The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (42 page)

claim action as illusion, from despair.

Because if both Venetians painted frescoes,

then what I thought I saw had to be panels

or canvas seamed, but still the image grows

with more conviction there and nowhere else.

Then how could I be standing in two places,

first, in a Venice I had never seen,

despite its sharpness of prong-bearded faces,

then at the Metropolitan? What did the dog mean?

    
2

Over the years I abandoned the claim

of a passion which, if it existed, naturally faded

from my island Pissarro, rooted in his fame,

a smoke wisp on the Seine, his exile dictated

by a fiction that sought from him discipleship

in light and affection for our shacks and ridges

touched by crepuscular orange. No black steamship

roiled in its wake a pain that was ever his;

no loss of St. Thomas. Our characters are blent

not by talent but by climate and calling. Cézanne's

signing his work,
Pupil of Pissarro
, all I meant

was only affection's homage, and affection's

envy, benign as dusk arching over Charlotte Amalie,

and night, when centuries vanish, or when dawns rise

on the golden alleys of Paris, Castries, or Italy,

ceilings of Tiepolo or Veronese in changing skies.

A change of Muses, a change of light and customs,

of crooked tracks for avenues of bricks for straw,

change fiddling orchestras for firelit drums,

they were never his people, we were there to draw.

They, and everything else. Our native grace

is still a backward bending, out of fashion

in theaters and galleries, an island race

damned to the provincialities of passion.

My Muses pass, in their earth-rooted stride,

basket-balancing illiterate women, their load,

an earthen vessel, its springs of joy inside,

pliant shadows striding down a mountain road.

In evening light a frangipani's antlers

darken over spume crests and become invisible

even to the full moon, and as dusk always does

for my eyes, and his lights bud on the black hill

to a cobbled brook's tireless recitation

in voluble pebbles as lucent as the ones

under the soles of the Baptist. Morning sun

on the corrugating stream over clean stones.

    
3

I thoroughly understand all he endures:

that sense of charity to a gifted stranger,

open to their gatherings, these voluble bores,

these brilliant jeerers. Friends are a danger,

proud of the tribal subtleties of their

suffering, its knot of meaning, of blood on the street

for an idea, their pain is privilege, a clear

tradition, proud in triumph, prouder in defeat,

for which they have made a language they share

in intellectual, odorless sweat.

Because they measure evil by the seasons, the clear

death of October, its massacre of leaves,

my monodic climate has no history. I hear

their bright applause for one another's lives.

My fault was ignorance of their History

and my contempt for it, they are my Old Masters,

sunlight and pastures, a tireless sea

with its one tense, one crest where the last was.

No scansions for the seasons, no epochs

for the fast scumbling surf, no dates

or decades for the salt-streaming rocks,

no spires or towers for the sailing frigates.

    
4

One sunrise I felt an ordinary

width of enlightenment in my motel,

at the Ramada Inn in Albany.

I was bent, writing, he was bent as well,

but in nineteenth-century St. Thomas

my body filled his penciled silhouette

in arched Dronningens Gade, my trousers

rolled to the calves, in a sisal hat at the market

which I now tip in my acknowledgment

to him and Mr. Melbye. I'll be born

a hundred years later, but we're both bent

over this paper; I am being drawn,

anonymous as my own ancestor,

my Africa erased, if not his France,

the cobbled sunlit street with a dirt floor

and a quick sketch my one inheritance.

Then one noon where acacias shade the beach

I saw the parody of Tiepolo's hound

in the short salt grass, requiring no research,

but something still unpainted, on its own ground.

I had seen wolfhounds straining on the leash,

their haunches taut on tapestries of Spring;

now I had found, whose azure was a beach,

this tottering, abandoned, houseless thing.

A starved pup trembling by the hard sea,

far from the backyards of a village street.

She cried out in compassion. This was not the

cosseted lapdog in its satin seat,

not even Goya's mutt peering from a fissure

of that infernal chasm in the Prado,

but one that shook with local terror, unsure

of everything, even its shadow.

Its swollen belly was shivering from the heat

of starvation; she moaned and picked it up,

this was the mongrel's heir, not in a great

fresco, but bastardy, abandonment, and hope

and love enough perhaps to help it live

like all its breed, and charity, and care,

we set it down in the village to survive

like all my ancestry. The hound was here.

XXIII

    
1

Teaching in St. Thomas, I had never sought it out,

the Synagogue of Blessing and Peace and Loving Deeds;

in the tourist streets I never gave a thought

to the lost shops that were Dronningens Gade's.

Liners whitened the hectic port, as always,

with the exact, vivid banality

of its postcards; its sunlit stone alleys

hid the lost shul of Charlotte Amalie

but along hot shadowed roads frothing with trees

that led to the steep college, you saw

those customary pastorals of the Antilles,

yards and rust fences that he learnt to draw.

I passed, climbing the hot hill to the college,

him and Fitz Melbye sketching in the shade.

I stopped. I heard their charcoals scratch the page

and their light laughter, but not what they said.

I felt a line enclose my lineaments

and those of other shapes around me too,

a bare dirt yard stacked with old implements,

its patterned leaves, cross-hatched, and as the view

grew backwards quickly, I grew back as well,

my clothes were lighter and my stance as frozen

as the penciled branches of an immortelle.

