The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (8 page)

MASS MAN

Through a great lion's head clouded by mange

a black clerk growls.

Next, a gold-wired peacock withholds a man,

a fan, flaunting its oval, jeweled eyes,

What metaphors!

What coruscating, mincing fantasies!

Hector Mannix, waterworks clerk San Juan, has entered a lion,

Boysie, two golden mangoes bobbing for breastplates, barges

like Cleopatra down her river, making style.

“Join us” they shout, “O God, child, you can't dance?”

but somewhere in that whirlwind's radiance

a child, rigged like a bat, collapses, sobbing.

But I am dancing, look, from an old gibbet

my bull-whipped body swings, a metronome!

Like a fruit-bat dropped in the silk cotton's shade

my mania, my mania is a terrible calm.

Upon your penitential morning,

some skull must rub its memory with ashes,

some mind must squat down howling in your dust,

some hand must crawl and recollect your rubbish,

someone must write your poems.

MIRAMAR

There'll be no miracle tonight; by the third drink

you can tell. The nerves deaden from steel

or a hollow sax. I look through the window:

a bus goes by like an empty hospital,

and turn. The stripper's spinning, pink

tits, falsies in a false light, her crotch's

mechanical lurch is her own rut, and think

of the night I almost burned my balls

off with some abrasive, powdery chemical

and in the next ward of the teaching hospital

would listen all night to the clenched, stuck

howl of a child dying of lockjaw. Clench, hold

on to what you have. After a while, this whole

slow grinding circus doesn't give a fuck.

There is nowhere to go. You'd better go.

EXILE

Wind-haired, mufflered

against dawn, you watched the herd

of migrants ring the deck

from steerage. Only the funnel

bellowing, the gulls who peck

waste from the plowed channel

knew that you had not come

to England; you were home.

Even her wretched weather

was poetry. Your scarred leather

suitcase held that first

indenture, to her Word,

but, among cattle docking, that rehearsed

calm meant to mark you from the herd

shook, calflike, in her cold.

Never to go home again,

for this was home! The windows

leafed through history to the beat

of a school ballad, but the train

soon changed its poetry to the prose

of narrowing, pinched eyes you could not enter,

to the gas-ring, the ringing Students' Center,

to the soiled, icy sheet.

One night, near rheum-eyed windows

your memory kept pace with winter's

pages, piled in drifts,

till Spring, which slowly lifts

the heart, broke into prose

and suns you had forgotten

blazoned from barrows.

And earth began to look

as you remembered her,

herons, like seagulls, flock-

ed to the salted furrow,

the bellowing, smoky bullock

churned its cane sea,

a world began to pass

through your pen's eye,

between bent grasses and one word

for the bent rice.

And now, some phrase

caught in the parenthesis

of highway quietly states

its title, and an ochre trace

of flags and carat huts opens

at Chapter One,

the bullock's strenuous ease is mirrored

in a clear page of prose,

a forest is compressed in a blue coal,

or burns in graphite fire,

invisibly your ink nourishes

leaf after leaf the furrowed villages

where the smoke flutes

and the brittle pages

of the Ramayana stoke the mulch fires,

the arrowing, metal

highways head nowhere,

the tabla and the sitar amplified,

the Path unrolling like a dirty bandage,

the cinema-hoardings leer

in language half the country cannot read.

Yet, when dry winds rattle

the flags whose bamboo lances bend

to Hanuman, when, like chattel

folded in a cloth knot, the debased

brasses are tremblingly placed

on flaking temple lintels,

when the god stamps his bells

and smoke writhes its blue arms

for your lost India,

the old men, threshing rice,

rheum-eyed, pause,

their brown gaze flecked with chaff,

their loss chafed by the raw

whine of the cinema-van calling the countryside

to its own dark devotions,

summoning the drowned from oceans

of deep cane. The hymn

to Mother India whores its lie.

Your memory walks by its soft-spoken

path, as flickering, broken,

Saturday jerks past like a cheap film.

 

THE TRAIN

On one hand, harrowed England,

iron, an airfield's mire,

on the other, fire-

gutted trees, a hand

raking the carriage windows.

Where was my randy white grandsire from?

He left here a century ago

to found his “farm,”

and, like a thousand others,

drunkenly seed their archipelago.

Through dirty glass

his landscape fills through my face.

Black with despair

he set his flesh on fire,

blackening, a tree of flame.

That's hell enough for here.

His blood burns through me as this engine races,

my skin sears like a hairshirt with his name.

On the bleak Sunday platform

the guiltless, staring faces

divide like tracks before me as I come.

Like you, grandfather, I cannot change places,

I am half-home.

HOMAGE TO EDWARD THOMAS

Formal, informal, by a country's cast

topography delineates its verse,

erects the classic bulk, for rigid contrast

of sonnet, rectory or this manor house

dourly timbered against these sinuous

Downs, defines the formal and informal prose

of Edward Thomas's poems which make this garden

return its subtle scent of Edward Thomas

in everything here hedged or loosely grown.

Lines which you once dismissed as tenuous

because they would not howl or overwhelm,

as crookedly grave-bent, or cuckoo-dreaming,

seemingly dissoluble as this Sussex down

harden in their indifference, like this elm.

THE GULF

for Jack and Barbara Harrison

    
I

The airport coffee tastes less of America.

