The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (50 page)

with graying salt, bringing irascible mothers and

their rubber-bright children and hating it

at first, the rented chairs, while a hundred

identical iron umbrellas emphasize the size

of the holiday coast and the invincible dread

of families, where each shadow is an oasis,

and vanilla-colored girls rub cream on their thighs

in an advertisement Italy, a plastic happiness

that brought actual content. In the cool lobby,

the elderly idle. I was now one of them.

Studying the slow, humped tourists was my only hobby,

racked now by a whimsical bladder and terrible phlegm.

    
X

I am astonished at the sunflowers spinning

in huge green meadows above the indigo sea,

amazed at their aureate silence, though they sing

with the inaudible hum of the clocks over Recanati.

Do they turn to face the dusk, just as an army

might obey the last orders of a sinking empire,

their wheels stuck in one rut before the small studs

of stars and the fireflies' meandering fire,

then droop like exhausted meteors in soft thuds

to the earth? In our life elsewhere, sunflowers

come singly but in this coastal province

there can be entire fields of their temporal powers

spread like the cloak of some Renaissance prince,

their banners will wilt, their gold helms fill the void;

they are poems we recite to ourselves, metaphors

of our brief glory, a light we cannot avoid

that was called heaven in Blake's time, but not since.

    
XI

If all these words were different-colored pebbles,

with little pools that the blue heron might drink from,

a mosaic sheeted and glazed by the vanishing bubbles

of the shallows, and bannered waves marching to the sea's drum

if they were more than black marks on white paper,

and sounds that our eyes make upon their meeting,

they would be all yours, since you are the shaper

of the instant's whim, yours is the steady greeting

of the ground dove in the grove, the net that is hurled

over the wobbling stone bed of the inlet,

and yours is the shell in which an ear is curled

or a praying fetus, prophecy and regret.

Here on the blazing instance of an afternoon, the tiring

heart is happy, the hot sea crinkles like tin,

in the tide pools the black rocks are firing

their usual volleys of mullet in their clear basin;

this is the stillness and heat of a secret place,

where what shapes itself in a rock-pool is a girl's face.

    
XII

Over and over I will praise the light that ranges

over a terra-cotta wall in Naples, in the ungraspable dusk

that makes every corner flare with the lilacs and oranges

of an amateur painter, praise lurid Venice with its disc

dissolving in the Grand Canal when an inaudible

gunshot scatters the pigeons although Roberta says

that their flocks are now an official nuisance, and no sibyl

or Doge can save them, no statue with her lifted arm,

or will they settle again and a Canaletto calm

return to the shining lagoon, to Santa Maria della Salute,

dusk rippling the water with accordion strokes,

from a god striking his trident? I hear the widening sound

under the rattle of vaporettos past handiworks

of lace that, as you warp nearer, turn into stone:

turn into stone, cherished one, my carved beauty

who makes drowsing lions yawn and bronze stallions frisk.

                                                                   
for Roberta

12   THE LOST EMPIRE

    
I

And then there was no more Empire all of a sudden.

Its victories were air, its dominions dirt:

Burma, Canada, Egypt, Africa, India, the Sudan.

The map that had seeped its stain on a schoolboy's shirt

like red ink on a blotter, battles, long sieges.

Dhows and feluccas, hill stations, outposts, flags

fluttering down in the dusk, their golden aegis

went out with the sun, the last gleam on a great crag,

with tiger-eyed turbaned Sikhs, pennons of the Raj

to a sobbing bugle. I see it all come about

again, the tasseled cortège, the clop of the tossing team

with funeral pom-poms, the sergeant major's shout,

the stamp of boots, then the volley; there is no greater theme

than this chasm-deep surrendering of power

the whited eyes and robes of surrendering hordes,

red tunics, and the great names Sind, Turkistan, Cawnpore,

dust-dervishes and the Saharan silence afterwards.

    
II

A dragonfly's biplane settles and there, on the map,

the archipelago looks as if a continent fell

and scattered into fragments; from Pointe du Cap

to Moule à Chique,
bois-canot, laurier cannelles
,

canoe-wood, spicy laurel, the wind-churned trees

echo the African crests; at night, the stars

are far fishermen's fires, not glittering cities,

Genoa, Milan, London, Madrid, Paris,

but crab-hunters' torches. This small place produces

nothing but beauty, the wind-warped trees, the breakers

on the Dennery cliffs, and the wild light that loosens

a galloping mare on the plain of Vieuxfort make us

merely receiving vessels of each day's grace,

light simplifies us whatever our race or gifts.

I'm content as Kavanagh with his few acres;

for my heart to be torn to shreds like the sea's lace,

to see how its wings catch color when a gull lifts.

13   THE SPECTER OF EMPIRE

    
I

Down the Conradian docks of the rusted port,

by gnarled sea grapes whose plates are caked with grime,

to a salvo of flame trees from the old English fort,

he waits, the white specter of another time,

or stands, propping the entrance of some hovel

of a rumshop, to slip into the streets

like the bookmark in a nineteenth-century novel,

scuttering from contact as a crab retreats.

He strolls along the waterfront's old stench

to the balcony shade of a store in Soufrière

for the vantage-point of a municipal bench

in the volcanic furnace of its town square.

I just missed him as he darted the other way

in the bobbing crowd disgorging from the ferry

in blue Capri, just as he had fled the bay

of equally blue Campeche and rose-walled Cartagena,

his still elusive silence growing more scary

with every shouted question, because so many were

hurled at him, fleeing last century's crime.

