The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (23 page)

in the back of his brain. He rose in his dream.

The soul, which was his body made as thin

as its reflection and invulnerable

without its clock, was losing track of time;

it walked the mountain tracks of the Maroons,

it swung with Gordon from the creaking gibbet,

it bought a pack of peppermints and cashews

from one of the bandanna'd mammies outside the ward,

it heard his breath pitched to the decibels

of the peanut vendors' carts, it entered a municipal wall

stirring the slogans that shrieked his name:
SAVIOR
!

and others:
LACKEY
! he melted like a spoon

through the alphabet soup of CIA, PNP, OPEC,

that resettled once he passed through with this thought:

I should have foreseen those seraphs with barbed-wire hair,

beards like burst mattresses, and wild eyes of garnet,

who nestled the Coptic Bible to their ribs, would

call me Joshua, expecting him to bring down Babylon

by Wednesday, after the fall of Jericho; yes, yes,

I should have seen the cunning bitterness of the rich

who left me no money but these mandates:

His aerial mandate, which

contained the crows whose circuit

was this wedding band that married him to his island.

His marine mandate, which

was the fishing limits

which the shark scissored like silk with its teeth

between Key West and Havana;

his terrestrial:

the bled hills rusted with bauxite;

paradisal:

the chimneys like angels sheathed in aluminum.

In shape like a cloud

he saw the face of his father,

the hair like white cirrus blown back

in a photographic wind,

the mouth of mahogany winced shut,

the eyes lidded, resigned

to the first compromise,

the last ultimatum,

the first and last referendum.

One morning the Caribbean was cut up

by seven prime ministers who bought the sea in bolts—

one thousand miles of aquamarine with lace trimmings,

one million yards of lime-colored silk,

one mile of violet, leagues of cerulean satin—

who sold it at a markup to the conglomerates,

the same conglomerates who had rented the water spouts

for ninety-nine years in exchange for fifty ships,

who retailed it in turn to the ministers

with only one bank account, who then resold it

in ads for the Caribbean Economic Community,

till everyone owned a little piece of the sea,

from which some made saris, some made bandannas;

the rest was offered on trays to white cruise ships

taller than the post office; then the dogfights

began in the cabinets as to who had first sold

the archipelago for this chain store of islands.

Now a tree of grenades was his star-apple kingdom,

over fallow pastures his crows patrolled,

he felt his fist involuntarily tighten

into a talon that was strangling five doves,

the mountains loomed leaden under martial law,

the suburban gardens flowered with white paranoia

next to the bougainvilleas of astonishing April;

the rumors were a rain that would not fall:

that enemy intelligence had alerted the roaches'

quivering antennae, that bats flew like couriers,

transmitting secrets between the embassies;

over dials in the war rooms, the agents waited

for a rifle crack from Havana; down shuttered avenues

roared a phalanx of Yamahas. They left

a hole in the sky that closed on silence.

He didn't hear the roar of the motorcycles

diminish in circles like those of the water mill

in a far childhood; he was drowned in sleep;

he slept, without dreaming, the sleep after love

in the mineral oblivion of night

whose flesh smells of cocoa, whose teeth are white

as coconut meat, whose breath smells of ginger,

whose braids are scented like sweet-potato vines

in furrows still pungent with the sun.

He slept the sleep that wipes out history,

he slept like the islands on the breast of the sea,

like a child again in her star-apple kingdom.

Tomorrow the sea would gleam like nails

under a zinc sky where the barren frangipani

was hammered, a horizon without liners;

tomorrow the heavy caravels of clouds would wreck

and dissolve in their own foam on the reefs

of the mountains, tomorrow a donkey's yawn

would saw the sky in half, and at dawn

would come the noise of a government groaning uphill.

But now she held him, as she holds us all,

her history-orphaned islands, she to whom

we came late as our muse, our mother,

who suckled the islands, who, when she grows old

with her breasts wrinkled like eggplants

is the head-tie mother, the bleached-sheets-on-the-river-rocks mother,

the gospel mother, the t'ank-you-parson mother

who turns into mahogany, the lignum-vitae mother,

her sons like thorns,

her daughters dry gullies that give birth to stones,

who was, in our childhood, the housemaid and the cook,

the young grand' who polished the plaster figure

of Clio, muse of history, in her seashell grotto

in the Great House parlor, Anadyomene washed

in the deep Atlantic heave of her housemaid's hymn.

In the indigo dawn the palms unclenched their fists,

his eyes opened the flowers, and he lay as still

as the waterless mill wheel. The sun's fuse caught,

it hissed on the edge of the skyline, and day exploded

its remorseless avalanche of dray carts and curses,

the roaring oven of Kingston, its sky as fierce

as the tin box of a patties cart. Down the docks

between the Levantine smells of the warehouses

nosed the sea wind with its odor of a dog's damp fur.

He lathered in anger and refreshed his love.

He was lathered like a horse, but the instant

the shower crowned him and he closed his eyes,

he was a bride under lace, remarrying his country,

a child drawn by the roars of the mill wheel's electorate,

those vows reaffirmed; he dressed, went down to breakfast,

and sitting again at the mahogany surface

of the breakfast table, its dark hide as polished

as the sheen of mares, saw his father's face

and his own face blent there, and looked out

to the drying garden and its seeping pond.

