The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (30 page)

the fields, not their names, were the same. We found a caff,

parked in a thin drizzle, then crammed into a pew

of red leatherette. Outside, with thumb and finger,

a careful sun was picking the lint from things.

The sun brightened like a sign, the world was new

while the cairns, the castled hillocks, the stony kings

were scabbarded in sleep, yet what made me think

that the crash of chivalry in a kitchen sink

was my own dispossession? I could sense, from calf

to flinging wrist, my veins ache in a knot.

There was mist on the window. I rubbed it and looked out

at the helmets of wet cars in the parking lot.

XXXVI

The oak inns creak in their joints as light declines

from the ale-colored skies of Warwickshire.

Autumn has blown the froth from the foaming orchards,

so white-haired regulars draw chairs nearer the grate

to spit on logs that crackle into leaves of fire.

But they grow deafer, not sure if what they hear

is the drone of the abbeys from matins to compline,

or the hornet's nest of a chain saw working late

on the knoll up there back of the Norman chapel.

Evening loosens the moth, the owl shifts its weight,

a fish-mouthed moon swims up from wavering elms,

but four old men are out on the garden benches,

talking of the bows they have drawn, their strings of wenches,

their coined eyes shrewdly glittering like the Thames'

estuaries. I heard their old talk carried

through cables laid across the Atlantic bed,

their gossip rustles like an apple orchard's

in my own head, and I can drop their names

like familiars—those bastard grandsires

whose maker granted them a primal pardon—

because the worm that cores the rotting apple

of the world and the hornet's chain saw cannot touch the words

of Shallow or Silence in their fading garden.

XXXVIII

Autumn's music grates. From tuning forks of branches,

small beaks scrape the cold. With trembling feather,

with the squeaking nails of their notes, they pierce me, plus

all the hauntings and evasions of gray weather,

and the river veining with marble despite their pleas.

Lunging to St. Martin's marshes, toward the salt breaks

corrugated by windy sunlight, to reed-whistling islets

the geese chevron, too high for a shadow. Over brown bricks

the soundless white scream of contrails made by jets

remains. Earlier and earlier the brownstones darken.

Now the islands feel farther than something out of the
Georgics
.

Maple and elm close in. But palms require translation,

and their long lines stiffen with dead characters.

Vergilian Brookline! By five, then four, the sun sets;

the lines of passengers at each trolley station,

waiting to go underground, have the faces of actors

when a play must close. Or yours, looking up from a desk,

from a play you hadn't reread for several years.

The look on the face of the sea when the day is finished,

or the seats in an empty theater, each one with its reasons

for what went wrong. They didn't know your language,

the characters were simple, there was no change of seasons

or sets. There was too much poetry. It was the wrong age.

XLI

The camps hold their distance—brown chestnuts and gray smoke

that coils like barbed wire. The profit in guilt continues.

Brown pigeons goose-step, squirrels pile up acorns like little shoes,

and moss, voiceless as smoke, hushes the peeled bodies

like abandoned kindling. In the clear pools, fat

trout rising to lures bubble in umlauts.

Forty years gone, in my island childhood, I felt that

the gift of poetry had made me one of the chosen,

that all experience was kindling to the fire of the Muse.

Now I see her in autumn on that pine bench where she sits,

their nut-brown ideal, in gold plaits and
lederhosen
,

the blood drops of poppies embroidered on her white bodice,

the spirit of autumn to every Hans and Fritz

whose gaze raked the stubble fields when the smoky cries

of rooks were nearly human. They placed their cause in

her cornsilk crown, her cornflower iris,

winnower of chaff for whom the swastikas flash

in skeletal harvests. But had I known then

that the fronds of my island were harrows, its sand the ash

of the distant camps, would I have broken my pen

because this century's pastorals were being written

by the chimneys of Dachau, of Auschwitz, of Sachsenhausen?

XLII

Chicago's avenues, as white as Poland.

A blizzard of heavenly coke hushes the ghettos.

The scratched sky flickers like a TV set.

Down Michigan Avenue, slow as the glacial prose

of historians, my taxi crawls. The stalled cars are as frozen

as the faces of cloaked queues on a Warsaw street,

or the hands of black derelicts flexing over a fire-

barrel under the El; above, the punctured sky

is needled by rockets that keep both Empires high.

It will be both ice and fire. In the sibyl's crystal

the globe is shaken with ash, with a child's
frisson
.

It'll be like this. A bird cry will sound like a pistol

down the avenues. Cars like dead horses, their muzzles

foaming with ice. From the cab's dashboard, a tinny

dispatcher's voice warns of more snow. A picture

lights up the set—first, indecipherable puzzles;

then, in plain black and white, a snow slope with pines

as shaggy as the manes of barbarian ponies;

then, a Mongol in yak's skin, teeth broken as dice,

grinning at the needles of the silent cities

of the plains below him up in the Himalayas,

who slaps the snow from his sides and turns away as,

in lancelike birches, the horde's ponies whinny.

XLVIII

Raw ochre sea cliffs in the slanting afternoon,

at the bursting end of Balandra, the dry beach's end,

that a shadow's dial wipes out of sight and mind.

White sanderlings race the withdrawing surf to pick,

with wink-quick stabs, shellfish between the pebbles,

ignoring the horizon where a sail goes out

like the love of Prospero for his island kingdom.

A grape leaf shields the sun with veined, orange hand,

but its wick blows out, and the sanderlings are gone.

Go, light, make weightless the burden of our thought,

let our misfortune have no need for magic,

be untranslatable in verse or prose.

