The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (44 page)

her body steaming with hues of a banked hearth,

her eyes the blue-green of its dying coals,

and her hair, once it was shaken from its cap

leapt like new fire. Ilse, perhaps, brought in

the muddy tracks between the inns, dark pines,

the unicorn shaft or the priapic horn

of the white mountain, as famous as its stamp,

she brought in echoes of hunted stags folding

from a shot's ricochet through a crevasse

in the warmth of the body which she now unsheathed,

shaking the dust of snow from fur and leather

and hanging her ski-coat on a rack of antlers,

with a glance that pierced him like an icicle,

flashing the blizzard of white teeth, then tousling

the wet hair at the nape of her neck, she stood

for a moment in a blizzard of linen

and the far-lightning flash of cutlery

over the chalets and lodges of Zermatt.

    
IV

As far as secular angels go there is always one,

in Venice, in Milan, hardening that horn

of ageing desire and its devastations,

while skiers plunge and slide soundlessly

past crevasses, invisible as thoughts,

like the waitress buttoning her uniform

already pronged by an invisible horn

and lids that sometimes closed as if her form

slept in the white peace after an avalanche.

He looked out through the window at white air,

and there, crawling impossibly like an insect

across the drifts, a train, distinct, impossible.

Now with more promise than he could expect.

Her speech was crisp, and as for the flushed face,

was it a patronizing kindness? Who could tell?

Auf Wiedersehen
to the pines and the peaked chalets

to the inns looking like toys behind the car

and the waitresses and Ilse, indifferently

going about their business with the lamps

of the Alpine dusk, and the beds freshly made

as the new snow that blurred the villages

and the lights from the stores on the banked street

and the receding shore of our hotel.

Again, how many farewells and greetings

on cheeks that change their name, how many kisses

near tinkling earrings that fade like carriage bells.

    
V

On the powdery ridges of the slopes were sheds

where cattle were byred in the winter darkness.

I imagined them blindly gurgitating their fodder,

and beyond them the vertiginous fissures

in the iron cold. There were the absolute,

these peaks, the pitch of temperature and terror,

polar rigidities that magnetized a child

these rocks bearded with icicles, crevasses

from Andersen's “Ice Maiden,” Whittier's “Snow-Bound,”

this empire, this infernity of ice.

One afternoon, an eternity ago

in his warm island childhood in a jalousied room

with all the fire of daylight outside

in the bustling, black, barefoot street, his heart

was iced with terror, a frozen pond, in which

glazed faces started behind the glacial prose

of Hans Christian Andersen's “The Ice Maiden”

with its snow-locked horror, and that

afternoon has never left me. I did not know then that

she worked as a blond waitress in Zermatt.

I liked the precocious lamps of the evening.

I had never seen so much snow. It whitened night.

Out of this snow, like weeds that have survived,

came an assiduous fiction, one that the inns,

the gables shelved with white, the muted trails,

and (unavoidable) the sharp horn of the peak,

demanded of the ritual silence, a flare of light,

the flush of a warmed face, some elegy,

some cold enchantress, an ember's memory

of fire, provided since my young manhood

or earlier, of the Ice Maiden. She and the horn

were from the same white magic and when she came,

she lifted her head and the horn hooked my heart,

and the world magnified a greeting into love.

Wide meadows shot with a lemon light under the peaks,

the mineral glint of distant towns, the line of the plain

ending in the exclamation of a belfry!

Entering Lausanne, after the white ridges,

ochre scarps for a long while along the gray lake,

a lake so wide you could not see the other shore,

nor if souls walked along it, arms outstretched.

So many of them now on the other bank!

Then the old gentlemen at lunch in Lausanne

with suits of flawless cut, impeccable manners,

update of Rembrandt's
Syndics of the Drapers' Guild
.

I translated the pink, shaven faces of the Guild

to their dark-paneled and polished ancestry

of John the Baptist heads each borne on a saucer

of white lace, the loaded eyes, the thinning hair

over the white streaks of the foreheads, a syndicate

in which, far back, a negligible ancestor

might have been a member, greeting me

a product of his empire's miscegenation

in old Saint Martin. I could find no trace.

Built in huge gilt frames I sometimes found myself

loitering among the markets and canals;

but in Geneva though I felt hung and mounted

in sepia rooms with a glazed stare.

Immense and gray, with its invisible shore.

The weather sounded like its name: Lausanne.

Thought furred and felt like an alderman's collar,

a chocolate stick for the voracious fog.

Irradiating outwards from that gray lake,

that gray which is the hue of historical peace

Geneva was the color of a statesman's hair,

silvery and elegant and with a statesman's conscience,

banks and furled flags above the banks, and shoes

mirrored and quiet in deep-piled carpets.

The velvet, soft transactions of the world.

Stipple of farmhouse and fields, foothills dissolving

to lilac, violet shadows in the ridged furrows,

a spire slowly spinning away into Italy.

3

    
I

Blessed are the small farms conjugating Horace,

and the olive trees as twisted as Ovid's syntax,

Virgilian twilight on the hides of cattle

and the small turreted castles on the Tuscan slopes.

To live in another language with the swallow's wings:

chelidon
beating over the rye, shadows on the barley,

between the peeling farms and the rusted poplars,

the bright air full of drunken insects,

the Pervigilium Veneris, Latin words leaping to life

as the train glides into dividing Florence.

