The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (37 page)

in the thud of wind like a cape shaping the car,

the tormented olives smaller than you thought they were,

as a sadness, not incalculable but measured,

its distance diminishing in the humming coil of the road

widens astonishing Granada. This is how to read

Spain, backwards, like memory, like Arabic, mountains

and predicted cypresses confirming that the only tense

is the past, where a sin lies that is all of Spain's.

It writhes in the olive's trunk, it gapes in the ochre

echo of a stone hillside, like a well's dry mouth: “Lorca.”

The black olives of his eyes, the bread dipped in its saucer.

A man in a torn white shirt with its wine-stains,

a black suit, and leather soles stumbling on the stones.

You cannot stand outside, apart from it, and the other ones

on the open hill, the staccato of carbine-fire,

of the dancer's heels, the O of the flamenco singer

and the mouth of the guitar; they are there in Goya,

the clown that dies, eyes open, in
The Third of May

where the heart of Spain is. Why Spain will always suffer.

Why do they return from this distance, this far away

from the cypresses, the mountains, the olives turning silver?

 

    
III   READING MACHADO

The barren frangipani branches uncurl their sweet threat

out of the blue. More echoes than blossoms, they stun the senses

like the nocturnal magnolia, white as the pages I read,

with the prose printed on the left bank of the page

and, on the right, the shale-like speckle of stanzas

and the seam, like a stream stitching its own language.

The Spanish genius bristling like thistles. What provoked this?

The pods of a dry season, heat rippling in cadenzas,

black ruffles and the arc of a white throat?

All echoes, all associations and inferences,

the tone of Antonio Machado, even in translation,

the verb in the earth, the nouns in the stones, the walls,

all inference, all echo, all association,

the blue distance of Spain from bougainvillea verandas

when white flowers sprout from the branches of a bull's horns,

the white frangipani's flowers like the white souls of nuns.

Ponies that move under pines in the autumn mountains,

onions, and rope, the silvery bulbs of garlic, the creak

of saddles and fast water quarreling over clear stones,

from our scorched roads in August rise these heat-cracked stanzas,

all inferences, all echoes, associations.

    
IV

for Esperanza Lerdá

Storks, ravens, cranes, what do these disparate auguries mean?

The sky ripened then dulled, then across the chimneys

the storks, their legs dangling as if broken, found their nests

over the arches of Alcalá, the cobbled city of Cervantes,

arches and punishing bells, on your wrist a thought rests

like a settling crow. Your death is closer than an ant, as

you look to the day ahead, bountiful, abundant.

I look up at the dry hill in the sun, each shadow a thought.

I imagine my absence; the fatigued leaves will

fall one by one into soundless brown grass in drought

and the raw ochre patches where lilac laces the hill

and the shadows returning exactly some May as they ought,

but with the seam of air I inhabited closed.

A gusting of orange petals crosses Santa Cruz

in a bridal breeze; here combers bouquet in white lace,

and I offer these lines with their thorns to whoever can use

them, the scales of my two islands swayed into place.

I bequeath my eyes to whoever admires Paramín,

my ears to the caves of Las Cuevas, when the silver knot is loosed

from nerve-strings and arteries, and cloud-pages close in amen.

21   SIX FICTIONS

    
I

This is the first fiction: the biblical plague of dragonflies

crossing the plumes of bamboo after the huge rains

that we thought were locusts, they were there; what magnifies

their importance is plot, to believe that the fiction begins

with the lift of astonishing insects from the very first line.

Horses stamp at the lassos of gnats, and the sweet odor

of their dung mixes with the smell of grass drying,

and I watch the mountains streaming from the sunlit door.

There is symmetry in all this, or all fiction is lying.

Pray for a life without plot, a day without narrative,

but the dragonflies drift like a hive of adjectives loosened

from a dictionary, like bees from the hive of the brain,

and as time passes, they pass, their number is lessened

and their meaning no more than that they come after rain.

They come after rain to this valley when the bamboos have calmed

themselves after threshing and plunging like the manes of horses,

they come with the pestilential host of a prophet armed

for the day of the locust. What summoned their force is

nowhere to be seen, yet the frightening hum of their wings

cruising the garden carries echoes of ancient affliction,

revisitants who have come to remind us of our first wrongs,

grenade-eyed and dragonish; neither science nor fiction.

    
II

He believed the pain of exile would have passed

by now, but he had stopped counting the days and months,

and lately the seasons, given the promise that nothing can last

for a whole life, much less forever, that if we have suffered once

but thoroughly, a particular loss, we would not suffer it again

in the same way, so that what he counted were the years

whose number he did not repeat aloud, but he knew if rain

fell and after rain the wind swept the plazas, his tears

dried as quickly as the fading sheets of concrete

facing the national park and its bicycle paths

and the drizzle-like silver of wheels, that the heat

of summer in one of the kindest cities of Europe was

nothing compared to the inferno of August at home.

He mutters to himself in the old colonial diction

and he heard how he still said home not only to appease

his hope that he would be there soon, but that he would come

to the rail of the liner and see the serrated indigo ridges

that had waited for him, and all the familiar iron

roofs, and even the vultures balancing on the hot ledges

of the Customs House. He wears black, his hair has grown

white, and he has placed his cane on a bench in the park.

There is no such person. I myself am a fiction,

remembering the hills of the island as it gets dark.

