The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (27 page)

crossed the white river.

They spoke the stilted French

of their dark river,

whose hooked worm, multiplying its pale sickle,

could thin the harvest of the winter streets.

“Then we can depend on you to get us those tractors?”

“I gave my word.”

“May my country ask you why you are doing this, sir?”

Silence.

“You know if you betray us, you cannot hide?”

A tug. Smoke trailing its dark cry.

At the window in Haiti, I remember

a gekko pressed against the hotel glass,

with white palms, concentrating head.

With a child's hands. Mercy, monsieur. Mercy.

Famine sighs like a scythe

across the field of statistics and the desert

is a moving mouth. In the hold of this earth

10,000,000 shoreless souls are drifting.

Somalia: 765,000, their skeletons will go under the tidal sand.

“We'll meet you in Bristol to conclude the agreement?”

Steeples like tribal lances, through congealing fog

the cries of wounded churchbells wrapped in cotton,

gray mist enfolding the conspirator

like a sealed envelope next to its heart.

No one will look up now to see the jet

fade like a weevil through a cloud of flour.

One flies first-class, one is so fortunate.

Like a telescope reversed, the traveller's eye

swiftly screws down the individual sorrow

to an oval nest of antic numerals,

and the iris, interlocking with this globe,

condenses it to zero, then a cloud.

Beetle-black taxi from Heathrow to my flat.

We are roaches,

riddling the state cabinets, entering the dark holes

of power, carapaced in topcoats,

scuttling around columns, signaling for taxis,

with frantic antennae, to other huddles with roaches;

we infect with optimism, and when

the cabinets crack, we are the first

to scuttle, radiating separately

back to Geneva, Bonn, Washington, London.

Under the dripping planes of Hampstead Heath,

I read her letter again, watching the drizzle

disfigure its pleading like mascara. Margo,

I cannot bear to watch the nations cry.

Then the phone: “We will pay you in Bristol.”

Days in fetid bedclothes swallowing cold tea,

the phone stifled by the pillow. The telly

a blue storm with soundless snow.

I'd light the gas and see a tiger's tongue.

I was rehearsing the ecstasies of starvation

for what I had to do.
And have not charity.

I found my pity, desperately researching

the origins of history, from reed-built communes

by sacred lakes, turning with the first sprocketed

water-driven wheels. I smelled imagination

among bestial hides by the gleam of fat,

seeking in all races a common ingenuity.

I envisaged an Africa flooded with such light

as alchemized the first fields of emmer wheat and barley,

when we savages dyed our pale dead with ochre,

and bordered our temples

with the ceremonial vulva of the conch

in the gray epoch of the obsidian adze.

I sowed the Sahara with rippling cereals,

my charity fertilized these aridities.

What was my field? Late sixteenth century.

My field was a dank acre. A Sussex don,

I taught the Jacobean anxieties:
The White Devil
.

Flamineo's torch startles the brooding yews.

The drawn sword comes in strides. I loved my Duchess,

the white flame of her soul blown out between

the smoking cypresses. Then I saw children pounce

on green meat with a rat's ferocity.

I called them up and took the train to Bristol,

my blood the Severn's dregs and silver.

On Severn's estuary the pieces flash,

Iscariot's salary, patron saint of spies.

I thought, who cares how many million starve?

Their rising souls will lighten the world's weight

and level its gull-glittering waterline;

we left at sunset down the estuary.

England recedes. The forked white gull

screeches, circling back.

Even the birds are pulled back by their orbit,

even mercy has its magnetic field.

                                                     Back in the cabin,

I uncap the whiskey, the porthole

mists with glaucoma. By the time I'm pissed,

England, England will be

that pale serrated indigo on the sea-line.

“You are so fortunate, you get to see the world—”

Indeed, indeed, sirs, I have seen the world.

Spray splashes the portholes and vision blurs.

Leaning on the hot rail, watching the hot sea,

I saw them far off, kneeling on hot sand

in the pious genuflections of the locust,

as Ponce's armored knees crush Florida

to the funereal fragrance of white lilies.

    
II

Now I have come to where the phantoms live,

I have no fear of phantoms, but of the real.

The sabbath benedictions of the islands.

Treble clef of the snail on the scored leaf,

the Tantum Ergo of black choristers

soars through the organ pipes of coconuts.

Across the dirty beach surpliced with lace,

they pass a brown lagoon behind the priest,

pale and unshaven in his frayed soutane,

into the concrete church at Canaries;

as Albert Schweitzer moves to the harmonium

of morning, and to the pluming chimneys,

the groundswell lifts
Lebensraum, Lebensraum
.

Black faces sprinkled with continual dew—

dew on the speckled croton, dew

on the hard leaf of the knotted plum tree,

dew on the elephant ears of the dasheen.

Through Kurtz's teeth, white skull in elephant grass,

the imperial fiction sings. Sunday

wrinkles downriver from the Heart of Darkness.

The heart of darkness is not Africa.

The heart of darkness is the core of fire

in the white center of the holocaust.

