The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (4 page)

And drinking and don't name me but I think

They catch his wife with two tests up the beach

While he drunk quoting Shelley with “Each

Generation has its
angst
, but we has none”

And wouldn't let a comma in edgewise.

(Black writer chap, one of them Oxbridge guys.)

And it was round this part once that the heart

Of a young child was torn from it alive

By two practitioners of native art,

But that was long before this jump and jive.

    
CHAPTER VII

     
lotus eater …

“Maingot,” the fishermen called that pool blocked by

Increasing filth that piled between ocean

And jungle, with a sighing grove

Of dry bamboo, its roots freckled with light

Like feathers fallen from a migratory sky.

Beyond that, the village. Through urine-stunted trees

A mud path wriggled like a snake in flight.

Franklin gripped the bridge-stanchions with a hand

Trembling with fever. Each spring, memories

Of his own country where he could not die

Assaulted him. He watched the malarial light

Shiver the canes. In the tea-colored pool, tadpoles

Seemed happy in their element. Poor, black souls.

He shook himself. Must breed, drink, rot with motion.

    
CHAPTER VIII

In the Hotel Miranda, 10 Grass St., who fought

The Falangists en la guerra civil, at the hour

Of bleeding light and beads of crimson dew,

This exile, with the wry face of a Jew

Lets dust powder his pamphlets; crook't

Fingers clutch a journal to his shirt.

The eye is glacial; mountainous, the hook'd

Nose down which an ant,
caballo
, rides. Besides

As pious fleas explore a seam of dirt

The sunwashed body, past the age of sweat

Sprawls like a hero, curiously inert.

Near him a dish of olives has turned sour.

Above the children's street cries, a girl plays

A marching song not often sung these days.

    
CHAPTER IX

     
“le loupgarou”

A curious tale that threaded through the town

Through graying women sewing under eaves,

Was how his greed had brought old Le Brun down,

Greeted by slowly shutting jalousies

When he approached them in white-linen suit,

Pink glasses, cork hat, and tap-tapping cane,

A dying man licensed to sell sick fruit,

Ruined by fiends with whom he'd made a bargain.

It seems one night, these Christian witches said,

He changed himself to an Alsatian hound,

A slavering lycanthrope hot on a scent,

But his own watchman dealt the thing a wound

Which howled and lugged its entrails, trailing wet

With blood back to its doorstep, almost dead.

    
CHAPTER X

     
“adieu foulard…”

I watched the island narrowing the fine

Writing of foam around the precipices then

The roads as small and casual as twine

Thrown on its mountains; I watched till the plane

Turned to the final north and turned above

The open channel with the gray sea between

The fishermen's islets until all that I love

Folded in cloud; I watched the shallow green

That broke in places where there would be reef,

The silver glinting on the fuselage, each mile

Dividing us and all fidelity strained

Till space would snap it. Then, after a while

I thought of nothing, nothing, I prayed, would change;

When we set down at Seawell it had rained.

RETURN TO DENNERY, RAIN

Imprisoned in these wires of rain, I watch

This village stricken with a single street,

Each weathered shack leans on a wooden crutch,

Contented as a cripple in defeat.

Five years ago even poverty seemed sweet,

So azure and indifferent was this air,

So murmurous of oblivion the sea,

That any human action seemed a waste

The place seemed born for being buried there.

                          The surf explodes

In scissor-birds hunting the usual fish,

The rain is muddying unpaved inland roads,

So personal grief melts in the general wish.

The hospital is quiet in the rain.

A naked boy drives pigs into the bush.

The coast shudders with every surge. The beach

Admits a beaten heron. Filth and foam.

There in a belt of emerald light, a sail

Plunges and lifts between the crests of reef,

The hills are smoking in the vaporous light,

The rain seeps slowly to the core of grief.

It could not change its sorrows and be home.

It cannot change, though you become a man

Who would exchange compassion for a drink,

Now you are brought to where manhood began

Its separation from “the wounds that make you think.”

And as this rain puddles the sand, it sinks

Old sorrows in the gutter of the mind,

Where is that passionate hatred that would help

The black, the despairing, the poor, by speech alone?

The fury shakes like wet leaves in the wind,

The rain beats on a brain hardened to stone.

For there is a time in the tide of the heart, when

Arrived at its anchor of suffering, a grave

Or a bed, despairing in action, we ask

O God, where is our home? For no one will save

The world from itself, though he walk among men.

On such shores where the foam

Murmurs oblivion of action, though they raise

No cry like herons stoned by the rain.

The passionate exiles believe it, but the heart

Is circled by sorrows, by its horror

And bitter devotion to home.

And the romantic nonsense ends at the bowsprit, shearing

But never arriving beyond the reef-shore foam,

Or the rain cuts us off from heaven's hearing.

Why blame the faith you have lost? Heaven remains

Where it is, in the hearts of these people,

In the womb of their church, though the rain's

Shroud is drawn across its steeple.

You are less than they are, for your truth

Consists of a general passion, a personal need,

Like that ribbed wreck, abandoned since your youth,

Washed over by the sour waves of greed.

The white rain draws its net along the coast,

A weak sun streaks the villages and beaches

And roads where laughing laborers come from shelter,

On heights where charcoal burners heap their days.

Yet in you it still seeps, blurring each boast

Your craft has made, obscuring words and features,

Nor have you changed from all of the known ways

To leave the mind's dark cave, the most

Accursed of God's self-pitying creatures.

