The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (43 page)

In autumn, on the train to Pennsylvania,

he placed his book facedown on the sunlit seat

and it began to move. Meter established,

carried on calm parallels, he preferred to read

the paragraphs, the gliding blocks of stanzas

framed by the widening windows—

Italian light on the factories, October's

motley in Jersey, wild fans of trees, the blue

metallic Hudson, and in the turning aureate afternoon,

dusk on rose brickwork as if it were Siena.

Nothing. Nobody at the small railroad station.

The willows fan open. Here we hung our harps,

as the river slid past to elegiac banjos

and the barge crawled along an ochre canal

past the white spires of autumnal towns

and racketing freight trains all long whoop and echo.

Stations, bridges and tunnels enter their language

and the scribble of brown twigs on a blank sky.

And now the cars began to fill with pilgrims,

while the book slept. With others in the car,

he felt as if he had become a tunnel

through which they entered the idea of America—

familiar mantling through the tunnel's skin.

It was still unfamiliar, the staidness of trains.

And the thoughtful, the separate, gliding in cars

on arrowing rails serenely, each gripped face intent

on the puzzle of distance, as stations pass

without waving, and sad, approaching cities,

announced by the prologue of ramshackle yards

and toothless tunnels, and the foliage rusting

across an old aqueduct, loomed and then dwindled

into their name. There were no stations

or receding platforms in the maps of childhood

nor blizzards of dogwood, no piercing steeples

from buttressed cathedrals, nor statues whose base

held dolphins, blunt browed, repeating themselves.

Look at that man looking from the stalled window—

he contains many absences. He has ridden

over infinite bridges, some with roofs below,

many where the afternoon glittered like mica

on the empty river. There was no time

to fall in love with Florence, to completely understand

Wilmington or the rusty stanchions

that flashed past with their cables

or how the screaming gulls knew

the names of all the women he had lost.

There was sweet meditation on a train

even of certain griefs, a gliding time

on the leveled surface of elegiac earth

more than the immortal motion of a blue bay

next to the stone sails of graves, his growing loss.

Echoing railway stations drew him to fiction,

their web of schedules, incoherent announcements,

the terror of missing his train, and because trains

(their casual accuracy, the joy in their gliding power)

had (there were no trains on the islands

of his young manhood) a child's delight in motion,

the lines and parallels and smoky arches

of unread famous novels would stay the same

for yet another fall with its bright counties,

he knew, through the gliding window, the trees would lift

in lament for all the leaves of the unread books,

Anna Karenina
, for the long wail of smoke

across Alpine meadows, for soldiers leaning

out of war-crowded stations, a separate joy

more rooted in landscapes than the flare of battles.

In the middle of the nineteenth century,

somewhere between Balzac and Lautréamont,

a little farther on than Baudelaire Station

where bead-eyed Verlaine sat, my train broke down,

and has been stuck there since. When I got off

I found that I had missed the Twentieth Century.

I studied those small things which besieged the station,

the comical belligerence of dragonflies

and the perpetual astonishment of owls.

It was another country whose time had passed,

with pastoral willows and a belief in drawing.

I saw where Courbet lived; I saw the big quarry

and the lemon light of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot.

The noise of roaring parliaments, a noise

that sounded like the ocean, whorled in my ear-shell,

was far, and the one sibilance was of the poplars

who once bowed to Hobbema. My joy was stuck.

The small station was empty in the afternoon,

as it had been on the trip to Philadelphia.

I sipped the long delight of a past time

where ambition was too late. My craft was stuck.

My deep delight lay in being dated

like the archaic engine. Peace was immense.

But Time passed differently than it did on water.

    
II

There is a continent outside my window,

in the Hudson's patient narrative. There's some calm.

But traffic hurtles up the West Side Highway,

and in fall, the embankment blazes, but

even in spring sunlight I have rarely sought

the glittering consolation of the river,

its far-fetched history, the tongues of unknown trees

talk to an old man sitting on a bench.

Along the smoldering autumnal sidewalks,

the secretive coffee-shops, bright flower stalls,

wandering the Village in search of another subject

other than yourself, it is yourself you meet.

An old man remembering white-headed mountains.

And subtly the sense insinuates itself

that frequent exile turns into treachery,

missing the seasons at the table of July

on lower Seventh Avenue when young women glide

like Nereids in their lissome summer dresses,

all those Susannas for a single elder!

In spring the leaves sing round a tireless statue

who will not sit although invited to.

From a fresh- to a salt-water muse. Home to the Hudson.

The bells on a bright Sunday from my bed,

the squares of sunlight on the buildings opposite

the river slate, the sky cloudless, enameled.

Then Sunday brings its summary of the world,

with the serene Hudson and its criss-crossing ferries,

great clouds and a red barge.

Gaze, graze on the numinous grays

of the river, its spectral traffic

and the ghostly bridges, the bouquet of lamps,

along the embankment your name fades into fog.

Clouds, the sag of old towels, sodden in gray windows,

the far shore scumbled by the fog,

ducks bob on the gray river like decoys,

not ducks but the submerged pieces of an old pier,

lights fade from the water, “Such, such were the joys,”

muffled remorse in the December air.

