The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (6 page)

of walking, running the rat race,

locked in a system, ridden by its rail,

within a life where no one dares to fail.

I watch your smile breaking across my skull,

the hollows of your face below my face

sliding across it like a pane of glass.

Nothing endures. Even in his cities

man's life is grass.

Times Square. We sigh and let off steam,

who should screech with the braking wheels, scream

like our subway-Cassandra, heaven-sent

to howl for Troy, emerge

blind from the blast of daylight, whirled

apart like papers from a vent.

    
III

Going away, through Queens we pass

a cemetery of miniature skyscrapers. The verge

blazes its rust, its taxi-yellow leaves. It's fall.

I stare through glass,

my own reflection there, at

empty avenues, lawns, spires, quiet

stones, where the curb's rim

wheels westward, westward, where thy bones …

Montana, Minnesota, your real

America, lost in tall grass, serene idyll.

A TROPICAL BESTIARY

    
IBIS

Flare of the ibis, rare vermilion,

A hieroglyphic of beak-headed Egypt

That haunts, they claim, the green swamp-traveller

Who catches it to watch its plumage fade,

Loses its colors in captivity,

Blanches into a pinkish, stilted heron

Among the garrulous fishwife gulls, bitterns and spoonbills

And ashen herons of the heronry.

She never pines, complains at being kept,

Yet, imperceptibly, fades from her fire,

Pointing no moral but the fact

Of flesh that has lost pleasure in the act,

Of domesticity, drained of desire.

    
OCTOPUS

Post coitum, omne animal … from love

The eight limbs loosen, like tentacles in water,

Like the slow tendrils of

The octopus.

             Fathoms down

They drift, numbed by the shock

Of an electric charge, drown

Vague as lidless fishes, separate

Like the anemone from rock

The sleek eel from its sea-cleft, drawn

By the darkening talons of the tide.

Pulse of the sea in the locked, heaving side.

    
LIZARD

Fear:

              the heraldic lizard, magnified,

Devouring its midge.

                         Last night I plucked

“as a brand from the burning,” a murderous, pincered beetle

Floundering in urine like a shipwreck shallop

Rudderless, its legs frantic as oars.

Did I, by this act, set things right side up?

It was not death I dreaded but the fight

With nothing. The aged, flailing their claws

On flowery coverlets, may dread such salvation,

The impotence of rescue or compassion.

Rightening a beetle damns creation.

It may have felt more terror on its back

When my delivering fingers, huge as hell,

Shadowed the stiffening victim with their jaws

Than the brown lizard, Galapagos-large,

Waggling its horny tail at morning's morsel

Held for the midge.

                         Mercy has strange laws.

Withdraw and leave the scheme of things in charge.

    
MAN-O'-WAR BIRD

The idling pivot of the frigate bird

Sways the world's scales, tilts cobalt sea and sky,

Rightens, by its round eye, my drift

Through heaven when I shift

My study of the sun.

                         The easy wings

Depend upon the stress I give such things

As my importance to its piercing height, the peace

Of its slow, ravening circuit of a speck

Upon a beach prey to its beak

Like any predatory tern it seizes.

In that blue wildfire somewhere is an Eye

That weighs this world exactly as it pleases.

    
SEA CRAB

The sea crab's cunning, halting, awkward grace

is the syntactical envy of my hand;

obliquity burrowing to surface

from hot, plain sand.

Those who require vision, complexity,

tire of its distressing

limits: sea, sand, scorching sky.

Cling to this ground, though constellations race,

the horizon burn, the wave coil, hissing,

salt sting the eye.

    
THE WHALE, HIS BULWARK

To praise the blue whale's crystal jet,

To write, “O fountain!” honoring a spout

Provokes this curse:

                         “The high are humbled yet”

From those who humble Godhead, beasthood, verse.

Once, the Lord raised this bulwark to our eyes,

Once, in our seas, whales threshed,

The harpooner was common. Once, I heard

Of a baleine beached up the Grenadines, fleshed

By derisive, ant-like villagers: a prize

Reduced from majesty to pygmy-size.

Salt-crusted, mythological,

And dead.

The boy who told me couldn't believe his eyes,

And I believed him. When I was small

God and a foundered whale were possible.

Whales are rarer, God as invisible.

Yet, through His gift, I praise the unfathomable,

Though the boy may be dead, the praise unfashionable,

The tale apocryphal.

    
TARPON

At Cedros, thudding the dead sand

in spasms, the tarpon

gaped with a gold eye, drowned

thickly, thrashing with brute pain

this sea I breathe.

Stilled, its bulk,

screwed to the eye's lens, slowly

sought design. It dried like silk,

leisurely, altered to lead.

The belly, leprous, silver, bulged

like a cold chancre for the blade.

Suddenly it shuddered in immense

doubt, but the old jaw, gibbering, divulged

nothing but some new filaments

of blood. For every bloody stroke

with which a frenzied fisherman struck

its head my young son shook his head.

Could I have called out not to look

simply at the one world we shared?

Dead, and examined in detail,

a tarpon's bulk grows beautiful.

Bronze, with a brass-green mold, the scales

age like a corselet of coins,

a net of tarnished silver joins

the back's deep-sea blue to the tail's

wedged, tapering Y.

Set in a stone, triangular skull,

ringing with gold, the open eye

is simply, tiringly there.

A shape so simple, like a cross,

a child could draw it in the air.

