The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (49 page)

in those fierce days still beats across my face

like a startled branch or a dove or some other bird's.

My memory's nostrils prick at these odors,

of burnt concrete, or tar, the smell of words

drying like kelp in a rock-pool to a door's

hinges opening like a heart. Gulls rise

like screeching gossips past the hotel windows

as a bosoming wave unbuttons her white bodice.

    
VI

There never really was a “we” or “ours”;

whatever each enjoyed was separate:

a drizzle's drift, the slant of arrowing showers

on a hot road, on roofs, made them elate,

but with a joy defined by separation—

the languor of a glittering afternoon

when a bay's bowl is full of glittering coins,

or a white road is paved by the full moon,

the same delight that separates them joins

without conversion, but close to happiness

in accidental gusts that made the leaves

agree unanimously with one green yes,

yet made a dark division of their lives.

The clouds shone altar-white on moonlit nights;

he was the stubborn, sacrificial victim

of his own hopes, like fireflies whose lights

are like false stars that, with the daylight, dim.

    
VII

There was no “affair,” it was all one-sided.

Bats fretted the treetops then pitched like darts

from the pines. At lunch an invisible presence presided

over the wines and salads as, in fits and starts,

a sinuous organ sobbed to the Bay of the Saracens

flecked with gulls' feathers or the sails of yachts,

yet balance and perfection made no sense.

By the open-air table where I sat alone

a flock of chattering girls passed, premature sirens

fleeing like pipers from the sudden thought of a stone.

Emerald ducks paddled and stabbed their bills

in the cool dark well sacred to Arethusa.

I wondered in the inching sun how it was known

to the ferry's horn, the pines, the Bay's azure hills

and the jeering screaming girls that I would lose her

or an accordion's meandering sob and moan

through the coiled, serpentine alleys of Siracusa.

    
VIII

How come, despite all this, you never mention old age,

you grizzled satyr with your bristling sea urchin beard,

and a head grown almost as white as this page,

as white cedar flowers shake from the
gommier maudit
,

the cursed cedar, like vowels from your pen? Why?

I'll tell you what they think: you're too old to be

shaken by such a lissom young woman, to need her

in spite of your scarred trunk and trembling hand,

your head rustles with thoughts of her like the cedar

in March, you blaze in her praise like a sea-almond,

the crab scrawls your letters then hides them,

certain that she would never understand.

How boring the love of others is, isn't it, Reader?

This page, touched by the sun's declining arc,

sighs with the same whinge, the Sonnets and Petrarch.

    
IX

What if all this passion is out of proportion to its subject?

An average beauty, magnified to deific, demonic

stature by the fury of intellect,

a flat-faced girl with slanted eyes and a narrow

waist, and a country lilt to her voice,

that she should infect your day to the very marrow,

to hate the common light and its simple joys?

Where does this sickness come from, because it is

sickness, this conversion of the simplest action

to an ordeal, this hatred of simple delight

in others, of benches in the empty park?

Only her suffering will bring you satisfaction,

old man in the dimming world, only joy is the mark

and silence in the stricken streets where no dogs bark.

I watch them accumulating my errors

steadily repeated as the waves as the sea's

decline, and shadows on the high terrace

facing Syracuse; cafés flare in the dark.

    
X

Why does she precede every journey, waiting by

the side of the road, sometimes, sometimes under

a flowering tree, seated on a culvert, stubbornly

wearing the same dress, as close or far as thunder

curling up a mountain? See the mat of sunlight

under that cedar? There she is! Look how the hedges

above Recanati blaze like a line of verse,

or how the palm or the pine tree blazon their edges

above where she waits in the dusk, lifting no arm

in greeting, her gaze looking through you.

How did she know where I was going, so calm

in her unacknowledging patience, the fringe

of her russet locks as her figure recedes

towards our inevitable meeting? She can singe

my memory in advance, so I go where she leads.

    
XI

So the moths came, responding to invitations

to my beloved's funeral, she whom I had killed

with my caustic jealousy, my commonplace love-hatred,

my pathetic patience, my impotent impatience,

my infatuation or whatever it's called;

and a cortège of caterpillars too gaily dressed for such

a solemn occasion adding some gaiety to it

and the usual fanning lighthearted butterflies who have never

taken any death seriously, then also, an

anachronistic blackbird in a frock coat and Homburg

representing some ministry, undoubtedly Culture,

then a white guy I didn't know, some
l'autre boug
,

then the usual, stooping ecumenical vulture

who pressed his card on me. All of them had known her,

then a patient deputation of worms. All sympathized

but all hoped, like me, that I had outgrown her,

all knew how much her beauty had been prized.

10   IN ITALY

for Paola

    
I

The day, gray. The mood: slate. Too overcast to swim,

unless a strong sun emerges; which it may.

Our hands, like ants, keep building libraries, storing leaves

and riddling parchment; our books are tombstones, every poem a hymn.

And that honey-natured, gifted Italian girl

gone from the leaves of
Poesia
, gone from the wet stones

of Rimini as the ants keep scribbling, the crabs keep scuttering, and

the tombstones thicken. She was one of the lovely ones,

lovely in laughter, musical in speech,

so gentle in disposition! Vanished like drying sand,

like the fast shadow of the wind on a sunlit beach,

a crab halts and then continues. Like this ant; this hand.