POCOMANIA

De shepherd shrieves in Egyptian light,

The Abyssinian sweat has poured

From armpits and the graves of sight,

The black sheep of their blacker Lord.

De sisters shout and lift the floods

Of skirts where bark n' balm take root,

De bredren rattle withered gourds

Whose seeds are the forbidden fruit.

Remorse of poverty, love of God

Leap as one fire; prepare the feast,

Limp now is each divining rod,

Forgotten love, the double beast.

Above the banner and the crowd

The Lamb bleeds on the Coptic cross,

De Judah Lion roars to shroud

The sexual fires of Pentecost.

In jubilation of The Host,

The goatskin greets the bamboo fife

Have mercy on those furious lost

Whose life is praising death in life.

Now the blind beast butts on the wall,

Bodily delirium is death,

Now the worm curls upright to crawl

Between the crevices of breath.

Lower the wick, and fold the eye!

Anoint the shriveled limb with oil!

The waters of the moon are dry,

Derision of the body, toil.

Till Armageddon stains the fields,

And Babylon is yonder green,

Till the dirt-holy roller feels

The obscene breeding the unseen.

Till those black forms be angels white,

And Zion fills each eye.

High overhead the crow of night

Patrols eternity.

PARANG

… THE SECOND CUATROMAN SINGS.

Man, I suck me tooth when I hear

How dem croptime fiddlers lie,

And de wailing, kiss-me-arse flutes

That bring water to me eye!

O, when I t'ink how from young

I wasted time at de fêtes,

I could bawl in a red-eyed rage

For desire turned to regret,

Not knowing the truth that I sang

At parang and la comette.

Boy, every damned tune them tune

Of love that will last forever

Is the wax and the wane of the moon

Since Adam catch body-fever.

I old, so the young crop won't

Have these claws to reap their waist,

But I know “do more” from “don't”

Since the grave cry out “Make haste!”

This banjo world have one string

And all man does dance to that tune:

That love is a place in the bush

With music grieving from far,

As you look past her shoulder and see

Like her one tear afterwards

The falling of a fixed star.

Young men does bring love to disgrace

With remorseful, regretful words,

When flesh upon flesh was the tune

Since the first cloud raise up to disclose

The breast of the naked moon.

A CAREFUL PASSION

    
Hosanna, I build me house, Lawd,

    
De rain come wash it 'way.

                                         
Jamaican song

The Cruise Inn, at the city's edge,

Extends a breezy prospect of the sea

From tables fixed like islands near a hedge

Of foam-white flowers, and to deaden thought,

Marimba medleys from a local band,

To whose gay pace my love now drummed a hand.

I watched an old Greek freighter quitting port.

You hardly smell the salt breeze in this country

Except you come down to the harbor's edge.

Not like the smaller islands to the south.

There the green wave spreads on the printless beach.

I think of wet hair and a grape-red mouth.

The hand which wears her husband's ring, lies

On the table idly, a brown leaf on the sand.

The other brushes off two coupling flies.

“Sometimes I wonder if you've lost your speech.”

Above our heads, the rusty cries

Of gulls revolving in the wind.

Wave after wave of memory silts the mind.

The gulls seem happy in their element.

We are lapped gently in the sentiment

Of a small table by the harbor's edge.

Hearts learn to die well that have died before.

My sun-puffed carcass, its eyes full of sand,

Rolls, spun by breakers on a southern shore.

“This way is best, before we both get hurt.”

Look how I turn there, featureless, inert.

That weary phrase moves me to stroke her hand

While winds play with the corners of her skirt.

Better to lie, to swear some decent pledge,

To resurrect the buried heart again;

To twirl a glass and smile, as in pain,

At a small table by the water's edge.

“Yes, this is best, things might have grown much worse…”

And that is all the truth, it could be worse;

All is exhilaration on the eve,

Especially, when the self-seeking heart

So desperate for some mirror to believe

Finds in strange eyes the old original curse.

So cha cha cha, begin the long goodbyes,

Leave the half-tasted sorrows of each pledge,

As the salt wind brings brightness to her eyes,

At a small table by the water's edge.

I walk with her into the brightening street;

Stores rattling shut, as brief dusk fills the city.

Only the gulls, hunting the water's edge

Wheel like our lives, seeking something worth pity.

A LETTER FROM BROOKLYN

An old lady writes me in a spidery style,

Each character trembling, and I see a veined hand

Pellucid as paper, travelling on a skein

Of such frail thoughts its thread is often broken;

Or else the filament from which a phrase is hung

Dims to my sense, but caught, it shines like steel,

As touch a line, and the whole web will feel.

She describes my father, yet I forget her face

More easily than my father's yearly dying;

Of her I remember small, buttoned boots and the place

She kept in our wooden church on those Sundays

Whenever her strength allowed;

Gray haired, thin voiced, perpetually bowed.

“I am Mable Rawlins,” she writes, “and know both your parents”;

He is dead, Miss Rawlins, but God bless your tense:

“Your father was a dutiful, honest,

Faithful and useful person.”

For such plain praise what fame is recompense?

“A horn-painter, he painted delicately on horn,

He used to sit around the table and paint pictures.”

The peace of God needs nothing to adorn

It, no glory nor ambition.

“He is twenty-eight years buried,” she writes, “he was called home,

And is, I am sure, doing greater work.”