The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (9 page)

from cuts and tears,

I crawled four flights upstairs.

Sprawled in the gutter, I

remember a few watchers waved

loudly, and one kid's mother shouting

like “Jackie” or “Terry,”

“Now that's enough!”

It's nothing really.

They don't get enough love.

You know they wouldn't kill

you. Just playing rough,

like young America will.

Still, it taught me something

about love. If it's so tough,

forget it.

AIR

There has been romance, but it has been the romance of pirates and outlaws. The natural graces of life do not show themselves under such conditions. There are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own.

FROUDE,
The Bow of Ulysses

 

The unheard, omnivorous

jaws of this rain forest

not merely devour all,

but allow nothing vain;

they never rest,

grinding their disavowal

of human pain.

Long, long before us,

those hot jaws like an oven

steaming, were open

to genocide; they devoured

two minor yellow races and

half of a black;

in the word made flesh of God

all entered that gross, un-

discriminating stomach;

the forest is unconverted,

because that shell-like noise

which roars like silence, or

ocean's surpliced choirs

entering its nave, to a censer

of swung mist, is not

the rustling of prayer

but nothing; milling air,

a faith, infested, cannibal,

which eats gods, which devoured

the god-refusing Carib, petal

by golden petal, then forgot,

and the Arawak

who leaves not the lightest fern-trace

of his fossil to be cultured

by black rock,

but only the rusting cries

of a rainbird, like a hoarse

warrior summoning his race

from vaporous air

between this mountain ridge

and the vague sea

where the lost exodus

of corials sunk without trace—

There is too much nothing here.

CHE

In this dark-grained news-photograph, whose glare

is rigidly composed as Caravaggio's,

the corpse glows candle-white on its cold altar—

its stone Bolivian Indian butcher's slab—

stare till its waxen flesh begins to harden

to marble, to veined, Andean iron;

from your own fear,
cabron
, its pallor grows;

it stumbled from your doubt, and for your pardon

burnt in brown trash, far from the embalming snows.

NEGATIVES

A newsclip; the invasion of Biafra:

black corpses wrapped in sunlight

sprawled on the white glare entering what's its name—

the central city?

                           Someone who's white

illuminates the news behind the news,

his eyes flash with, perhaps, pity:

“The Ibos, you see, are like the Jews,

very much the situation in Hitler's Germany,

I mean the Hausas' resentment.” I try to see.

I never knew you Christopher Okigbo,

I saw you when an actor screamed “The tribes!

the tribes!” I catch

the guttering, flare-lit

faces of Ibos,

stuttering, bug-eyed

prisoners of some drumhead tribunal.

The soldiers' helmeted shadows

could have been white, and yours

one of those sun-wrapped bodies on the white road

entering … the tribes, the tribes, their shame—

that central city, Christ, what is its name?

HOMECOMING: ANSE LA RAYE

for Garth St. Omer

Whatever else we learned

at school, like solemn Afro-Greeks eager for grades,

of Helen and the shades

of borrowed ancestors,

there are no rites

for those who have returned,

only, when her looms fade,

drilled in our skulls, the doom-

surge-haunted nights,

only this well-known passage

under the coconuts' salt-rusted

swords, these rotted

leathery sea-grape leaves,

the seacrabs' brittle helmets, and

this barbecue of branches, like the ribs

of sacrificial oxen on scorched sand;

only this fish-gut reeking beach

whose spindly, sugar-headed children race

whose starved, pot-bellied children race

pelting up from the shallows

because your clothes,

your posture

seem a tourist's.

They swarm like flies

round your heart's sore.

Suffer them to come,

entering your needle's eye,

knowing whether they live or die,

what others make of life will pass them by

like that far silvery freighter

threading the horizon like a toy;

for once, like them,

you wanted no career

but this sheer light, this clear,

infinite, boring, paradisal sea,

but hoped it would mean something to declare

today, I am your poet, yours,

all this you knew,

but never guessed you'd come

to know there are homecomings without home.

You give them nothing.

Their curses melt in air.

The black cliffs scowl,

the ocean sucks its teeth,

like that dugout canoe

a drifting petal fallen in a cup,

with nothing but its image,

you sway, reflecting nothing.

The freighter's silvery ghost

is gone, the children gone.

Dazed by the sun

you trudge back to the village

past the white, salty esplanade

under whose palms, dead

fishermen move their draughts in shade,

crossing, eating their islands,

and one, with a politician's

ignorant, sweet smile, nods,

as if all fate

swayed in his lifted hand.

THE CELL

Woman, wasp-waisted, then wasp-tongued,

hissing to enemies how much I wronged

you, how just you were! We would secrete

in every cell, each separate room

the stink and stigma of my name,

and nothing, not the bedside flame

charring in coils by the child's net

could calm your virulent regret

or my last effort, lust. You cried

against the poison charged inside

his flesh and yours, I prayed we'd clasp

each other fierce as coupling wasps,

as bittersweet it seemed to flesh

to die in self-stung martyrdom,

for mind and body bitten black

with shame to take its poison back,

to build, even in hate, a home,

in that hexagonal lace mesh

shuddering, exchanging venom.

