The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (24 page)

of Sheridan Square, syllables of Nordic tongues

(as an Obeah priestess sprinkles flour on the doorstep

to ward off evil, so Carthage was sown with salt);

the flakes are falling like a common language

on my nose and lips, and rime forms on the mouth

of a shivering exile from his African province;

a blizzard of moths whirls around the extinguished lamp

of the Union general, sugary insects crunched underfoot.

You move along dark afternoons where death

entered a taxi and sat next to a friend,

or passed another a razor, or whispered “Pardon”

in a check-clothed restaurant behind her cough—

I am thinking of an exile farther than any country.

And, in this heart of darkness, I cannot believe

they are now talking over palings by the doddering

banana fences, or that seas can be warm.

How far I am from those cacophonous seaports

built round the single exclamation of one statue

of Victoria Regina! There vultures shift on the roof

of the red iron market, whose patois

is brittle as slate, a gray stone flecked with quartz.

I prefer the salt freshness of that ignorance,

as language crusts and blackens on the pots

of this cooked culture, coming from a raw one;

and these days in bookstores I stand paralyzed

by the rows of shelves along whose wooden branches

the free-verse nightingales are trilling “Read me! Read me!”

in various meters of asthmatic pain;

or I shiver before the bellowing behemoths

with the snow still falling in white words on Eighth Street,

those burly minds that barreled through contradictions

like a boar through bracken, or an old tarpon

bristling with broken hooks, or an old stag

spanieled by critics to a crag at twilight,

the exclamation of its antlers like a hat rack

on which they hang their theses. I am tired of words,

and literature is an old couch stuffed with fleas,

of culture stuffed in the taxidermist's hides.

I think of Europe as a gutter of autumn leaves

choked like the thoughts in an old woman's throat.

But she was home to some consul in snow-white ducks

doing out his service in the African provinces,

who wrote letters like this one home and feared malaria

as I mistrust the dark snow, who saw the lances of rain

marching like a Roman legion over the fens.

So, once again, when life has turned into exile,

and nothing consoles, not books, work, music, or a woman,

and I am tired of trampling the brown grass,

whose name I don't know, down an alley of stone,

and I must turn back to the road, its winter traffic,

and others sure in the dark of their direction,

I lie under a blanket on a cold couch,

feeling the flu in my bones like a lantern.

Under the blue sky of winter in Virginia

the brick chimneys flute white smoke through skeletal lindens,

as a spaniel churns up a pyre of blood-rusted leaves;

there is no memorial here to their Treblinka—

as a van delivers from the ovens loaves

as warm as flesh, its brakes jaggedly screech

like the square wheel of a swastika. The mania

of history veils even the clearest air,

the sickly-sweet taste of ash, of something burning.

And when one encounters the slow coil of an accent,

reflexes step aside as if for a snake,

with the paranoid anxiety of the victim.

The ghosts of white-robed horsemen float through the trees,

the galloping hysterical abhorrence of my race—

like any child of the Diaspora, I remember this

even as the flakes whiten Sheridan's shoulders,

and I remember once looking at my aunt's face,

the wintry blue eyes, the rusty hair, and thinking

maybe we are part Jewish, and felt a vein

run through this earth and clench itself like a fist

around an ancient root, and wanted the privilege

to be yet another of the races they fear and hate

instead of one of the haters and the afraid.

Above the spiny woods, dun grass, skeletal trees,

the chimney serenely fluting something from Schubert—

like the wraith of smoke that comes from someone burning—

veins the air with an outcry that I cannot help.

The winter branches are mined with buds,

the fields of March will detonate the crocus,

the olive battalions of the summer woods

will shout orders back to the wind. To the soldier's mind

the season's passage round the pole is martial,

the massacres of autumn sheeted in snow, as

winter turns white as a veterans hospital.

Something quivers in the blood beyond control—

something deeper than our transient fevers.

But in Virginia's woods there is also an old man

dressed like a tramp in an old Union greatcoat,

walking to the music of rustling leaves, and when

I collect my change from a small-town pharmacy,

the cashier's fingertips still wince from my hand

as if it would singe hers—well, yes,
je suis un singe
,

I am one of that tribe of frenetic or melancholy

primates who made your music for many more moons

than all the silver quarters in the till.

MAP OF THE NEW WORLD

 

    
I   ARCHIPELAGOES

At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.

At the rain's edge, a sail.

Slowly the sail will lose sight of islands;

into a mist will go the belief in harbors

of an entire race.

The ten-years war is finished.

Helen's hair, a gray cloud.

Troy, a white ashpit

by the drizzling sea.

The drizzle tightens like the strings of a harp.

A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain

and plucks the first line of the
Odyssey
.

 

    
II   THE COVE

Resound it, surge: the legend of Yseult

in languorous detonations of your surf.

I've smuggled in this bleached prow, rustling shoreward

to white sand guarded by fierce manchineel,

a secret

read by the shadow of a frigate hawk.

This inlet's a furnace.

The leaves flash silver signals to the waves.

Far from the curse of government by race,

I turn these leaves—this book's seditious fault—

to feel her skeins of sea mist cross my face,

and catch, on the wind's mouth, a taste of salt.

 

    
III   SEA CRANES

“Only in a world where there are cranes and horses,”

wrote Robert Graves, “can poetry survive.”

