The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (51 page)

With a change in government no change in the cricket's chirrup,

the low, comical bellow of the bull, or

the astonishing symmetry of tossing horses.

With a change in government the haze of wide rain

which you begin to hear as the ruler hears the crowd

gathering under the balcony, the leader who has promised

the permanent cobalt of a change of government

with the lilac and violet of his cabinet's change.

23

What? You're going to be Superman at seventy-seven?

Got your weight down? Okay. You've lost seven pounds,

but what you've also lost is belief in heaven

as dear friends die. Still making his rounds,

the postman, the scyther, Basil, whatever you call him—

a cyclist silently exercising on Sunday

down a shade-striped avenue of casuarinas

with bursts of foam on the breakwater's wall. I'm

sure everyone knows it will happen one day,

the yachts, nodding agreement in all the marinas,

the blackbirds in frock coats, the frog's staccato hymn,

seven less pounds and you'll need a slimmer coffin.

You suffer from a furious itch that raises welts

on your neck and forearms, so now you swim

early in the morning to avoid the sun, fear melts

before daylight's beauty, despite all that coughing.

24

The sorrel rump of a mare in the bush,

her neck stretched out in a shuddering whinny

is straight out of Uccello or Marini,

this salt-promised morning on the road to the beach.

A fine mist carries me to other places—

that haze which means it is raining in Monchy,

and perhaps on the cobbled streets of (here memory pauses).

What was that seafront hotel facing Syracuse?

It will come back like her cheekbones, her face's

aboriginal symmetry, it will all come back,

the obsession that I prayed I would lose,

the voice that stirred like a low-tempered cello,

and the esplanade's name … help me, Muse.

Who'd have thought this could happen, the yellow

fading hotel, and now, Christ! her name?

Only the sun on the seafront stays the same

to an old man on a bench for whom the waves are not news.

27   SIXTY YEARS AFTER

In my wheelchair in the Virgin lounge at Vieuxfort,

I saw, sitting in her own wheelchair, her beauty

hunched like a crumpled flower, the one whom I thought

as the fire of my young life would do her duty

to be golden and beautiful and young forever

even as I aged. She was treble-chinned, old, her devastating

smile was netted in wrinkles, but I felt the fever

briefly returning as we sat there, crippled, hating

time and the lie of general pleasantries.

Small waves still break against the small stone pier

where a boatman left me in the orange peace

of dusk, a half-century ago, maybe happier

being erect, she like a deer in her shyness, I stalking

an impossible consummation; those who knew us

knew we would never be together, at least, not walking.

Now the silent knives from the intercom went through us.

30

All day I wish I was at Case-en-Bas,

passing incongruous cactus which grows in the north

in the chasm-deep ruts of the dry season

with the thunderous white horses that dissolve in froth,

and the bush that mimics them with white cotton

to the strengthening smell of kale from the bright

Atlantic, as the road-ruts level and you come upon

a view that dissolves into pure description,

a bay whose arc hints of an infinite

Africa. The trade wind tirelessly frets

the water, combers are long and the swells heave

with weed that smells, a smell nearly rotten

but tolerable soon. Light hurls its nets

over the whitecaps and seagulls grieve

over some common but irreplaceable loss

while a high, disdainful frigate-bird, a
ciseau
,

slides in the clouds then is lost with the forgotten

caravels, privateers, and other frigates

with the changing sails of the sky and a sea so

deep it has lost its stuttering memory of our hates.

32

Be happy now at Cap, for the simplest joys—

for a line of white egrets prompting the last word,

for the sea's recitation reentering my head

with questions it erases, canceling the demonic voice

by which I have recently been possessed; unheard,

it whispers the way the fiend does to a madman

who gibbers to his bloody hands that he was seized

the way the sea swivels in the conch's ear, like the roar

of applause that precedes the actor with increased

doubt to the pitch of paralyzed horror

that his prime is past. If it is true

that my gift has withered, that there's little left of it,

if this man is right then there's nothing else to do

but abandon poetry like a woman because you love it

and would not see her hurt, least of all by me;

so walk to the cliff's edge and soar above it,

the jealousy, the spite, the nastiness with the grace

of a frigate over Barrel of Beef, its rock;

be grateful that you wrote well in this place,

let the torn poems sail from you like a flock

of white egrets in a long last sigh of release.

33   IN AMSTERDAM

    
I

The cruise-boats keep gliding along the brown canal

as quiet as prayer, the leaves are packed with peace,

the elegant house-fronts, repetitive and banal

as the hotel brochure, are still as an altarpiece.

We cruised it with Rufus Collins once, a white macaw

on his piratical shoulder. Rufus is gone.

Canals spread reflection, with calm at the core.

I reflect quietly on how soon I will be going.

I want the year 2009 to be as angled with light

as a Dutch interior or an alley by Vermeer,

to accept my enemy's atrabilious spite,

to paint and write well in what could be my last year.

    
II

Silly to think of a heritage when there isn't much,

though my mother whose surname was Marlin or Van der Mont

took pride in an ancestry she claimed was Dutch.

Now here in Amsterdam, her claim starts to mount.