STAR

If, in the light of things, you fade

real, yet wanly withdrawn

to our determined and appropriate

distance, like the moon left on

all night among the leaves, may

you invisibly delight this house,

O star, doubly compassionate, who came

too soon for twilight, too late

for dawn, may your faint flame

strive with the worst in us

through chaos

with the passion of

plain day.

LOVE IN THE VALLEY

The sun goes slowly blind.

It is this mountain, shrouding

the valley of the shadow,

widening like amnesia

evening dims the mind.

I shake my head in darkness,

it is a tree branched with cries,

a trash-can full of print.

Now, through the reddening squint

of leaves leaden as eyes,

a skein of drifting hair

like a twig, fallen on snow,

branches the blank pages.

I bring it close, and stare

in slow vertiginous darkness,

and now I drift elsewhere,

through hostile images,

of white and black, and look,

like a thaw-sniffing stallion, the head

of Pasternak emerges with its forelock,

his sinewy wrist a fetlock

pawing the frozen spring,

till his own hand has frozen

on the white page, heavy.

I ride through a white childhood

whose pines glittered with bracelets,

when I heard wolves, feared the black wood,

every wrist-aching brook

and the ice maiden

in Hawthorne's fairy book.

The hair melts into dark,

a question mark that led

where the untethered mind

strayed from its first track,

Now Hardy's somber head

over which hailstorms broke

looms, like a weeping rock,

like wind, the tresses drift

and its familiar trace

tingles across the face

with its light lashes.

I feared the depth of whiteness,

I feared the numbing kiss

of those women of winter,

Bathsheba, Lara, Tess

whose tragedy made less

of life, whose love was more

than love or literature.

THE WALK

After hard rain the eaves repeat their beads,

those trees exhale your doubt like mantled tapers,

drop after drop, like a child's abacus

beads of cold sweat file from high tension wires,

pray for us, pray for this house, borrow your neighbor's

faith, pray for this brain that tires,

and loses faith in the great books it reads;

after a day spent prone, hemorrhaging poems,

each phrase peeled from the flesh in bandages,

arise, stroll on under a sky

sodden as kitchen laundry,

while the cats yawn behind their window frames,

lions in cages of their choice,

no further though, than your last neighbor's gates

figured with pearl. How terrible is your own

fidelity, O heart, O rose of iron!

When was your work more like a housemaid's novel,

some drenched soap-opera which gets

closer than yours to life? Only the pain,

the pain is real. Here's your life's end,

a clump of bamboos whose clenched

fist loosens its flowers, a track

that hisses through the rain-drenched

grove: abandon all, the work,

the pain of a short life. Startled, you move;

your house, a lion rising, paws you back.

HIC JACET

    
I

They'll keep on asking, why did you remain?

Not for the applauding rain

of hoarse and hungry thousands at whose center

the politician opens like a poisonous flower,

not for the homecoming lecturer

gripping his lectern like a witness, ready to explain

the root's fixation with earth,

nor for that new race of dung beetles, frock-coated, iridescent

crawling over the people.

Before the people became popular

he loved them.

Nor to spite some winter-bitten novelist

praised for his accuracy of phlegm,

but for something rooted, unwritten

that gave us its benediction,

its particular pain,

that may move its clouds from that mountain,

that is packing its bags on that fiction

of our greatness, which, like the homecoming rain,

veers to a newer sea.

    
II

I loved them all, the names

of shingled, rusting towns, whose dawn

touches like metal,

I should have written poems on the Thames,

shivered through cities furred and cracked with ice,

spat, for their taste, in some barge-burdened river.

    
III

Convinced of the power of provincialism,

I yielded quietly my knowledge of the world

to a gray tub steaming with clouds of seraphim,

the angels and flags of the world,

and answer those who hiss, like steam, of exile,

this coarse soap-smelling truth:

I sought more power than you, more fame than yours,

I was more hermetic, I knew the commonweal,

I pretended subtly to lose myself in crowds

knowing my passage would alter their reflection,

I was that muscle shouldering the grass

through ordinary earth,

commoner than water I sank to lose my name,

this was my second birth.

FROM

Another Life

(1973)

FROM BOOK I:
THE DIVIDED CHILD

An old story goes that Cimabue was struck with admiration when he saw the shepherd boy, Giotto, sketching sheep. But, according to the true biographies, it is never the sheep that inspire a Giotto with the love of painting: but rather, his first sight of the paintings of such a man as Cimabue. What makes the artist is the circumstance that in his youth he was more deeply moved by the sight of works of art than by that of the things which they portray.

MALRAUX,
Psychology of Art

 

 

CHAPTER 1

    
I

Verandas, where the pages of the sea

are a book left open by an absent master

in the middle of another life—

I begin here again,

begin until this ocean's

a shut book, and, like a bulb

the white moon's filaments wane.

Begin with twilight, when a glare

which held a cry of bugles lowered

the coconut lances of the inlet,

as a sun, tired of empire, declined.

It mesmerized like fire without wind,

and as its amber climbed

the beer-stein ovals of the British fort