    
II

Walking the drenched ramparts, tugging his hat-brim,

maintaining his distance on the deaf page,

he cannot hear the insults hurled at him,

bracing for the sputtering brine. An image

more than a man, this white-drill figure

is smoke from a candle or stick of incense

or a mosquito coil, his fame is bigger

than his empire's now, its slow-burning conscience.

Smoke is the guilt of fire, so where he strolls

in Soufrière, in Sumatra, by any clogged basin

where hulks have foundered and garbage-smoke scrolls

its flag, he travels with its sin,

its collapsed mines, its fortunes sieved through bets.

He crosses a cricket field, overrun with stubble

launching a fleet of white, immaculate egrets.

    
III

The docks are dark and hooded, the warehouses

locked, and his insomnia rages like the moon

above the zinc roofs and spindly palms; he rouses

himself and dresses slowly in his small room:

he walks to the beach, the hills are brooding whales

against them drift the flambeaux and the lanterns

of the crab fishermen, the yachts have furled their sails,

he goes for this long walk when guilt returns;

indifferent to a constellation's Morse,

his resignation no longer sends

out fleets of power, an echo of that force

like dissipating spume on the night sand.

To the revolving beam of the Cyclopic lighthouse

he hears the suction of his soul's death-rattle,

but his is a history without remorse.

He hears the mocking cannonade of battle

from the charging breakers and sees the pluming hordes

of tribesmen galloping down the hills of sand

and hears the old phrase “
Peccavi. I have Sind
.”

Think of the treaties signed by the same one-ringed hand,

think of the width its power could encompass

“one-seventh of the globe,” we learnt in class.

Its promontories, docks, its towers and minarets

with the power that vanished as dew does from the grass

in the rising dawn of a sun that never sets.

    
IV

His fingers sticky with rum around a glass,

he can see the scorched square where a saint presides,

and its dry fountain where lizards shoot through grass

and the cathedral's candlelit insides.

In the sunlit bar the woman draws the blinds,

they look like the slitted lids of a lioness

(the yellow sheaves she hides in are his mind's)

the café is quiet, safe from the street's noise,

what he likes now confirms the aftermath

of great events; a tilted sail, a heron

elaborately picking out its path,

a beetle on its back, such things wear on

his concentrated care since the old scale

has been reduced (as are his circumstances)

on the croton bush by the window the tail

of the cat swishes as a dragonfly dances.

A vast and moral idleness stretching before him,

the café's demotic dialogues at peak hour.

The things he cherishes now are things that bore him,

and how powerlessness contains such power.

The costumes that he wore, and the roles that wore him.

14   PASTORAL

In the mute roar of autumn, in the shrill

treble of the aspens, the basso of the holm-oaks,

in the silvery wandering aria of the Schuylkill,

the poplars choiring with a quillion strokes,

find love for what is not your land, a blazing country

in eastern Pennsylvania with the DVD going

in the rented burgundy Jeep, in the inexhaustible bounty

of fall with the image of Eakins' gentleman rowing

in his slim skiff whenever the trees divide

to reveal a river's serene surprise, flowing

through snow-flecked birches where Indian hunters glide.

The country has caught fire from the single spark

of a prophesying preacher, its embers glowing,

its clouds are smoke in the onrushing dark

a holocaust crackles in this golden oven

in which tribes were consumed, a debt still owing,

while a white country spire insists on heaven.

15   A LONDON AFTERNOON

    
I

Afternoon. Durrants. Either the lift (elevator),

with shudder and rattle, its parenthesis,

or the brown bar with its glum, punctual waiter

and his whatever accent; biscuits and cheeses

with hot, broadening tea with blessing friends.

Summer London outside, guests, porter, taxis,

the consoling clichés you have come back for,

welcomed, but not absorbed, the little ecstasies

of recognition of home, almost, in the polite roar

of traffic towards dusk; here are all the props,

the elaborate breakfasts, kippers, sporting prints,

the ornate lettering on the smallest shops,

the morning papers and the sense of permanence

under every phrase. This is where it must start:

hereditary in each boy (or chap),

the stain that spreads invisibly from the heart,

like the red of Empire in a schoolroom's map.

    
II

What have these narrow streets, begrimed with age

and greasy with tradition, their knobbly names,

their pizza joints, their betting shops, that black garage,

the ping and rattle of mesmerizing games

on slot machines, to do with that England on each page

of my fifth-form anthology, now that my mind's

an ageing sea remembering its lines,

the scent and symmetry of Wyatt, Surrey?

Spring grass and roiling clouds dapple a county

with lines like a rutted road stuck in the memory

of a skylark's unheard song, a bounty

pungent as clover, the creak of a country cart

in Constable or John Clare. Words clear the page

like a burst of sparrows over a hedge

“but though from court to cottage he depart,

his saint is sure of his unspotted heart”

and the scent of petrol. Why do these lines

lie like barred sunlight on the lawn to cage

the strutting dove? My passing image in the shops, the signs.

21   A SEA-CHANGE

With a change of government the permanent cobalt,

the promises we take with a pinch of salt,

with a change of government the permanent aquamarine,

with a reorganized cabinet the permanent violet,

the permanent lilac over the reef, the permanent flux

of ochre shallows, the torn bunting of the currents

and the receding banners of the breakers.