The heart of darkness is the rubber claw

selecting a scalpel in antiseptic light,

the hills of children's shoes outside the chimneys,

the tinkling nickel instruments on the white altar;

Jacob, in his last card, sent me these verses:

“Think of a God who doesn't lose His sleep

if trees burst into tears or glaciers weep.

So, aping His indifference, I write now,

not Anno Domini: After Dachau.”

    
III

The night maid brings a lamp and draws the blinds.

I stay out on the veranda with the stars.

Breakfast congealed to supper on its plate.

There is no sea as restless as my mind.

The promontories snore. They snore like whales.

Cetus, the whale, was Christ.

The ember dies, the sky smokes like an ash heap.

Reeds wash their hands of guilt and the lagoon

is stained. Louder, since it rained,

a gauze of sand flies hisses from the marsh.

Since God is dead, and these are not His stars,

but man-lit, sulphurous, sanctuary lamps,

it's in the heart of darkness of this earth

that backward tribes keep vigil of His Body,

in deya, lampion, and this bedside lamp.

Keep the news from their blissful ignorance.

Like lice, like lice, the hungry of this earth

swarm to the tree of life. If those who starve

like these rain-flies who shed glazed wings in light

grew from sharp shoulder blades their brittle vans

and soared toward that tree, how it would seethe—

ah, Justice! But fires

drench them like vermin, quotas

prevent them, and they remain

compassionate fodder for the travel book,

its paragraphs like windows from a train,

for everywhere that earth shows its rib cage

and the moon goggles with the eyes of children,

we turn away to read. Rimbaud learned that.

                                                     Rimbaud, at dusk,

idling his wrist in water past temples

the plumed dates still protect in Roman file,

knew that we cared less for one human face

than for the scrolls in Alexandria's ashes,

that the bright water could not dye his hand

any more than poetry. The dhow's silhouette

moved through the blinding coinage of the river

that, endlessly, until we pay one debt,

shrouds, every night, an ordinary secret.

    
IV

The drawn sword comes in strides.

It stretches for the length of the empty beach;

the fishermen's huts shut their eyes tight.

A frisson shakes the palm trees,

and sweats on the traveller's tree.

They've found out my sanctuary. Philippe, last night:

“It had two gentlemen in the village yesterday, sir,

asking for you while you was in town.

I tell them you was in town. They send to tell you,

there is no hurry. They will be coming back.”

In loaves of cloud,
and have not charity
,

the weevil will make a sahara of Kansas,

the ant shall eat Russia.

Their soft teeth shall make,
and have not charity
,

the harvest's desolation,

and the brown globe crack like a begging bowl,

and though you fire oceans of surplus grain,

and have not charity
,

still, through thin stalks,

the smoking stubble, stalks

grasshopper: third horseman,

the leather-helmed locust.

THE SEASON OF PHANTASMAL PEACE

Then all the nations of birds lifted together

the huge net of the shadows of this earth

in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,

stitching and crossing it. They lifted up

the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,

the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,

the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill—

the net rising soundless at night, the birds' cries soundless, until

there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,

only this passage of phantasmal light

that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.

And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,

what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes

that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear

battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,

bearing the net higher, covering this world

like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing

the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes

of a child fluttering to sleep;

                                        it was the light

that you will see at evening on the side of a hill

in yellow October, and no one hearing knew

what change had brought into the raven's cawing,

the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough

such an immense, soundless, and high concern

for the fields and cities where the birds belong,

except it was their seasonal passing, Love,

made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,

something brighter than pity for the wingless ones

below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,

and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices

above all change, betrayals of falling suns,

and this season lasted one moment, like the pause

between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,

but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.

FROM

Midsummer

(1984)

I

The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud—

clouds that will keep no record of where we have passed,

not the sea's mirror, not the coral busy with its own

culture; they aren't doors of dissolving stone,

but pages in a damp culture that come apart.

So a hole in their parchment opens, and suddenly, in a vast

dereliction of sunlight, there's that island known

to the traveller Trollope, and the fellow traveller Froude,

for making nothing. Not even a people. The jet's shadow

ripples over green jungles as steadily as a minnow

through seaweed. Our sunlight is shared by Rome

and your white paper, Joseph. Here, as everywhere else,

it is the same age. In cities, in settlements of mud,

light has never had epochs. Near the rusty harbor

around Port of Spain bright suburbs fade into words—

Maraval, Diego Martin—the highways long as regrets,

and steeples so tiny you couldn't hear their bells,

nor the sharp exclamations of whitewashed minarets

from green villages. The lowering window resounds

over pages of earth, the canefields set in stanzas.

Skimming over an ochre swamp like a fast cloud of egrets

are nouns that find their branches as simply as birds.

It comes too fast, this shelving sense of home—

canes rushing the wing, a fence; a world that still stands as

the trundling tires keep shaking and shaking the heart.

II

Companion in Rome, whom Rome makes as old as Rome,

old as that peeling fresco whose flaking paint

is the clouds, you are crouched in some ancient pensione

where the only new thing is paper, like young St. Jerome

with his rock vault. Tonsured, you're muttering a line