Let us darken like stones that have never frowned or known

the need for art or medicine, for Prospero's

snake-knotted staff, or sea-bewildering stick;

erase these ciphers of birds' prints on sand.

Proportion benedict us, as in fables,

that in life's last third, its movements, we accept the

measurement of our acts from one to three,

and boarding this craft, pull till a dark wind

rolls this pen on a desktop, a broken oar, a scepter

swayed by the surf, the scansion of the sea.

L

I once gave my daughters, separately, two conch shells

that were dived from the reef, or sold on the beach, I forget.

They use them as doorstops or bookends, but their wet

pink palates are the soundless singing of angels.

I once wrote a poem called “The Yellow Cemetery,”

when I was nineteen. Lizzie's age. I'm fifty-three.

These poems I heaved aren't linked to any tradition

like a mossed cairn; each goes down like a stone

to the seabed, settling, but let them, with luck, lie

where stones are deep, in the sea's memory.

Let them be, in water, as my father, who did watercolors,

entered his work. He became one of his shadows,

wavering and faint in the midsummer sunlight.

His name was Warwick Walcott. I sometimes believe

that his father, in love or bitter benediction,

named him for Warwickshire. Ironies

are moving. Now, when I rewrite a line,

or sketch on the fast-drying paper the coconut fronds

that he did so faintly, my daughters' hands move in mine.

Conchs move over the sea floor. I used to move

my father's grave from the blackened Anglican headstones

in Castries to where I could love both at once—

the sea and his absence. Youth is stronger than fiction.

LI

Since all of your work was really an effort to appease

the past, a need to be admitted among your peers,

let the inheritors question the sibyl and the Sphinx,

and learn that a raceless critic is a primate's dream.

You were distressed by your habitat, you shall not find peace

till you and your origins reconcile; your jaw must droop

and your knuckles scrape the ground of your native place.

Squat on a damp rock round which white lilies stiffen,

pricking their ears; count as the syllables drop

like dew from primeval ferns; note how the earth drinks

language as precious, depending upon the race.

Then, on dank ground, using a twig for a pen,

write Genesis and watch the Word begin.

Elephants will mill at their water hole to trumpet a

new style. Mongoose, arrested in rut,

and saucer-eyed mandrills, drinking from the leaves,

will nod as a dew-lapped lizard discourses on “Lives

of the Black Poets,” gripping a branch like a lectern for better

delivery. Already, up in that simian Academe,

a chimp in bifocals, his lower lip a jut,

tears misting the lenses, is turning your
Oeuvres Complètes
.

LII

I heard them marching the leaf-wet roads of my head,

the sucked vowels of a syntax trampled to mud,

a division of dictions, one troop black, barefooted,

the other in redcoats bright as their sovereign's blood;

their feet scuffled like rain, the bare soles with the shod.

One fought for a queen, the other was chained in her service,

but both, in bitterness, travelled the same road.

Our occupation and the Army of Occupation

are born enemies, but what mortar can size

the broken stones of the barracks of Brimstone Hill

to the gaping brick of Belfast? Have we changed sides

to the mustached sergeants and the horsy gentry

because we serve English, like a two-headed sentry

guarding its borders? No language is neutral;

the green oak of English is a murmurous cathedral

where some took umbrage, some peace, but every shade, all,

helped widen its shadow. I used to haunt the arches

of the British barracks of Vigie. There were leaves there,

bright, rotting like revers or epaulettes, and the stenches

of history and piss. Leaves piled like the dropped aitches

of soldiers from rival shires, from the brimstone trenches

of Agincourt to the gas of the Somme. On Poppy Day

our schools bought red paper flowers. They were for Flanders.

I saw Hotspur cursing the smoke through which a popinjay

minced from the battle. Those raging commanders

from Thersites to Percy, their rant is our model.

I pinned the poppy to my blazer. It bled like a vowel.

LIV

The midsummer sea, the hot pitch road, this grass, these shacks that made me,

jungle and razor grass shimmering by the roadside, the edge of art;

wood lice are humming in the sacred wood,

nothing can burn them out, they are in the blood;

their rose mouths, like cherubs, sing of the slow science

of dying—all heads, with, at each ear, a gauzy wing.

Up at Forest Reserve, before branches break into sea,

I looked through the moving, grassed window and thought “pines,”

or conifers of some sort. I thought, they must suffer

in this tropical heat with their child's idea of Russia.

Then suddenly, from their rotting logs, distracting signs

of the faith I betrayed, or the faith that betrayed me—

yellow butterflies rising on the road to Valencia

stuttering “yes” to resurrection; “yes, yes is our answer,”

the gold-robed Nunc Dimittis of their certain choir.

Where's my child's hymnbook, the poems edged in gold leaf,

the heaven I worship with no faith in heaven,

as the Word turned toward poetry in its grief?

Ah, bread of life, that only love can leaven!

Ah, Joseph, though no man ever dies in his own country,

the grateful grass will grow thick from his heart.

FROM

The Arkansas Testament

(1987)

CUL DE SAC VALLEY

    
I

A panel of sunrise

on a hillside shop

gave these stanzas

their stilted shape.

If my craft is blest;

if this hand is as

accurate, as honest

as their carpenter's,

every frame, intent

on its angles, would

echo this settlement

of unpainted wood

as consonants scroll

off my shaving plane

in the fragrant Creole

of their native grain;

from a trestle bench

they'd curl at my foot,

C's, R's, with a French

or West African root

from a dialect throng-

ing, its leaves unread