What was the Caribbean? A green pond mantling

behind the Great House columns of Whitehall,

behind the Greek façades of Washington,

with bloated frogs squatting on lily pads

like islands, islands that coupled as sadly as turtles

engendering islets, as the turtle of Cuba

mounting Jamaica engendered the Caymans, as, behind

the hammerhead turtle of Haiti-San Domingo

trailed the little turtles from Tortuga to Tobago;

he followed the bobbing trek of the turtles

leaving America for the open Atlantic,

felt his own flesh loaded like the pregnant beaches

with their moon-guarded eggs—they yearned for Africa,

they were lemmings drawn by magnetic memory

to an older death, to broader beaches

where the coughing of lions was dumbed by breakers.

Yes, he could understand their natural direction

but they would drown, sea eagles circling them,

and the languor of frigates that do not beat wings,

and he closed his eyes, and felt his jaw drop

again with the weight of that silent scream.

He cried out at the turtles as one screams at children

with the anger of love, it was the same scream

which, in his childhood, had reversed an epoch

that had bent back the leaves of his star-apple kingdom,

made streams race uphill, pulled the water wheel backwards

like the wheels in a film, and at that outcry,

from the raw ropes and tendons of his throat,

the sea buzzards receded and receded into specks,

and the osprey vanished.

                                        On the knee-hollowed steps

of the crusted cathedral, there was a woman in black,

the black of moonless nights, within whose eyes

shone seas in starlight like the glint of knives

(the one who had whispered to the keyhole of his ear),

washing the steps, and she heard it first.

She was one of a flowing black river of women

who bore elliptical basins to the feet of paupers

on the Day of Thorns, who bore milk pails to cows

in a pastoral sunrise, who bore baskets on their heads

down the hemophilic red hills of Haiti,

now with the squeezed rag dripping from her hard hands

the way that vinegar once dropped from a sponge,

but she heard as a dog hears, as all the underdogs

of the world hear, the pitched shriek of silence.

Star-apples rained to the ground in that silence,

the silence was the green of cities undersea,

and the silence lasted for half an hour

in that single second, a seashell silence, resounding

with silence, and the men with barbed-wire beards saw

in that creak of light that was made between

the noises of the world that was equally divided

between rich and poor, between North and South,

between white and black, between two Americas,

the fields of silent Zion in Parish Trelawny,

in Parish St. David, in Parish St. Andrew,

leaves dancing like children without any sound,

in the valley of Tryall, and the white, silent roar

of the old water wheel in the star-apple kingdom;

and the woman's face, had a smile been decipherable

in that map of parchment so rivered with wrinkles,

would have worn the same smile with which he now

cracked the day open and began his egg.

FROM

The Fortunate Traveller

(1982)

OLD NEW ENGLAND

Black clippers, tarred with whales' blood, fold their sails

entering New Bedford, New London, New Haven.

A white church spire whistles into space

like a swordfish, a rocket pierces heaven

as the thawed springs in icy chevrons race

down hillsides and Old Glories flail

the crosses of green farm boys back from 'Nam.

Seasons are measured still by the same

span of the veined leaf and the veined body

whenever the spring wind startles an uproar

of marching oaks with memories of a war

that peeled whole counties from the calendar.

The hillside is still wounded by the spire

of the white meetinghouse, the Indian trail

trickles down it like the brown blood of the whale

in rowanberries bubbling like the spoor

on logs burnt black as Bibles by hellfire.

The war whoop is coiled tight in the white owl,

stone-feathered icon of the Indian soul,

and railway lines are arrowing to the far

mountainwide absence of the Iroquois.

Spring lances wood and wound, and a spring runs

down tilted birch floors with their splintered suns

of beads and mirrors—broken promises

that helped make this Republic what it is.

The crest of our conviction grows as loud

as the spring oaks, rooted and reassured

that God is meek but keeps a whistling sword;

His harpoon is the white lance of the church,

His wandering mind a trail folded in birch,

His rage the vats that boiled the melted beast

when the black clippers brought (knotting each shroud

round the crosstrees) our sons home from the East.

NORTH AND SOUTH

Now, at the rising of Venus—the steady star

that survives translation, if one can call this lamp

the planet that pierces us over indigo islands—

despite the critical sand flies, I accept my function

as a colonial upstart at the end of an empire,

a single, circling, homeless satellite.

I can listen to its guttural death rattle in the shoal

of the legions' withdrawing roar, from the raj,

from the Reich, and see the full moon again

like a white flag rising over Fort Charlotte,

and sunset slowly collapsing like the flag.

It's good that everything's gone, except their language,

which is everything. And it may be a childish revenge

at the presumption of empires to hear the worm

gnawing their solemn columns into coral,

to snorkel over Atlantis, to see, through a mask,

Sidon up to its windows in sand, Tyre, Alexandria,

with their wavering seaweed spires through a glass-bottom boat,

and to buy porous fragments of the Parthenon

from a fisherman in Tobago, but the fear exists,

Delenda est Carthago
on the rose horizon,

and the side streets of Manhattan are sown with salt,

as those in the North all wait for that white glare

of the white rose of inferno, all the world's capitals.

Here, in Manhattan, I lead a tight life

and a cold one, my soles stiffen with ice

even through woollen socks; in the fenced backyard,

trees with clenched teeth endure the wind of February,

and I have some friends under its iron ground.

Even when spring comes with its rain of nails,

with its soiled ice oozing into black puddles,

the world will be one season older but no wiser.

Fragments of paper swirl round the bronze general