The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (45 page)

met the black-haired Irish beauty playing her

and told her that and I showed her the book

to our mutual astonishment, also her friend's

another young Irishwoman with red hair,

her beauty's guardian, I guessed, and I made

of this something more; oracular

and fated, although all it meant

was that we were both here at the festival,

but it was more. Perhaps. I liked to believe

that she was Nora, and not that I was Joyce,

but to be reading the paper with her picture

in the basic, salty furniture of the lobby

while the seaside light made her skin manifest

with Irishness, with none of Nora's fairness

but with her accent, seemed to me a miracle

of which as evidence of that epiphany

while the rain stopped on the shining esplanade,

I have in her warm hand untouched by fame,

like the scrawl of seaweed on unprinted strand,

the lilting whisper of her signature.

4

    
I

O Genoan, I come as the last line of where you began,

to the port whose wharf holds long shadows and silence,

under the weeds of the prow, nodding and riding with

the wavering map of America. Droplets of oil

conjugate themselves into rainbows, the greased rag

blurs the portholes and the moorings sway

until Genoa glides past, a fog of spires

absorbing the gull's return. Hands close like wings

in the aisles of the cathedral. The palms close

and the psalms and the choir's O

widens and deepens in the wave's trough,

in the interminable metronome, grave and cradle,

until over the crest there is a fresher crest,

against preliminary reefs, the surf's exploding light!

Lice sing in the timber and the sponges open.

Seaside hotels with their salt balconies

whose iron flowers rust with artifice

facing the pompous, cavernous railway station

utilitarian monument of the Fascists;

down the serrated summer coast from Nice

to Genoa, the sea's tinfoil striations

are close to home. The cedar's agitation

repeats the rustling of reversible almonds,

the cheek warmed by a freshly ironed sky;

scent of scorched grass, and, through the limp leaves—

the Mediterranean doing its laundry.

Then somewhere, from the window of your eye,

a flag lifts a corner of the afternoon,

as an iron swarm of Vespas hurtles by

and the Discoverer's statue fades round the turn.

All these remembered women melt into one,

when my small words, like sails, must leave their haven:

the cliffs of shoulders burnt brown by the sun,

and wild jet hair, the banner of the raven.

In Genoa I loved our balcony. Below me,

the white stone statue of the Admiral

kept quiet in the navigating traffic,

the open gate to the Mediterranean, the sea—

with the same swell that heaved the caravel's sigh

at the remorseful future that lay ahead—

in the stone-flagged park close to the railway station.

Conglomerate masonry, shaft-light on brick

in the old Quarter, squeaking pulleys

lifting the sails of laundry across the gulf

of inconsolable alleys, the pigeon's dandruff

powdering the hair and shoulders of creased statues

who forget what they were famous for—

the whitewashed Admiral also. There is no rest for

the insomnia of sculptures, the snow's nightmare,

the smell of history I carry in my clothes

like smoke, the smell of a washed street in Pescara,

the sun-on-stone smell of the hills of Tuscany,

flowers in the weed between the rocks, wild flowers

the train passing their hosannas on the slopes,

and the soul, in exile, sliding into its station—

into History, the Muse of shutters and cabinets,

past the closed cathedral of the gramophone.

    
II

Envy of statues; this is how it grew:

every day in Milan, en route to class,

I passed my rigid, immortal friend, the General,

on his morose green horse, still there on weekends.

The wars were over but he would not dismount.

Had he died, catapulted in some charge

in some euphonious battle? The bronze charger

was lathered, streaked with sweat, in the summer sun.

We had no such memorials on the island.

Our only cavalry were the charging waves,

pluming with spume, and tossing plunging necks.

Who knows what war he fought in and whose shot

tumbled his whinnying steed? Envy of fountains.

Poor hero on his island in the swirl of traffic,

denied the solace of an umbrageous linden

or chestnut with bright medals through its leaves.

Envy of columns. Calm. Envy of bells.

Peace widened the Sunday avenue in Milan.

Left-handed light at morning on the square,

the Duomo with long shadows where clamoring bells

shake exaltation from blue, virginal air,

squaring off corners, de Chirico parallels—

and where the soundlessly snorting, big-balled horse

whose head, lowered and drooping, means the death

of its rider, holds a far longer breath, longer

than ours in our traffic island.

The widening love of Italy growing stronger

against my will with sunlight in Milan …

For we still expect presences, no matter where—

to sit again at a table watching the luminous clatter

of the great mall in Milan; there! was that him,

Joseph in an olive raincoat, like a leaf

on a clear stream with a crowd of leaves

from the edge to the center and sinking into them?

    
III

Absence's emblem, the solid specter of your grief,

yes, you can still see his tonsure, his ascetic halo,

till somewhere bars it, a hat or a sign, then

the mall fills with phantoms serenely hurrying

to the same exit the arched doorways of a sunlight

almost celestial, I silently shout their names

but I am inaudible, to them, since they outnumber me,

to them I am the phantom and they are the real ones,

their names still claiming them over the noise

of waiters clearing the tables of their possessions,

of the crumbs of bread and the glasses of recent blood

still clouded with their one breath, the breath

that I too will leave in a water-glass to condense

when I join them following the pale tonsure

of a moon that fades into the glare of the dawn

outside the intricate and immense cathedral

and our terrestrial traffic; the changing light.