Outside Firenze the hill offered itself,

erect-flame cypresses and an ochre castle

sepulchral towards evening, a star's first spark,

over the red-brown tiles of roofs through the olive grove,

dusk delicate as an old gentleman

with mottled hands and watery eyes, our host.

Diabetic, dying, my double.

And here again, a digit in Rome's bustle—

“Rome's bustle,” a phrase as casual as a cape

tossed over the shoulder of a dimming pilgrim

in an obscure, anonymous altarpiece.

Those serene soft mountains, those tacit gorges—

that was Abruzzi. I remembered Abruzzi

from
A Farewell to Arms
, with the soft young priest

who invites Frederic Henry there after the war,

and perhaps Frederic Henry got there, whether or not,

here it was now, with small hill towns on the ridges,

where it could be infernally cold. The precise light

defined bright quarries. It looked incorruptible

as the faith of a young priest. Its paint still wet.

It spun past, saying, “You swore not to forget

fighting and the rattle of gunfire in the mountains.”

Gone, without echo: Only the tight fine towns,

church tower or spire, the steep rust roofs

revolving slowly past the carriage window.

We drove through the wet sunlight into Pescara.

Wind folded the deckchairs on the esplanade,

slamming them shut. A detached, striped umbrella

somersaulted over the sand. A dishrag sky.

Then the weak sunshine strengthened steadily

and color came back into the sea's face.

The waitress moved among the afternoon tables

setting and straightening the dinner linen;

a girl with jet hair, black as her skirt, red mouth

and cheeks that were brightening now with the sun

and the drying sand. The sky grew Caribbean.

The breakers chumbling in from the Adriatic,

the folded beach umbrellas like a Chinese army

waiting for the drop of their Emperor's sword.

Through the dirty glass of the hotel in Pescara

a mixture of spume and grime, a quiet

like an armistice, the clink, like small weapons, of cutlery,

the rumors darkening like smoke over Albania,

the palms on the sea-front ceaselessly tossing,

the traffic with slow headlights inching through rain.

And O it was lovely coming through the mountains,

castles on the far crests, the flashing olives

and the halted infantry of the pines. All the wars

were over or far away. But the young woman on the bus

past whose beauty the pines, the olives and the small castles swept

in the clarified window, and whose sadness I thought

was like a holiday resort-town in the rain,

the lights of her gray eyes like glistening traffic

whose name, she told me, was a mountain flower's

but one that was quite common in her country,

spoke softly as the drizzle on Pescara's shore-front

of Serbia and its sorrow, of the horrors she had seen

on the sidewalks of Kosovo, and how it was, all war,

the fault of the Jews. Yet she said it with calm eyes.

I learnt this later. I learnt it from the drizzle

and the car lights of Pescara lancing the dark

and the folded umbrellas, quiet as banners

of the long brown hair that bracketed her face.

Leon. Yehuda. Joseph. The war was their fault.

But it was lovely coming through the mountains

that they said were the Apennines when I asked their names.

    
II

to Luigi Sampietro

The tidal motion of refugees, not the flight of wild geese,

the faces in freight cars, haggard and coal-eyed,

particularly the peaked stare of children,

the huge bundles crossing bridges, axles creaking

as if joints and bones were audible, the dark stain

spreading on maps whose shapes dissolve their frontiers

the way that corpses melt in a lime-pit or

the bright mulch of autumn is trampled into mud,

and the smoke of a cypress signals Sachsenhausen,

those without trains, without mules or horses,

those who have the rocking chair and the sewing machine

heaped on a human cart, a wagon without horses

for horses have long since galloped out of their field

back to the mythology of mercy, back to the cone

of the orange steeple piercing clouds over the lindens

and the stone bells of Sunday over the cobbles,

those who rest their hands on the sides of the carts

as if they were the flanks of mules, and the women

with flint faces, with glazed cheekbones, with eyes

the color of duck-ponds glazed over with ice,

for whom the year has only one season, one sky:

that of the rooks flapping like torn umbrellas,

all have been reduced into a common language,

the homeless, the province-less, to the incredible memory

of apples and clean streams, and the sound of milk

filling the summer churns, where are you from,

what was your district, I know that lake, I know the beer,

and its inns, I believed in its mountains,

now there is a monstrous map that is called Nowhere

and that is where we're all headed, behind it

there is a view called the Province of Mercy,

where the only government is that of the apples

and the only army the wide banners of barley

and its farms are simple, and that is the vision

that narrows in the irises and the dying

and the tired whom we leave in ditches

before they stiffen and their brows go cold

as the stones that have broken our shoes,

as the clouds that grow ashen so quickly after dawn

over palm and poplar, in the deceitful sunrise

of this, your new century.

    
III

O Serbian sibyl, prophetess

peering between your curtains of brown hair

(or these parentheses), if I were a Jew,

you'd see me shuffling on the cobblestones

of some unpronounceable city, you could watch

my body crumble, like the long, trembling ash

of a cigarette in the hand of a scholar

in a sidewalk restaurant, you beauty

who had the name of a common mountain flower

that hides in a cleft of the rocks

on the white-haired ridges of Albania.

    
IV

Among ragged palms and pastel balconies,

this miracle also happened in Pescara,

by accident, or by coincident stars.

In the hotel lobby of a forgotten name

as mine will be forgotten by another, I

who was reading a paperback of the life of Nora,

J. Joyce's wife, from which there is now a film,

with a photo of the actress on the cover,

a film at the film festival in that city

with its furrowed bay by a long esplanade,