    
II

He had seemed negligible but her death

afflicted him with wisdom; now he acquired

authority from pain; you could hear his breath

and the littlest gesture he made was profoundly tired.

Maybe that was what she left him, a strange,

angry diffidence beyond his surrender

and a devotion deeper than his work desired,

for a beauty that had seemed so out of range

of the dull cannon thud that would send her

sprawling on the bedroom carpet; more so

than being merely a widower; they were to be married.

Now she lay white as tousled marble, the classical torso

of a goddess whose brief visit delighted earth.

    
III

The pine flung its net to snare the evening swallows

back to its branches, their flight was brief as bats',

the yachts lit up and brought Siracusa close,

a broken music drifted from the ferry boats.

At dusk the soul rocks in its homesickness,

in the orange hour its silhouette is a palm

spiky as a sea urchin against the sky

beginning to pulse with stars, the open psalm

of a huge cloud slowly absorbed its dye.

Swifts practiced their archery and the day's fire

roared over Carthage, over Alexandria,

all of the cities were embers in the sun's empire,

and the night in its blindness would choose a

girl with greater vision, Santa Lucia,

patroness of palm and pine tree whose

alphabet was the swallows of Syracuse.

for Giuseppe Cicchelero

    
IV

Roads shouldered by enclosing walls with narrow

cobbled tracks for streets, those hill towns with their

stamp-sized squares and a sea pinned by the arrow

of a quivering horizon, with names that never wither

for centuries and shadows that are the dial of time. Light

older than wine and a cloud like a tablecloth

spread for lunch under the leaves. I have come this late

to Italy, but better now, perhaps, than in youth

that is never satisfied, whose joys are treacherous,

while my hair rhymes with those far crests, and the bells

of the hilltop towers number my errors,

because we are never where we are, but somewhere else,

even in Italy. This is the bearable truth

of old age; but count your benedictions: those fields

of sunflowers, the torn light on the hills, the haze

of the unheard Adriatic, while the day still hopes

for possibility, cloud shadows racing the slopes.

    
V

Those hillsides ridged with ramparts and bell towers,

the crests of olives, those wheat-harvested slopes

through glittering aspens, those meadows of sunflower

with luncheon napkins like the miters of popes,

lanes with long shadows, wide-open retreats

guarded by leaping cypresses, shade-splashed ochre

walls, then the towns themselves with streets

as close as chain-mail, named after some mediocre

saint, coiling as one road down to the hazed sea.

All of those little ports, all named for saints,

redeem the sadness that was Sicily

and the stupidity of innocence.

It is like Sicilian light but not the same

sun or my shadow, a bitterness like a loss.

Drink of its bitterness to forget her name,

that is the mercy oblivion allows.

    
VI

The blue windows, the lemon-colored counterpane,

the knowing that the sea is behind the avenue

with balconies and bicycles, that the gelid traffic

mixes its fumes with coffee-transient interiors,

transient bedsheets, and the transient view

of sea-salted hotels with spiky palms,

in spite of which summer is serious,

since there is inevitably a farewell to arms:

to the storm-haired beauty who will disappear.

The shifted absence of your axis, love

wobbles on your body's pivot, to the carriage's

shudder as it glides past the roofs and beaches

of the Ligurian coast. Things lose their balance

and totter from the small blows of memory.

You wait for revelations, for leaping dolphins,

for nightingales to loosen their knotted throats,

for the bell in the tower to absolve your sins

like the furled sails of the homecoming boats.

    
VII

As your red hair moved through Leopardi's house,

it was with its modest, flameless fire, Maria.

We toured its rooms in awe of such suffering, whose

stairs constricted its walls, whose climbing aria

was Silvia and solitude; under dark beams,

passing bound volumes in funereal file,

we heard of the great poet's crippled dreams

from our Caravaggio guide and her white smile.

You seemed wrong for the crowd: separate, distinct,

you belonged to the spring-freckled hills outside

Recanati. Your pert, tanned body wrinkled

under its floral print, your look said:

“Why must they feel that love is a great sorrow?

Don't sparrows dart with joy around this house,

though more lugubrious pilgrims come tomorrow?”

Then I looked from the window of his house

and saw, assembled in the little square,

knights ranked to serve the banner of red hair,

their halberds raised, on half a hundred horse.

    
VIII

Also in Italy I'd never seen anywhere quite

like it—these squares of harvested wheat, panels of

a green crop, maybe corn, tilled hills in rolling light,

dotted with olive and the cypress that I love,

a bleached river-bed and fields of always surprising

sunflowers around Urbino, like nothing I had read,

small hills gently declining then gently rising,

and above the rushing asphalt the window said:

“You have seen Umbria, admired Tuscany,

and gaped at the width of the harbor at Genoa,

now I show you an open secret, do you know any

landscape as lovely as this, do you know a

drive as blest as this one?” I said: “Monterey.

We stopped the car, too, to take in the light,

the breakers, juniper, pine, and the unfolding skies

of the coast. If the grain flung by the sower

in the card brings such astonishment, such a sure

harvest, I have seen them with my own eyes.”

    
IX

Even this far now from that compact, modest hotel,

white walls of summer, tinkle of the ice-cream cart,

baking bicycle path and mineral-water bottle,

another beach postcard stamps itself on my heart;

even this far, weeks later, the itch of sand,

the Adriatic sticks to my back, plating it