Within the circumference of the cathedral

and its immense and bustling piazza

and a long mall of cafés and shops, I saw him,

because I needed to; because a lengthening absence

requires its apparition, lost, then returned again

by the frothing crowd, I was not ready

for the stone-webbed and incantation-hallowed

intricacies of the altars, an architecture

like frozen fury, demanding a surrendering awe.

    
IV

I wanted to be able to write: “There is nothing like it,

to walk down the Via Veneto before sunrise.”

And now, you think: he is going to describe it.

I am going to describe the benediction of June,

the gray cool spring air, its edges at
prima luce
,

too early for coffee from the hotel

and from the locked grids of last night's cafés,

the dew as wet as Pescara's the year before,

and the canvas umbrellas folded in their scabbards,

the reason being the difference in travel-time,

the difference being the night clerk yawning at the end

of his vigil, and the surly, early waiter,

then the long, unechoing empty street

that isn't as quiet as he had imagined,

with traffic building, the spiky palms

outside the American Embassy and two policemen

because of the threat of terrorists, the huge trees

against the pale buildings, the banks and arches

with their dirty flags; the lights still on

in certain buildings as the widening light

palely washed their façades, but the stillness

exactly like Gros Ilet's, the sea and the village,

if not the vermilion buses under the trees

their lights still on, there, here it comes, the light

out of pearl, out of Piero della Francesca,

(you could tell he would mention a painter),

then slowly the whole fresco with the spring's gold

on Ministerio del Lavoro e delle Politiche Sociali

at whose gate a man came out and examined me

as I copied the name down, a bald young man

in an orange windbreaker who scowled

because of my color and the terrorists,

and because my village was unimportantly beautiful

unlike his city and the Via Veneto,

its curved façades gamboge and ochre, gray stone,

the unnamed trees forming a gentle tunnel

over the buses, their lamps now out, vermilion, orange,

and what was missing was the smell of the sea

in the early morning on the small embankment,

but the palms as still in the dawn's docile tissue

Bus No. 63 L 90 Pugliese

whereas no echo in the name Gros Ilet,

no literature, no history, at least until now.

Bus 116, lights on. On the Via Veneto.

Glides, like a fish, softly, or a turning leaf.

I lived in two villages: Greenwich and Gros Ilet,

and loved both almost equally. One had the sea,

gray morning light along the waking water,

the other a great river, and if they asked

what country I was from I'd say, “The light

of that tree-lined sunrise down the Via Veneto.”

9

    
I

I lay on the bed near the balcony in Guadalajara

and watched the afternoon wind stiffen the leaves.

Later: dusty fields under parched lilac mountains

and clumps of what must have been eucalyptus

by the peeling skin of their barks. I saw your face,

I saw your flesh in theirs, my suffering brother;

jacaranda over the streets, all looking broken,

as if all Mexico had this film of dust,

and between trees dotting the plain, fog,

thick as your clogged breath, shrouding the ranges

of, possibly, Santa de Something. I read this.

March 11. 8:35 a.m. Guadalajara, Saturday.

Roddy. Toronto. Cremated today.

The streets and trees of Mexico covered with ash.

Your soul, my twin, keeps fluttering in my head,

a hummingbird, bewildered by the rafters,

barred by a pane that shows a lucent heaven.

The maid sings behind the house,

with wooden clips in her teeth,

she rips down laundry like an avenging angel

and the hillside surges, sailing. Roddy.

Where are you this bright afternoon? I

am watching a soccer match listlessly

on TV, as you did sunk deep in the socket of the sofa,

your head shrunken, your eyes wet

and every exchange an ordeal.

    
II

I carry a small white city in my head,

one with its avenues of withered flowers,

with no sound of traffic but the surf,

no lights at dusk on the short street

where my brother and our mother live now

at the one address, so many are their neighbors!

Make room for the accommodation of the dead,

their mounds that multiply by the furrowing sea,

not in the torch-lit catacombs of your head

but by the almond-bright, spume-blown cemetery.

What was our war, veteran of threescore years and ten?

To save the salt light of the island

to protect and exalt its small people

to sit enthroned to a clicking scissors

watching the hot road and the blue flowers across it

and behind the hedge soft blue mountains

and the barber with the face of a boxer

say one who loves his craft more than a victory

not like that arrogantly tilted tailor of Moroni's

assessing you with the eyes of his scissors.

    
III

The day, with all its pain ahead, is yours.

The ceaseless creasing of the morning sea,

the fluttering gamboge cedar leaves allegro,

the rods of the yawing branches trolling the breeze,

the rusted meadows, the wind-whitened grass,

the coos of the stone-colored ground doves on the road,

the echo of benediction on a house—

its rooms of pain, its veranda of remorse

when joy lanced through its open-hearted doors

like a hummingbird out to the garden and the pool

in which the sky has fallen. These are all yours,

and pain has made them brighter as absence does

after a death, as the light heals the grass.

And the twig-brown lizard scuttles up its branch

like fingers on the struts of a guitar.

I hear the detonations of agave,

the stuttering outbursts of bougainvillea,

I see the acacia's bonfire, the begonia's bayonets,

and the tamarind's thorns and the broadsides of clouds from the calabash

and the cedars fluttering their white flags of surrender

and the flame trees' siege of the fort.

I saw black bulls, horns lowered, galloping, goring the mist

that rose, unshrouding the hillocks of Santa Cruz

and the olives of Esperanza,