The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (46 page)

Andalusian idyll, and answer

and the moon's blank tambourine

and the drizzle's guitars

and the sunlit wires of the rain

the shawls and the used stars

and the ruined fountains.

    
IV

When we were boys coming home from the beach,

it used to be such a thing! The body would be singing

with salt, the sunlight hummed through the skin

and a fierce thirst made iced water

a gasping benediction, and in the plated heat,

stones scorched the soles, and the cored dove hid

in the heat-limp leaves, and we left the sand

to its mutterings, and the long, cool canoes.

Threescore and ten plus one past our allotment,

in the morning mirror, the disassembled man.

And all the pieces that go to make me up—

the detached front tooth from a lower denture

the thick fog I cannot pierce without my glasses

the shot of pain from a kidney

these piercings of acute mortality.

And your wife, day and night,

assembling your accoutrements

to endure another day on the sofa,

bathrobe, glasses, teeth, because

your hands were leaves in a gust

when the leaves are huge-veined, desiccated,

incapable of protest or applause.

To cedars, to the sea that cannot change its tune,

on rain-washed morning what shall I say then

to the panes reflecting the wet trees and clouds

as if they were storefronts and offices, and

in what voice, since I now hear changing voices?

The change of light on a pink plaster wall

is the change of a culture—how the light is seen,

how it is steady and seasonless in these islands

as opposed to the doomed and mortal sun of midsummer

or in the tightening circle of shadow in the bullring.

This is how a people look at death

and write a literature of gliding transience

as the sun loses its sight, singing of islands.

Sunrise then, the uncontaminated cobalt

of sky and sea. The hours idle, and I,

watching the heaving plumes of the palmistes

in the afternoon wind, I hear the dead sighing

that they are still too cold in the ochre earth

in the sun's sadness, to the caterpillar's accordion

and the ancient courtship of the turtle-doves.

Yellow-billed egret balanced on a black bull

its sheen so ebony rust shines through the coat

as the bamboos translate the threshing of the olives

as the olives the bamboo's calligraphy

a silvery twitter of a flock of fledglings

stuttering for rain, wires of a drizzle,

tinfoil of the afternoon sea and the dove's bassoon.

The house on the hill opposite—

blond beams criss-cross their shadows on gray stone,

finical, full of false confidence, then

a surge of happiness, inexplicable content,

like the light on a golden garden outside Florence,

afternoon wind resilvering the olives

and the sea's doves, white sails

and the fresh elation of dolphins

over the staghorn coral.

Cartagena, Guadalajara,

whose streets, if one eavesdropped,

would speak their demotic Castilian

if dust had not powdered the eucalyptus with silences

on the iron balcony's parenthesis

and the Aztec mask of Mercedes

on the tip of the tongue like a sparrow

dipping into the pool

and flicking its tail like a signature, a name

like the fluttering of wings in a birdbath—

Santiago de Compostela!

    
V

In a swift receding year, one summer in Spain,

when the lamb-ribs were exquisitely roasted on a pine-fire

your eyes were its coals, your tongue its leaping flame,

my Iberian sibyl, touch-timid Esperanza.

A river roared from its dam, the pines were sprinkled

with its spume that brought boys' cries on the wind

drifting to our picnic and beyond the bank

was the brown spire of the cathedral

as a rose went out in the ashes

and the sunshine cooled and the wind had an edge

when a roar in the pines and the dam would blend

on the Saturday in Spain, in what receding year?

11

    
I

The dialect of the scrub in the dry season

withers the flow of English. Things burn for days

without translation, with the heat

of the scorched pastures and their skeletal cows.

Every noun is a stump with its roots showing,

and the creole language rushes like weeds

until the entire island is overrun,

then the rain begins to come in paragraphs

and hazes this page, hazes the gray of islets,

the gray of eyes, the rainstorm's wild-haired beauty.

The first daybreak of rain, the crusted drought

broken in half like bread, the quiet trumpet mouth

of a rainbow and the wiry drizzle fighting

decease, half the year blowing out to sea

in hale, refreshing gusts, the withered lilies

drink with grateful mouths, and the first blackbird

of the new season announces itself on a bough

the hummingbird is reglistened drilling

the pierced hedges, my small shaft to your heart,

my emerald arrow: A crowd crosses a bridge

from Canaries to the Ponte Vecchio, from

Piaille to Pescara, and a volley of blackbirds

fans over Venice or the broken pier of Choiseul,

and love is as wide as the span of my open palm

for frontiers that read like one country,

one map of affection that closes around my pen.

I had forgotten the benediction of rain

edged with sunlight, the prayers of dripping leaves

and the cat testing the edge of the season

with careful paw. And I have nothing more

to write about than gratitude. For
la mer
,

soleil-là
, the bow of the
arc-en-ciel

and the archery of blackbirds from its

radiant bow. The rest of the year is rain.

    
II

“There was a beautiful rain this morning.”

“I was asleep.”

                        He stroked her forehead.

She smiled at him, then laughed as she kept yawning.

“It was lovely rain.” But I thought of the dead

I know. The sun shone through the rain

and it was lovely.

                        “I'm sure,” she said.

There were so many names the rain recited:

Alan, Joseph and Claude and Charles and Roddy.

The sunlight came through the rain and the drizzle shone

as it had done before for everybody.