Sour, unshaven, dreading the exertion

of tightening, racked nerves fueled with liquor,

some smoky, resinous bourbon,

the body, buckling at its casket hole,

a roar like last night's blast racing its engines,

watches the fumes of the exhausted soul

as the trans-Texas jet, screeching, begins

its flight and friends diminish. So, to be aware

of the divine union the soul detaches

itself from created things. “We're in the air,”

the Texan near me grins. All things: these matches

from LBJ's campaign hotel, this rose

given me at dawn in Austin by a child,

this book of fables by Borges, its prose

a stalking, moonlit tiger. What was willed

on innocent, sun-streaked Dallas, the beast's claw

curled round that hairspring rifle is revealed

on every page as lunacy or feral law;

circling that wound we leave Love Field.

Fondled, these objects conjure hotels,

quarrels, new friendships, brown limbs

nakedly molded as these autumn hills

memory penetrates as the jet climbs

the new clouds over Texas; their home means

an island suburb, forest, mountain water;

they are the simple properties for scenes

whose joy exhausts like grief, scenes where we learn,

exchanging the least gifts, this rose, this napkin,

that those we love are objects we return,

that this lens on the desert's wrinkled skin

has priced our flesh, all that we love in pawn

to that brass ball, that the gifts, multiplying

clutter and choke the heart, and that I shall

watch love reclaim its things as I lie dying.

My very flesh and blood! Each seems a petal

shriveling from its core. I watch them burn,

by the nerves' flare I catch their skeletal

candor! Best never to be born

the great dead cry. Their works shine on our shelves,

by twilight we tour their gilded, gravestone spines,

and read until the lamplit page revolves

to a white stasis whose detachment shines

like a propeller's rainbowed radiance.

Circling like us; no comfort for their loves!

    
II

The cold glass darkens. Elizabeth wrote once

that we make glass the image of our pain;

I watch clouds boil past the cold, sweating pane

above the Gulf. All styles yearn to be plain

as life. The face of the loved object under glass

is plainer still. Yet somehow, at this height,

above this cauldron boiling with its wars,

our old earth, breaking to familiar light,

that cloud-bound mummy with self-healing scars

peeled of her cerements again looks new;

some cratered valley heals itself with sage,

through that gray, fading massacre a blue

lighthearted creek flutes of some siege

to the amnesia of drumming water.

Their cause is crystalline: the divine union

of these detached, divided States, whose slaughter

darkens each summer now, as one by one,

the smoke of bursting ghettos clouds the glass

down every coast where filling-station signs

proclaim the Gulf, an air, heavy with gas,

sickens the state, from Newark to New Orleans.

    
III

Yet the South felt like home. Wrought balconies,

the sluggish river with its tidal drawl,

the tropic air charged with the extremities

of patience, a heat heavy with oil,

canebrakes, that legendary jazz. But fear

thickened my voice, that strange, familiar soil

prickled and barbed the texture of my hair,

my status as a secondary soul.

The Gulf, your gulf, is daily widening,

each blood-red rose warns of that coming night

when there's no rock cleft to go hidin' in

and all the rocks catch fire, when that black might,

their stalking, moonless panthers turn from Him

whose voice they can no more believe, when the black X's

mark their passover with slain seraphim.

    
IV

The Gulf shines, dull as lead. The coast of Texas

glints like a metal rim. I have no home

as long as summer bubbling to its head

boils for that day when in the Lord God's name

the coals of fire are heaped upon the head

of all whose gospel is the whip and flame,

age after age, the uninstructing dead.

ELEGY

Our hammock swung between Americas

we miss you, Liberty. Che's

bullet-riddled body falls,

and those who cried the Republic must first die

to be reborn are dead,

the freeborn citizen's ballot in the head.

Still, everybody wants to go to bed

with Miss America. And, if there's no bread,

let them eat cherry pie.

But the old choice of running, howling, wounded

wolf-deep in her woods,

while the white papers snow on

genocide is gone;

no face can hide

its public, private pain,

wincing, already statued.

Some splintered arrowhead lodged in her brain

sets the black singer howling in his bear trap

shines young eyes with the brightness of the mad,

tires the old with her residual sadness;

and yearly lilacs in her dooryards bloom,

and the cherry orchard's surf

blinds Washington and whispers

to the assassin in his furnished room

of an ideal America, whose flickering screens

show, in slow herds, the ghosts of the Cheyennes

scuffling across the staked and wired plains

with whispering, rag-bound feet,

while the farm couple framed in their Gothic door

like Calvin's saints, waspish, pragmatic, poor,

gripping the devil's pitchfork

stare rigidly towards the immortal wheat.

June 6, 1968

BLUES

Those five or six young guys

hunched on the stoop

that oven-hot summer night

whistled me over. Nice

and friendly. So, I stop.

MacDougal or Christopher

Street in chains of light.

A summer festival. Or some

saint's. I wasn't too far from

home, but not too bright

for a nigger, and not too dark,

I figured we were all

one, wop, nigger, jew,

besides, this wasn't Central Park.

I'm coming on too strong? You figure

right! They beat this yellow nigger

black and blue.

Yeah. During all this, scared

in case one used a knife,

I hung my olive-green, just-bought

sports coat on a fire-plug.

I did nothing. They fought

each other, really. Life

gives them a few kicks,

that's all. The spades, the spicks.

My face smashed in, my bloody mug

pouring, my olive-branch jacket saved