The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (47 page)

and time waits very quiet between the mountains

and the brown tracks in the valleys of the Northern Range,

a cover of overhanging bamboo, in Maraval

where, if the bed were steeper, a brown stream races

or tries to, pooling in rocks, with great avail

for me at least, or where a range's blues

and indigo over which wide hawks sail

their shadows on the wells of Santa Cruz,

dark benedictions on the brook's muttering shale,

and the horses are slowly plunging their manes

as they climb up from the paved-with-lilies pond,

so much mythology in their unharnessed necks!

These little things take root as I add my praise

to the huge lawn at the back of the house, a field,

a bright, unaltered meadow, a small savannah

for cries and bicycles and joy-crazed dogs

bolting after pedaling boys, the crescent ghost

of the new moon showing and on the thick slopes

this forest like green billowing smoke

pierced by the flame petals of the immortelle.

    
IV

Petals of the flame tree against ice-cream walls

and the arches across the park with its tacit fountain,

the old idlers on the benches, this is the prose

that spreads like the shade of an immortal banyan

in front of the library, the bulk that darkens

the violin of twilight when traffic has vanished

and nearly over also the colonial regime when the wharves

cradled the rocking schooners of our boyhood to

the echo of vespers in the alien cathedral.

In the hot green silence a dragonfly's drone

crossing the scorched hill to the shade of the cedars

and spiced laurels, the
lauriers canelles
,

the word itself lifting the plurals of its leaves,

from the hot ground, from this page, the singeing smells.

How simple to write this after you have gone,

that your death that afternoon had the same ease

as stopping at the side of the road under the trees

to buy cassava bread that comes in two sorts,

sweet and unsweetened, from the huge cauldron,

on the road between Soufrière and Canaries.

The heat collects in the depths between the ridges

and the high hawks circle in the gathering haze;

like consonants round a vowel, insistent midges

hum round a noun's hexagon, and the hornet's house.

Delve in the hot, still valley of Soufrière,

the black, baking asphalt and its hedges dripping shade

and here is the ultimate nullity despite the moil

of the churning vegetation. The small church

hidden in leaves. In midafternoon, the halt—

then dart of a quizzical lizard across the road.

18

    
I

Grass, bleached to straw on the precipice of Les Cayes,

running in the blue and green wind of the Trade,

a small church hidden in a grove past Soufriére,

hot dasheen and purpling pomme arac,

and heavy cattle in a pasture, and the repetition

of patois prayers by the shallows of Troumassee,

and there are still her eyes waiting for the small lights

that bring them to life, in which are reflected

the gold glints of labels in the Folies-Bergère bar

and the rust and orange of an April Glory cedar,

the leaves falling like curses from the
gommier maudit
,

a gull plucking fish from the shallows,

in the distance, the hump of a hazed mountain,

the ochreing meadows and the continuous cresting

of combers coming in, leaves spinning in the breeze

and the spray steadily spuming, the jets of bougainvillea,

all these must mold her cheekbones and a mouth

that says, “I come from Mon Repos,” from Saltibus,

from the curve of the road entering Canaries

and from the white nights of an insomniac Atlantic

that toss on the reefs of Praslin, that made me.

O blessed pivot that makes me a palm!

A silent exclamation at the cliff's edge

around whom the horizon silently spins!

What thuds against the hull, butting with such force?

Angels are gliding underneath the keel.

    
II

Time, that gnaws at bronze lions and dolphins

that shrivels fountains, had exhausted him;

a cupola in Milan exhaled him like incense,

Abruzzi devoured him, Firenze spat him out,

Rome chewed his arm and flung it over her shoulder

for the rats in the catacombs; Rome took his empty eyes

from the sockets of the Colosseum. Italy ate him.

Its bats at vespers navigated her columns

with an ancient elation, a hand in San Marco's font

aspersed him with foul canal water, then bells

tossed their heads like bulls, and their joy

rattled the campaniles, as innumerable pigeons

settled on the square of his forehead, his kidneys

were served in a modest hotel in Pescara,

a fish mimicked his skeleton in salty Amalfi,

until after a while there was nothing left of him

except this: a name cut on a wall that soon

from the grime of indifference became indecipherable.

    
III

We were headed steadily into the open sea.

Immeasurable and unplummetable fathoms

too deep for sounding or for any anchor,

the waves quick-running, crests, we were between

the pale blue phantoms of Martinique and Saint Vincent

on the iron rim of the ringing horizon;

the farther we went out, the white bow drumming,

plunging and shearing spray, the wider my fear,

the whiter my spume-shot cowardice, as the peaks

receded, rooted on their separating world,

diminishing in the idea of home, but still the prow

pressed stubbornly through the gulfs and the helmsman

kept nodding in their direction through the glass

between the front deck and the wheel, their direction

meaning what we could not see but he knew was there

from talking on the radio to the other boat

that lay ahead of us towards which we plunged

and droned, a white slip of another smaller cruiser,

convinced by his smiling that we would breach them soon.