Or adept goats on crags. Epic

follows the plow, meter the ring of the anvil;

prophecy divines the figurations of storks, and awe

the arc of the stallion's neck.

The flame has left the charred wick of the cypress;

the light will catch these islands in their turn.

Magnificent frigates inaugurate the dusk

that flashes through the whisking tails of horses,

the stony fields they graze.

From the hammered anvil of the promontory

the spray settles in stars.

Generous ocean, turn the wanderer

from his salt sheets, the prodigal

drawn to the deep troughs of the swine-black porpoise.

Wrench his heart's wheel and set his forehead here.

ROMAN OUTPOSTS

for Pat Strachan

The thought-resembling moonlight at a cloud's edge

spreads like the poetry of some Roman outpost

to every corner of the Silver Age.

The moon, capitol of that white empire, is lost

in the black mass. Now, the hot core is Washington,

where once it was Whitehall. Her light burns

all night in office like Cato's ghost,

a concentration ringed with turbulence.

The wet dawn smells of seaweed. On this seawall

where there was a pier once, the concrete cracks

have multiplied like frontiers on a map

of Roman Europe. The same tides rise and fall,

froth, the moon's lantern hung in the same place.

On the sea road skirting the old Navy base,

the archaeologist, with his backpack, crouching

to collect cowries, startles the carbon skeleton

impressed on earth like the gigantic fern

of Caterpillar tracks. By Roman roads

along the sea grapes, their leaves the size

of armor-plates, the stripped hangars rust

where once the bombers left for target practice;

breakers bring rumors of the nuclear fleet

to shells the washed-out blue of pirates' eyes.

GREECE

Beyond the choric gestures of the olive,

gnarled as sea almonds, over boulders dry

as the calcareous molars of a Cyclops,

past the maniacal frothing of a cave,

I climbed, carrying a body round my shoulders.

I held, for a blade, with armor-dented chops

a saw-toothed agave. Below me, on the sand,

the rooted phalanxes of coconuts,

Trojan and Spartan, stood with rustling helms;

hooking myself up by one bloody hand,

and groaning on each hoist, I made the height

where the sea crows circle, and heaved down the weight

on the stone acre of the promontory.

Up here, at last, was the original story,

nothing was here at all, just stones and light.

I walked to the cliff's edge for a wide look,

relishing this emptiness of sea and air,

the wind filling my mouth said the same word

for “wind,” but here it sounded different,

shredding the sea to paper as it rent

sea, wind, and word from their corrupted root;

my memory rode its buffets like a bird.

The body that I had thrown down at my foot

was not really a body but a great book

still fluttering like chitons on a frieze,

till wind worked through the binding of its pages

scattering Hector's and Achilles' rages

to white, diminishing scraps, like gulls that ease

past the gray sphinxes of the crouching islands.

I held air without language in my hands.

My head was scoured of other people's monsters.

I reached this after half a hundred years.

I, too, signed on to follow that gold thread

which linked the spines down a dark library shelf,

around a narrowing catacomb where the dead,

in columns hemmed with gold around the plinth

of their calf-binding, wait, and came upon

my features melting in the Minotaur

at the dead end of the classic labyrinth,

and, with this blade of agave, hacked down

the old Greek bull. Now, crouched before blank stone,

I wrote the sound for “sea,” the sign for “sun.”

THE MAN WHO LOVED ISLANDS

    
A TWO-PAGE OUTLINE

A man is leaning on a cold iron rail

watching an islet from an island and so on,

say, Charlotte Amalie facing St. John,

which begins the concept of infinity

uninterrupted by any mortal sail,

only the thin ghost of a tanker drawing the horizon

behind it with the silvery slick of a snail,

and that's the first shot of this forthcoming film

starring James Coburn and his tanned, leathery, frail

resilience and his now whitening hair,

and his white, vicious grin. Now we were where?

On this island, one of the Virgins, the prota-

gonist established. Now comes the second shot,

and chaos of artifice still called the plot,

which has to get the hero off somewhere

else, 'cause there's no kick in contemplation

of silvery light upon wind-worried water

between here and the islet of Saint John,

and how they are linked like any silver chain

glinting against the hero's leather chest,

sold in the free gift ports, like noon-bright water.

The hero's momentary rest on the high rail

can be a good beginning. To start with rest

is good—the tanker can come later.

But we can't call it “The Man Who Loved Islands”

any more than some Zen-Karate film

would draw them with “The Hero Who Loves Water.”

No soap. There must be something with diamonds,

emeralds, emeralds the color of the shallows there,

or sapphires, like blue, unambiguous air,

sapphires for Sophia, but we'll come to that.

Coburn looks great with or without a hat,

and there must be some minimum of slaughter

that brings in rubies, but you cannot hover

over that first shot like a painting. Action

is all of art, the thoughtless pace

of lying with style, so that when it's over,

that first great shot of Coburn's leathery face,

crinkled like the water which he contemplates,

could be superfluous, in the first place,

since that tired artifice called history,

which in its motion is as false as fiction,

requires an outline, a summary. I can think of none,

quite honestly. I'm no photographer; this

could be a movie. I mean things are moving,

the water for example, the light on the man's hair

that has gone white, even those crescent sands

are just as moving as his love of islands;

the tanker that seems still is moving, even

the clouds like galleons anchored in heaven,

and what is moving most of all of course

is the violent man lulled into this inaction