    
III

He carried his tenebrous thoughts in and out of shadows

like a leopard changing its covert, to find a speckled quiet

appropriate to contemplation, as its yellow eyes close

on a needling yawn, replete with nothing, with emptiness, yet

loaded with its pumping, measured peace, like a herd of zebras

carrying the striped shade of grasses to a watering hole

but in the steadiness of heads and hooves, their fetlocks brace

for a sudden sidewise clatter. The leaves and shadows heal;

all lie down benignly in the thorn-trees' satisfaction,

lion and jackal, when noon is the peaceable kingdom;

they stretch, shudder, and are still, the only action

in their slowly swiveling eyes. Here under the fierce dome

of a cloudless August he feels how the languor that climbs

from stomach to slow-lidding eyes and leonine yawn

shudders in his haunches and crawls along his limbs,

a peace that goes as far back as the umbrella thorn-trees

into a quiet close to Eden, before a dark thought like a cloud

raced over the open grass, and his trotting stalker, lioness,

crouched and, shifting her poise, pounced! Then a small crowd

of hopping, opening vultures and the speckled hyenas.

    
IV

He endured a purgatorial November, but one

without fire, whose smoke was only the loaded mist

that steamed through the charred woods, where a round sun

peered dimly as it travelled and where shadows were amazed

at any brightness on sidewalk and on ochre wall,

but which the law of seasons faded and slowly erased

as an error. He moved through its crowds like a criminal,

summoning what grace he could find in the lightest

gesture, the casual phrase, holding a cup, eating

without hanging his head, and on those, the brightest

hours that sometimes lanced the gray light, repeating

to himself that this was not his climate or people, no season

as depleting as this, and beyond this there was the sea

and the unrelenting mercy of light, a window in the prison

his mind had become; that suffering was easy

if, beyond it, there was the truth of another sky

and different trees that fitted his nature, his hand

that for all of its sixty-five years had tried not to lie

any more than a crab could travelling its page of sand.

The days would darken with cold, more leaves would die

behind fences, the fog thicken, but beyond them was the good island.

    
V

He could hear the dogs in the distance, and their baying

led him towards the chapel that rose off the road,

but he did not enter it. This was beneath praying,

and the black dogs were only his thoughts from nights of dread

through the rigid and guerdoning forests of Santa Cruz;

his heart hobbles, bubbling blood like berries on its trail,

three or four palms crest there, and the crazed parrot-cries

are like the clatter of testimony from an obscene trial,

but they cross the rose sky and fade, and a solace returns.

In the hot, hollow afternoon a shout crosses the valley,

a hawk glides, and behind the flame of the immortelle a hill burns

with a flute of blue smoke; this is all there is of value.

O leaves, multiply the days of my absence and subtract them

from the humiliation of punishment, the ambush of disgrace

for what they are: excrement not worthy of any theme,

not the burl and stance of a cedar or the pliant grass,

only the scorn of indifference, of weathering out abuse

like the lissome plunge of branches tossing with the grace

of endurance, bowing under the way that bamboo obeys

the horizontal gusts of the rain, not as martyrdom

but as natural compliance; below him was a house

where without a wound he was more than welcome,

and kind dogs came to the gate jostling for his voice.

 

    
VI   MANET IN MARTINIQUE

The teak plant was as stiff as rubber near the iron railing

of the pink veranda at whose center was an arch

that entered a tenebrous, overstuffed salon with the usual sailing

ship in full course through wooden waves, shrouds stiff with starch,

and around, in dolefully tinted cosmetic photos,

a French family: bearded grandpapa and black-bunned
grandmère

pillows with tassels, porcelains, souvenirs like prose

that had lost its bouquet, Lafcadio Hearn, the usual Flaubert,

more travel memoirs, a Japanese vase, one white rose

of immortal wax. My host left to make a phone-call.

I felt an immeasurable sadness for the ship's sails,

for the stagnant silence of objects, the mute past they carry,

for the glimpse of Fort-de-France harbor through lattices,

“
Notre âme est un trois-mâts cherchant son Icarie
”—

Baudelaire on the wandering soul. This was in the false métropole

of Martinique. A fan stirred one of Maupassant's tales.

Where was the spirit of the house? Some cliché with kohl-

lined eyes, lips like Manet's bougainvillea petals.

I sensed the salon, windows closed, was trying to recall

all it could of Paris; I turned from the wall, and there,

hollow with longing as the wall's gilt-framed clipper,

near stiff rubber leaves in the charged afternoon air,

unsheathed from her marble foot, a red satin slipper.

22

I am considering a syntax the color of slate,

with glints of quartz for occasional perceptions and

winking mica for wit. I am not weary of the elate,

but gray days are useful, without reflection, like the drained sand

just after twilight. I am considering the avoidance of

an excitable vobabulary or a melodramatic pause like death,

or the remorse of loss or not; there is no loss without love,

but this too must be muted, like the metronome of breath

close to the even heart. Pause. Resume. Pause. Once more.

A gray horse, riderless, grazes where the grass is gone,

a slate-colored horse wrenching tufts on a cold shore,

and the last lurid gash going, the sun closing its house

for the night, and everything near extinction. Even remorse.

Especially remorse and regret and longing and noise,

except the waves in the dark that strangely console

with their steadiness. They are bringing the same old news,

not only the death-rattle of surf on the gargling shoal,

but something further than the last wave, the smell

of pungent weed, of dead crabs whose casings whiten,

and further than the stars that have always looked too small

for those infinite spaces (Pascal) that used to frighten.