“Dolphins,” the steersman said. “You will see them playing,”

but this was widening into mania, there were only

the crests that looked to their leaping, no fins,

no arching backs, no sudden frieze, no school today,

but the young captain kept on smiling, I had never

seen such belief in legend, and then, a fin-hint!

not a crest, and then splaying open under the keel

and racing with the bow, the legend broke water

and was reborn, her screams of joy

and my heart drumming harder, and the pale blue islands

were no longer phantom outlines, and the elate spray

slapped our faces with joy, and everything came

back as it was between the other islets, but

those with our own names, sometimes a fin

shot up, sometimes a back arched and reentered

the racily running waves under which they glanced,

I saw their wet brown bodies gunning seaward,

more brown than golden despite the name “dorado,”

but I guess in the wet light their skins shone

too raw, too quiet to be miraculous,

too strange to quiet my fear, the skittering fish

from the first line of the open page, held

and held until the school was lost, the prodigal's home

was the horizon while my own peaks

loomed so inconsolably again, the roads, the roofs

of Soufrière in the wet sunlight. I watched them come.

    
IV

I had gaped in anticipation of an emblem

carved at a fountain's pediment from another sea

and when the dolphins showed up and I saw them

they arched the way thoughts rise from memory.

They shot out of the glacial swell like skiers

hurtling themselves out of that Alpine surf

with its own crests and plungings, spuming slopes

from which the dolphins seraphically soared

to the harps of ringing wires and humming ropes,

to which my heart clung and those finished hopes

that I would see you again, my twin, “my dolphin.”

And yet elation drove the dolphins' course

as if both from and to you, their joy was ours.

And had there been a prophecy that said: “Wait!

On a day of great delight you will see dolphins.”

Or, in the ashes and embers of a wrecked sunset

the same voice, falling as quietly as a flag, said,

before the constellations arranged their chaos,

“Those drifting cinders are angels, see how they soar,”

I would not have believed in them, being too old

and skeptical from the fury of one life's

determined benedictions, but they are here.

Angels and dolphins. The second, first.

And always certainly, steadily, on the bright rim

of the world, getting no nearer or nearer, the more

the bow's wedge shuddered towards it, prodigal,

that line of light that shines from the other shore.

FROM

White Egrets

(2010)

1

The chessmen are as rigid on their chessboard

as those life-sized terra-cotta warriors whose vows

to their emperor with bridle, shield and sword

were sworn by a chorus that has lost its voice;

no echo in that astonishing excavation.

Each soldier gave an oath, each gave his word

to die for his emperor, his clan, his nation,

to become a chess piece, breathlessly erect

in shade or crossing sunlight, without hours—

from clay to clay and odorlessly strict.

If vows were visible they might see ours

as changeless chessmen in the changing light

on the lawn outside where bannered breakers toss

and the palms gust with music that is time's

above the chessmen's silence. Motion brings loss.

A sable blackbird twitters in the limes.

2

Your two cats squat, heraldic sphinxes, with such

desert indifference, such “who-the-hell-are-you?” calm,

they rise and stride away leisurely from your touch,

waiting for you only. To be cradled in one arm,

belly turned upward to be stroked by a brush

tugging burrs from their fur, eyes slitted

in ecstasy. The January sun spreads its balm

on earth's upturned belly, shadows that have always fitted

their shapes, re-fit them. Breakers spread welcome.

Accept it. Watch how spray will burst

like a cat scrambling up the side of a wall,

gripping, sliding, surrendering; how, at first,

its claws hook then slip with a quickening fall

to the lace-rocked foam. That is the heart, coming home,

trying to fasten on everything it moved from,

how salted things only increase its thirst.

3

This was my early war, the bellowing quarrels,

at the pitch of noon, of men moving cargoes

while gulls screeched their monotonous vowels

in complex curses without coming to blows;

muscular men swirling codfish barrels

and heaving rice bags, who had stunted nicknames,

who could, one-handed, hoist phenomenal rolls

of wire, hoist flapping galvanize with both arms

to pitch it into the hold while hooks and winches

swung nearby. At lunch they ate in the shade

of mountainous freight bound with knots and cinches,

ignoring the gulls with their boulders of bread.

Then one would be terribly injured, one lose a leg

to rum and diabetes. You would watch him shrink

into his nickname, not too proud to beg,

who would roar like a lorry revving in the prime of his drink.

4   WHITE EGRETS

    
I

Cautious of time's light and how often it will allow

the morning shadows to lengthen across the lawn

the stalking egrets to wriggle their beaks and swallow

when you, not they, or you and they, are gone;

for clattering parrots to launch their fleet at sunrise

for April to ignite the African violet

in the drumming world that dampens your tired eyes

behind two clouding lenses, sunrise, sunset,

the quiet ravages of diabetes.

Accept it all with level sentences

with sculpted settlement that sets each stanza,

learn how the bright lawn puts up no defenses

against the egret's stabbing questions and the night's answer.

    
II

The elegance of those white, orange-billed egrets,

each like a stalking ewer, the thick olive trees,

cedars consoling a stream that roars torrentially

in the wet season; into that peace

beyond desires and beyond regrets,

at which I may arrive eventually,

whose palms droop in the sun like palanquins

with tigerish shadows under them. They shall

be there after my shadow passes with all its sins

into a green thicket of oblivion,

with the rising and setting of a hundred suns

over Santa Cruz Valley when I loved in vain.

    
III

I watch the huge trees tossing at the edge of the lawn

like a heaving sea without crests, the bamboos plunge

their necks like roped horses as yellow leaves, torn

from the whipping branches, turn to an avalanche;

all this before the rain scarily pours from the burst,