixed obscenity made by the two

coupling worlds, a beast in the shaft

of light, trampled its filth, a beast

that was my fear, my self, my craft,

not the white elegant wolfhound at the feast.

If recognition was the grace I needed

to elevate my race from its foul lair

by prayer, by poetry, by couplets repeated

over its carcass, I was both slain and slayer.

Time swung its pendulum's axe through any weather,

it swayed inside my heart. I heard it where

the dial stared, then brought its palms together

at noon and midnight in a steepled prayer.

XXI

    
1

Blessed Mary of the Derelicts. The church in Venice,

painted at nineteen, confirms the arch he spanned,

the hound's progenitor, the young Veronese;

a fresco's page arrests my halting hand

but none holds in its frame the arching dog

that has become spectral, a vision

loosened from its epoch; the rustling catalogue

whispers Veronese, but here, as contradiction,

is another print!
Apelles Painting Campaspe

is this allegory Tiepolo has painted himself,

painting his costumed models, on the floor, what must be

his mascot: a white lapdog revels in the wealth

of Venetian light. Alexander sprawls in a chair.

An admiring African peers from the canvas's edge

where a bare-shouldered model, Campaspe with gold hair,

sees her myth evolve. The Moor silent with privilege.

If the frame is Time, with the usual saffron burning

of his ceilings over which robed figures glide,

we presume from the African's posture that I too am learning

both skill and conversion watching from the painting's side.

    
2

Santa Maria del Rosario, Sant'Alvise,

Santa Maria della Visitazione, formal research

recites his ceilings in Italy, as faith raises the

scaffold of Giambattista Tiepolo in an island church,

his figure receding in the lifted devotion

of fishermen who cross themselves with salted eyes

as he climbs to his crow's nest above the muttering ocean

of vespers to chart the geography of paradise.

Each rusting village acknowledged her dominion,

Star of the Sea, from its dark, echoing nave,

her canoes genuflecting for Communion

before the lace-fringed altar of a wave.

Each reproduction, even in monochrome,

fresco or ceiling in a pale ochre wash,

made the world through its window one with Rome,

her scepter a cane stalk, her orb a calabash.

The cult and elevation of the Virgin

through roiling, soundless cloud was not my own

upbringing, far less his, and yet conversion

of a kind came with the echoing stone

cupolas, frescoes, banners, and ceilings, the same

ceremonies of Communion, the Mass in Latin,

even in hovels with their struggling flame

to the Madonna, and the throne she sat in.

And the beads of islands, bedded like the seeds

of a sugar apple in their pith of foam,

from the Synagogue of Blessing and Peace and Loving Deeds

to the black chapels where our songs came from.

Volumes of turning cloud in a conch-shell sky,

a floating Madonna, putti with ears like wings,

over tin and blackened shingles the squat belfry

of Anse La Raye divides us when it rings,

and a sky in rose and gold confirms the harmony

of a single faith, trucks with broad breadfruit leaves

to the scrolled palm pillars of the Scuola dei Carmini,

the watery light pearled on the Virgin's sleeves,

the bright stroke on a mongrel scavenging sand

before dark on the fading beach of Canaries,

the light in the dog's thigh made by the sun's hand,

as it turns and fills its outline in a masterpiece.

    
3

Garnet-eyed and gazing towards Zion,

a settlement of Abyssinian apostles,

bearded as smoke, have founded a religion

based on the horizon, while the old one jostles

for space in the old cathedral. Garbage in drains,

the furnace that rules the village by its stasis.

They have designed themselves so that what remains

is the Coptic fantasy in their stoned faces.

They have designed their faith, with leonine

locks, some shaggy with rust, till, in repose,

banners and beards are one in their design,

figures not Veronese's or Tiepolo's.

They have not seen Dürer's panels: Four Apostles,

not the Moorish princes of the Renaissance,

they echo a blue altarpiece in their postures,

one turbaned soldier with a bamboo lance.

On the beach a young tourist with her head inclined

towards an infant she cradles in her arms

is a Fra Angelico in a blue wraparound, as the wind

begins the incantations of pliable palms;

everywhere a craft confirming images,

from a nosing mongrel to a challenging ceiling

of cloud. The mind raised on mirages

sees my father's copy of storm gulls wheeling.

    
4

Vessel, apprentice and interpreter,

my own delight, before the frames of Time,

was innocent, ignorant and corruptible,

monodic as our climate in its sublime

indifference to seasonal modulations,

to schools, to epochs; I had read them, yes,

but art was not an index of elations;

it ignored error, it trusted its own eyes.

The hound's thigh blurred the smoky dyes around it,

it mixed the schools of distinct centuries,

fixed in its stance it stays where I had found it,

painted by both, Tiepolo, Veronese;

since what is crucial was not true ascription

to either hand—rather the consequence

of my astonishment, which has blent this fiction

to what is true without a change of tense.

Not that Time in a larger frame might have shown the gift

I believed in, and something more astonishing might

have resulted in paint, when on a cloud's wall swift

birds dart over it like a brush's flight

over a causeway with feathery branches, as azaleas

blaze in a vase like that canvas with its zinc glare

in my first Cézanne. He too was crazed by failures,

you can see the gleam of a madman in his stare.

My father's bones in my wrist, in the white Easter

linen of a crucified canvas nailed for his sons—

Lucien, son of Camille, Domenico of Giambattista,

from hand to veined hand the gift, from example, inheritance.

Ah, the hyphen of unfinished things, the unachieved—

like that shaft of light in the fading sky, the lance

of a brush crossing the canvas! O loss, that believed

in Time and its talent! The racing shadows advance.

XXII

    
1

One dawn I woke up to the gradual terror

that all I had written of the hound was false.

I had pursued a melody of error,

my craft seduced by the twin siren calls

of Memory changing to Imagination,

of Reason into Rhyme. I knew I stood

before the uproar of a feast. Its station

was Venice, unvisited. Its poles were my dark wood,

from which the hound, now a chained Cerberus, growled

and lunged its treble heads at Accuracy,

a simple fact made myth, and the myth fouled

by its demonic piss. Tiepolo, Veronese,

the image I had cherished made no sense,

my memory's transference of their frescoes

meant that I never learnt the difference

between Veronese's gift and Tiepolo's.

And yet I hold my ground and hold it till

I trace the evasive hound beyond my fear

that it never existed, that exhaustion will