Legitimate, illegitimate, I want to repaint

these rubicund Flemish faces, even if it's been done

by Frans Hals, by Rubens, by Rembrandt,

the clear gray eyes of Renée, the tree-shade on this side,

the chestnuts that glitter from the breakfast window,

why should I not claim them as fervently as

the pride of Alix Marlin an early widow,

as a creek in the Congo, if her joy was such?

I feel something ending here and something begun

the light strong leaves, the water muttering in Dutch,

the girls going by on bicycles in the sun.

39

For the crackle and hiss of the word “August,”

like a low bonfire on a beach, for the wriggling

of white masts in the marina on a Wednesday

after work, I would come back and forget the niggling

complaints of what the island lacks, how it is without

the certainties of cities, for a fisherman walking back

to this village with his jigging rod and a good catch

that blazes like rainbows when he shows it to you,

for the ember that goes out suddenly like a match

when the day and all that it brought is finished,

for the lights on the piers and for the first star

for whom my love of the island has never diminished

but will burn steadily when I am gone, wherever you are,

and for the lion's silhouette of Pigeon Island,

and your cat that presumes the posture of

a sphinx and for the long, empty sand

of your absence, for the word “August,” like a moaning dove.

43   FORTY ACRES

to Barack Obama

Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving—

a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,

an emblem of impossible prophecy: a crowd

dividing like the furrow which a mule has plowed,

parting for their president; a field of snow-flecked cotton

forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens

that the young plowman ignores for his unforgotten

cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch are a tense

court of bespectacled owls and, on the field's receding rim

is a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him

while the small plow continues on this lined page

beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado's black vengeance,

and the young plowman feels the change in his veins, heart, muscles, tendons,

till the field lies open like a flag as dawn's sure

light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.

44

“So the world is waiting for Obama,” my barber said;

and the old fences in the village street and the flowers

brimming over the rusted zinc fences all acquired

a sheen like a visible sigh, and indoors,

in the small barbershop, an election poster

joined another showing all the various hairstyles

available to his young black clients that cost the

same no matter who you were—President of the U.S.—

head smooth as a bowling ball my barber smiles

“Is that a Muslim or African name, Obama?”

benign and gentle with his swift-snipping scissors,

“I wish him luck,” and luck waits in each

gable-shadowed street that leads to the beach.

Polo loves politics, once in the glass

there were photos of Malcolm, King, Garvey, Frederick Douglass

frowning in the breadfruit window, also

the yapping dogs, the hoses, the church in Alabama.

Polo is young, black, bald under his baseball cap

but more than a barber he is delicate, adept

and when I leave his throne, shake shorn hair from my lap

I feel changed, like an election promise that is kept.

45

In the leathery closeness of the car through canefields

burdened with sweetness under the scudding stars,

I reflect on the bliss of failure, how it yields

no secret, no moral or blame while its suffering stays,

how every corner you christen now conceals a crisis.

On a hill the window-lit abbey of Mount Saint Benedict

passes like a ship in the night as a sickle moon rises

from conspiring, nodding cane and lights a hermit

crouched in his fetal cell as I did with my verses.

You drive towards cries and hugs that will comfort you

while the monk denies himself love that can contradict.

You remember those who supported and those who fought you

were stronger than wood or stone, you built a vision,

the lights of London, its bars, theaters, cathedrals,

that with the glass rolled downward like the night wind

in the canes, the treacherous joy with which a star falls,

mean even less now, what you have left behind

is the tacit pity of the heaven over Saint Paul's,

while from that clover-leaf highway rises

the loving city that takes you back as its son.

46

Here's what that bastard calls “the emptiness”—

that blue-green ridge with plunging slopes, the blossoms

like drooping chalices, of the African tulip, the noise

of a smoking torrent—it's his name for when rain comes

down the heights or gusts in sheets across the meadows

of the sea—“the emptiness,” the phrase applies

to our pathetic, pompous cities, their fretwork balconies,

their retail stores blasting reggae, either India in the eyes

of uniformed schoolchildren or the emptiness. The image

is from Conrad, of a warship pointlessly firing

into the huge empty jungle; all the endeavors

of our lives are damned to nothing by the tiring

catalogue of a vicious talent that severs

itself from every attachment, a bitterness whose

poison is praised for its virulence. This verse

is part of the emptiness, as is the valley of Santa Cruz,

a genuine benediction as his is a genuine curse.

47   EPITHALAMIUM: THE RAINY SEASON

for Stephanos and Heather

It is coming with the first drops mottling the hot cement,

the patterns budding in the pool, with a horizon

as wide and refreshing as the rain-veiled Georgics,

with the upward swoop of the dove, with the heron

quickening its gawky stride; watch a sail

hide her face in mist and the barred sun shrivel

into gathering cumuli, those huge clouds

trawling gauze skirts of rain as camera-flashes

of lightning record the rattling thunder

and the lances of drizzle start marching.

                                                    But nothing can equal

the surge of another's presence, the separately beloved

whose reign is the rain's, whose weather is the fragrant darkness

of the parlor, in the kitchen, the lightning's cutlery. But O

when the bursting storm rattles the sky's ceiling

and her body draws closer as a vessel warping

into you, her port, her aisle, and she gently rocks,

her ribs brushing yours, O, on your wedding day

may the worried banners of cirrus fade as the storm moves away.