For John and Inge, Devindra and Hamilton.

“Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon,”

wrote Edward Thomas. Her eyes closed in my arms,

but it was sleep. She was asleep again,

while the bright rain moved from Massade to Monchy.

Sometimes I stretch out, or you stretch out your hand,

and we lock palms; our criss-crossed histories join

and two maps fit. Bays, boundaries, rivers, roads,

one country, one warm island. Is that noise rain

on the hot roof, is it sweeping out to sea

by the stones and shells of the almond cemetery?

    
III

The road is wet, the leaves wet, but the sun inching,

and always the astonishment: in March?

This blustery, this gray? The waves chopping

and circling and ramming into one another

like sheep in a maddened pen from a whiff of wolf,

or white mares, bug-eyed from the lightning's whip,

and, if they could, whinnying. But the light will win.

The sun fought with the rain in the leaves and won;

then the rain came back and it was finer out to sea.

A drizzle blurred the promontories evenly

and now the manchineels and acacias sparkled

with the new rain and the cows' hides darkened

as the horses dipped their heads and shook their manes,

and over the horizon the faint arc

of an almost imperceptible bow appeared

then dimmed across the channel towards Martinique.

This miracle was usual for the season.

“The sun came out just for you,” he said.

And it was true. The light entered her forehead

and blazoned her difference there.

The pastures were beaded, roofs shone on the hills,

a sloop was working its way against huge clouds

as patches of sunlight widened with a new zeal

towards detachment, towards simplicity.

Who said that they were lying side by side,

the cupped spoon of her torso in his own

in the striped shadows of midafternoon?

    
IV

The doors are open, the house breathes and I feel

a balm so heavy and a benediction

so weightless that the past is just blue air

and cobalt motion lanced with emerald

and sail-flecks and the dove's continuous complaint

about repletion, its swollen note of gratitude—

all incantation is the monody of thanks

to the sky's motionless or moving altars,

even to the faint drone of that silver insect

that is the morning plane over Martinique,

while, take this for what you will, the frangipani

that, for dry months, contorted, crucified

in impotence or barrenness, endured, has come

with pale pink petals and blades of olive leaves,

parable of my loin-longing, my silver age.

From the salt brightness of my balcony

I look across to the abandoned fort;

no History left, just natural history,

as a cloud's shadow subtilizes thought.

On a sloped meadow lifted by the light,

the Hessians spun like blossoms from the immortelle,

the tattered pennons of the sea-almond fluttered

to the spray-white detonations of the lilac

against blue the hue of a grenadier, dried pods

of the flamboyant rattle their sabers

and a mare's whinny across the parched pastures

launches white scuds of sails across the channel,

the race of a schooner launched in a canal.

A gray sky trawls its silver wires of rain;

these are the subtleties of the noon sea:

lime, emerald, lilac, cobalt, ultramarine.

12

    
I

Prodigal, what were your wanderings about?

The smoke of homecoming, the smoke of departure.

The earth grew music and the tubers sprouted

to Sesenne's singing, rain-water, fresh patois

in a clay carafe, a clear spring in the ferns,

and pure things took root like the sweet-potato vine.

Over the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew,

as the sun turns into a cipher from a green flash,

clouds crumble like cities, the embers of Carthage;

any man without a history stands in nettles

and no butterflies console him, like surrendering flags,

does he, still a child, long for battles and castles

from the books of his beginning, in a hieratic language

he will never inherit, but one in which he writes

“Over the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew,”

his whole life a language awaiting translation?

Since I am what I am, how was I made?

To ascribe complexion to the intellect

is not an insult, since it takes its plaid

like the invaluable lizard from its background,

and if our work is piebald mimicry

then virtue lies in its variety

to be adept. On the warm stones of Florence

I subtly alter to a Florentine

till the sun passes, in London

I am pierced by fog, and shaken from reflection

in Venice, a printed page in the sun

on which a cabbage-white unfolds, a bookmark.

To break through veils like spiders' webs,

crack carapaces like a day-moth and achieve

a clarified frenzy and feel the blood settle

like a brown afternoon stream in River Doree

is what I pulsed for in my brain and wrist

for the drifting benediction of a drizzle

drying on this page like asphalt, for peace that passes

like a changing cloud, to a hawk's slow pivot.

    
II

In the vale of Santa Cruz I look to the hills.

The white flowers have the fury of battle,

they lay siege to the mountains, for war

there is the tumult of the white ravines,

and the cascade's assault; they bow their plumes,

Queen Anne's lace, bougainvillea, orchid and oleander,

and they are as white as arrested avalanches,

angry and Alpine, their petals blur into

a white gust from the Matterhorn or the streets of Zermatt.

Both worlds are welded, they were seamed by delight.

Santa Cruz, in spring. Deep hills with blue clefts.

I have come back for the white egrets

feeding in a flock on the lawn, darting their bills

in that finical stride, gawkily elegant,

then suddenly but leisurely sailing

to settle, but not too far off, like angels.

    
III

I wake at sunrise to angelic screams.

And time is measuring my grandchildren's cries

and time outpaces the sepia water

of the racing creek, time takes its leisure, cunning

in the blocked hollows of the pool, the elephantine stones

in the leaf-marked lagoon, time sails

with the soundless buzzard over the smoking hills

and the clouds that fray and change