    
III

Desire and disease commingling,

commingling, the white hair and the white page

with the fear of white sight, blindness, amputation,

a recurring kidney stone, the plague of AIDS,

shaken in the mirror by that bewildered look,

the truculence, the drooping lip of a spiritual lout.

Look at it any way you like, it's an old man's book

whenever you write it, whenever it comes out,

the age in your armpits in the pleats of your crotch,

the faded perfumes of cherished conversations,

and the toilet gurgling its eclogues, resurrecting names

in its hoarse swiveling into an echo after.

This is the music of memory, water.

    
IV

On Mondays, Boston classes. Lunch, a Korean corner—

my glasses clouded by a tribal broth,

a soup that tamed shaggy Mongolian horsemen

in steaming tents while their mares stamped the snow.

Asia swirls in a blizzard; winter is rising

on drifts across the pavements, soon every gutter

will be a locked rivulet then it will be time

for rose and orange lights to dot the Prudential,

and sparrows to bulb along the stricken branches.

I missed the fall. It went with a sudden flare

and blew its wick in Gloucester, sank in Salem,

and bleached the salt grass bending off Cape Ann,

flipped seals into the sound, rattled the shades

of a dark house on that headland abandoned

except by Hopper. You know the light I mean.

American light. And the wind is

the sound of an age going out the window,

yellow and red as taxis, the leaves. And then

boring through volumes of cloud, a silverfish—

2

    
I

Chasms and fissures of the vertiginous Alps

through the plane window, meadows of snow

on powdery precipices, the cantons of cumuli

grumbling or closing, gasping falls of light

a steady and serene white-knuckled horror

of speckled white serrations, inconceivable

in repetition, spumy avalanches

of forgetting cloud, in the wrong heaven—

a paradise of ice and camouflage

of speeding seraphs' shadows down its slopes

under the metal, featherless wings, the noise

a violation of that pre-primal silence

white and without thought, my fear was white

and my belief obliterated—a black stroke

on a primed canvas, everything was white,

white was the color of nothing, not the night,

my faith was strapped in. It could go no higher.

I doubted that there would be a blest descent

braking like threshing seraph's wings, to spire

and sun-shot field, wide, innocent.

The worst fear widened, to ask of the infinite:

How many more cathedral-spires? How many more

peaks of these ice-seized mountains, and towns

locked in by avalanches with their yellow lights

inside on their brilliant goods, with the clappers

of bells frozen by silence? How many small crows

like commas punctuating the drifts?

Infinite and repetitive as the ridges

patterned like okapi or jaguar, their white forests

are an opposite absolute world, a different life,

but more like a different death. The wanderer's cry

forms an O of terror but muted by the slanted snow

and a fear that is farther than panic. This,

whatever its lesson, is the tacit chorus

of the screaming mountains, the feathering alp,

the frozen ocean of oceanic roofs

above which hangs the white ogling horn—

skeletal tusk of a mastodon above white inns.

    
II

A small room, brown and dark, its linen

white as the white spur of the Matterhorn

above the balcony and the dark inns in snow,

and, incredibly on the scars of the crevasses,

a train crawling up the mountain. Orange lights

and brighter in the muffled streets of Zermatt,

what element more absolute as itself

than the death-hush of the snow, the voiceless blizzard,

between the brilliant windows of the stores?

He stood outside bright windows filled with music,

faint conversation through the mullioned panes

and crab-clenched chandeliers with pointed flames

above the animate and inanimate faces

of apparitions whose features matched their names,

all gentlemen with some big-buttressed dames,

a fiction in a fiction. The door could open,

he would be more than welcome. The lights were squared

on the lawn's edges. A conspiring pen

had brought him thus far. All that he had dared

lay in elegant ambush whose bright noise

was like the starlit surf whose voice had reared

him. But this was a different climate,

a different country. Now both lives had met

in this achievement. He turned his head

away this time, and walked back towards the road.

The scene was just like something he had read.

Something in boyhood, before he went abroad.

But cowardice called to him. He went back inside;

secure and rigid in their printed places

all of the dancers in that frozen ballroom.

    
III

As with snow, to feel the air changing,

the heart darken and in the clarity of sunshine—

the clarity of ice, as in the islands,

all spring, all summer, it was the one world

till autumn marshaled its divisions, its flags,

and deer marched with agreeing nodding antlers

into another fiction while we remained

in immortal cobalt, unchanging viridian;

and what was altered was something more profound

than geography, it was the self. It was vocabulary.

Now it was time for the white poem of winter,

when icicles lock the great bronze horse's teeth.

The streets were white. No sidewalks in the streets

and the short snowy distances between the shops

brilliant with winter gear and above the streets

full of skiers with their poles on their shoulders

the chalets, snow-roofed, with peaks like Christmas cards.

From a climate without wolves, what if I dreamt

a white wolf trotted and stood in my path,

there, in the early lights of the busy streets

thickened to silence, coal-eyed, its tongue

a panting flame, snow swarming my eyes.

Then, like a match struck with light! A different glow

than the windows of the hotels, the stores, the inns.

Her hair above the crisp snow of table linen

was like a flare, it led him, stumbling, inane.

He went down early to the lounge. Repeat:

He went down early to the lounge and waited.

The street lights were still on. Then they went out.

Eventually she came and when she came,

she brought the mountain with her into the big room

with her cold cheeks, snow smudged with strawberries,