A tarpon's scale, its skin's flake

washed at the sea's edge and held

against the light looks just like what

the grinning fisherman said it would:

dense as frost glass but delicate,

etched by a diamond, it showed

a child's drawing of a ship,

the sails' twin triangles, a mast.

Can such complexity of shape,

such bulk, terror and fury fit

in a design so innocent,

that through opaque, phantasmal mist,

moving, but motionlessly, it

sails where imagination sent?

GOATS AND MONKEYS

    
… even now, an old black ram

    
is tupping your white ewe.

                                              
Othello

The owl's torches gutter. Chaos clouds the globe.

Shriek, augury! His earthen bulk

buries her bosom in its slow eclipse.

His smoky hand has charred

that marble throat. Bent to her lips,

he is Africa, a vast, sidling shadow

that halves your world with doubt.

“Put out the light,” and God's light is put out.

That flame extinct, she contemplates her dream

of him as huge as night, as bodiless,

as starred with medals, like the moon

a fable of blind stone.

Dazzled by that bull's bulk against the sun

of Cyprus, couldn't she have known

like Pasiphaë, poor girl, she'd breed horned monsters?

That like Eurydice, her flesh a flare

travelling the hellish labyrinth of his mind

his soul would swallow hers?

Her white flesh rhymes with night. She climbs, secure.

Virgin and ape, maid and malevolent Moor,

their immoral coupling still halves our world.

He is your sacrificial beast, bellowing, goaded,

a black bull snarled in ribbons of its blood.

And yet, whatever fury girded

on that saffron-sunset turban, moon-shaped sword

was not his racial, panther-black revenge

pulsing her chamber with raw musk, its sweat,

but horror of the moon's change,

of the corruption of an absolute,

like a white fruit

pulped ripe by fondling but doubly sweet.

And so he barbarously arraigns the moon

for all she had beheld since time began

for his own night-long lechery, amibition,

while barren innocence whimpers for pardon.

And it is still the moon, she silvers love,

limns lechery and stares at our disgrace.

Only annihilation can resolve

the pure corruption in her dreaming face.

A bestial, comic agony. We harden

with mockery at this blackamoor

who turns his back on her, who kills

what, like the clear moon, cannot abhor

her element, night; his grief

farcically knotted in a handkerchief

a sibyl's

prophetically stitched remembrancer

webbed and embroidered with the zodiac,

this mythical, horned beast who's no more

monstrous for being black.

VERANDA

for Ronald Bryden

Gray apparitions at veranda ends

like smoke, divisible, but one

your age is ashes, its coherence gone,

Planters whose tears were marketable gum, whose voices

scratch the twilight like dried fronds

edged with reflection,

Colonels, hard as the commonwealth's greenheart,

middlemen, usurers whose art

kept an empire in the red,

Upholders of Victoria's china seas

lapping embossed around a drinking mug,

bully-boy roarers of the Empire club,

To the tarantara of the bugler, the sunset furled

round the last post,

the “flamingo colors” of a fading world,

A ghost steps from you, my grandfather's ghost!

Uprooted from some rainy English shire,

you sought your Roman

End in suicide by fire.

Your mixed son gathered your charred, blackened bones,

in a child's coffin.

And buried them himself on a strange coast.

Sire,

why do I raise you up? Because

Your house has voices, your burnt house,

shrills with unguessed, lovely inheritors,

your genealogical roof tree, fallen, survives,

like seasoned timber through green, little lives.

I ripen towards your twilight, sir, that dream

where I am singed in that sea-crossing, steam

towards that vaporous world, whose souls,

like pressured trees brought diamonds out of coals.

The sparks pitched from your burning house are stars.

I am the man my father loved and was.

Whatever love you suffered makes amends

within them, father.

I climb the stair

And stretch a darkening hand to greet those friends

who share with you the last inheritance

of earth, our shrine and pardoner,

gray, ghostly loungers at veranda ends.

NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF PORT OF SPAIN

Night, our black summer, simplifies her smells

into a village; she assumes the impenetrable

musk of the Negro, grows secret as sweat,

her alleys odorous with shucked oyster shells,

coals of gold oranges, braziers of melon.

Commerce and tambourines increase her heat.

Hellfire or the whorehouse: crossing Park Street,

a surf of sailors' faces crests, is gone

with the sea's phosphorescence; the boîtes de nuit

twinkle like fireflies in her thick hair.

Blinded by headlamps, deaf to taxi klaxons,

she lifts her face from the cheap, pitch-oil flare

towards white stars, like cities, flashing neon,

burning to be the bitch she will become.

As daylight breaks the Indian turns his tumbril

of hacked, beheaded coconuts towards home.

GOD REST YE MERRY GENTLEMEN

Splitting from Jack Delaney's, Sheridan Square,

that winter night, stewed, seasoned in bourbon,

my body kindled by the whistling air

snowing the Village that Christ was reborn,

I lurched like any lush by his own glow

across towards Sixth, and froze before the tracks

of footprints bleeding on the virgin snow.

I tracked them where they led across the street

to the bright side, entering the wax-

sealed smell of neon, human heat,

some all-night diner with its wise-guy cook

his stub thumb in my bowl of stew and one

man's pulped and beaten face, its look

acknowledging all that, white-dark outside,

was possible: some beast prowling the block,

something fur-clotted, running wild

beyond the boundary of will. Outside,

more snow had fallen. My heart charred.

I longed for darkness, evil that was warm.