I shrank into the posture they had chosen,

and felt, in barefoot weightlessness, that choice

transparently defined, straw hat, white cotton

fabric, drawn with a withdrawn voice,

knowing that I, not it, would be forgotten,

keeping my position as a model does,

a young slave, mixed and newly manumitted

last century and a half in old St. Thomas,

my figure now emerging, and it said:

“I and my kind move and not move; your drawing

is edged with a kindness my own lines contain,

but yours may just be love of your own calling

and not for us, since sunshine softens pain,

and we seem painless here, or the marketplace

where I discern myself among its figures,

placid adornments, models of the race.

Mission accomplished, exile-humming niggers

by a bay's harp, in pencil-shaded yards,

here for your practice; but do not leave us here,

for cities where our voices have no words.”

Our figures muttered, but he could not hear,

and to this day they still receive no answer,

even while I scolded his fast-shadowed hand.

“We lost our roots as yours were far Braganza,

but this is our new world, of reeds and sand.”

    
2

Both kept on drawing, and the sketch each made

that leafy afternoon was left unsigned,

holding my body while my spirit strayed

in catalogues, where I can never find

its exact apparition, as I have not found,

though I am sure I saw it, Tiepolo's

or Paolo Veronese's spectral hound,

I hide in white among white cotton Negroes.

I said, “You could have been our pioneer.

Treacherous Gauguin judged you a second-rater.

Yours could have been his archipelago, where

hues are primal, red trees, green shade, blue water.”

He said, “My history veins backwards

to the black soil of my birthplace, whose trees

are a hallowed forest; its leaf-words

uttering the language of my ancestors,

then, for ringed centuries, a helpless dimming

of distance made both bark and language fade

to an alphabet of bats and swallows skimming

the twilight gables of Dronningens Gade.”

The ground doves brood and strut, a swallow calls

from crusted eaves, “Adieu, Monsieur Gauguin”;

the placid afternoons of his pastorals

once he changed islands; both began again,

one on the Île de Paris's moss-blackened walls

with barges creasing the mud-colored Seine,

the other near Tahiti's waterfalls

and flower-haired women in their foaming basin.

Are all the paintings then falsifications

of his real origins, was his island betrayed?

Instead of linden walks and railway stations,

our palms and windmills? Think what he would have made

(but how could he, what color was his Muse,

and what was there to paint except black skins?)

of flame trees in the fields of Santa Cruz;

others took root and stood the difference,

and some even achieved a gratitude

beyond their dislocation, saw what was given

and seized it with possessed delight, made good

from an infernal, disease-riddled heaven,

and let the ship go, trailing its red banner

out of their harbor, like
The Téméraire
.

St. Thomas stays unpainted, every savannah

trails its flame tree that fades. This is not fair.

    
3

Out of the open window, the tall palms dream

of Zion, the thick clouds graze like sheep,

“If I forget thee…” Children share childhood. See him,

one oven-hot afternoon when parents sleep,

stretched out on a straw carpet, an innocent

studying the freight train of a millipede

before the world into which we are sent

stings with each poisonous and different creed.

He saw frigates veer over a smoky hill,

all that, regenerate, recurs; he would have seen

in flower beds a hummingbird's soundless drill

with electric wings, its emerald machine

that darts as soon as it settles, a windmill's

vanes grind to a halt with slavery, the sign

of the season changing on scorched hills

a rainbow's fury, the rain's trawling seine.

He woke, like us, to dew. He watched voracious

caterpillars of rain nibble the horizon,

the sun-dried tamarinds, rusting acacias

grown brittle as firewood for August's oven,

saw puffs of cloud from the fort's rusted cannon,

regiments of slaughtered flowers at the root

of cedars whose huge shade contracts at noon,

smelled earth's scorched iron in the autumnal drought.

Surely he recalled how the remorseless March

sun scorched the hills, the consoling verandas,

the family afternoons on the fretwork porch

in the infinity of Antillean Sundays,

to the soft bellows of a butterfly's wings,

the folded Bible of a velvet moth,

a swaying canna lily's bell that brings

a hymn of black flies to a tablecloth.

Sea-wires on the ceiling, he watched them once,

from the languor of mosquito nets, lying down,

paralyzed by floating afternoons,

the sea, past scorching roofs, a leaden cauldron.

Seasons and paintings cross, reversible,

Hobbema's, the shade-crossed casuarina walk,

the surf foams in apple orchards, cedars talk

poplar, and autumn claims the hills of April.

Grenade sugar-apples, cannonball calabash,

the first breeze and the cool of coming rain

from moaning ground doves, the burnt smell of bush,

the flecks of sea beyond a sugar mill's ruin,

decrepit doors in backyards blowing smoke,

a black pup nosing puddles by a yam fence,

from a dog to the Doge's Palace, drains that mock,

with gliding leaves and reeds, aureate Venice.

Once, near Dinard, a Roman aqueduct

soaring in sea mist, a rook shipped its oars,

in a homecoming glide, with wings it tucked

like brushes that lie crossed after Pontoise.

    
4

These couplets climb the pillared sanctum

of invitation to Salon, Academy,

its lectern for the elect. I thank them

for helping me to cross a treacherous sea

to find a marble hound. Mutely pleading

outside is a black mongrel; I examine a small

bas-relief that shows a wolfhound leading

a straining huntress. Well, it is fall,

so the season flares and fades, a reading,

an opening, a lavish catalogue

of homage to Tiepolo, gossip, breeding.

I think of reeking fish and a black dog.

FROM

The Prodigal

(2004)

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