The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (5 page)

The strength of one frail hand in a dim room

Somewhere in Brooklyn, patient and assured,

Restores my sacred duty to the Word.

“Home, home,” she can write, with such short time to live,

Alone as she spins the blessings of her years;

Not withered of beauty if she can bring such tears,

Nor withdrawn from the world that breaks its lovers so;

Heaven is to her the place where painters go,

All who bring beauty on frail shell or horn,

There was all made, thence their lux-mundi drawn,

Drawn, drawn, till the thread is resilient steel,

Lost though it seems in darkening periods,

And there they return to do work that is God's.

So this old lady writes, and again I believe,

I believe it all, and for no man's death I grieve.

BRISE MARINE

K with quick laughter, honey skin and hair

and always money. In what beach shade, what year

has she so scented with her gentleness

I cannot watch bright water but think of her

and that fine morning when she sang o' rare

Ben's lyric of “the bag o' the bee”

and “the nard in the fire”

                                        “nard in the fire”

against the salty music of the sea

the fresh breeze tangling each honey tress

                                        and what year was the fire?

Girls' faces dim with time, Andreuille all gold …

Sunday. The grass peeps through the breaking pier.

Tables in the trees, like entering Renoir.

Maintenant je n'ai plus ni fortune, ni pouvoir
 …

But when the light was setting through thin hair,

holding whose hand by what trees, what old wall.

Two honest women, Christ, where are they gone?

Out of that wonder, what do I most recall?

The darkness closing round a fisherman's oar.

The sound of water gnawing at bright stone.

ANADYOMENE

The shoulders of a shining nereid

Glide in warm shallows, nearing the white sand;

Thighs tangled in the golden weed,

Did fin flash there, or woman's hand?

Weed dissolves to burnished hair,

Foam now, where was milk-white breast,

Did thigh or dolphin cleave the air?

Half-woman and half-fish, or best

Both fish and woman, let them keep

Their elusive mystery.

Hurt, the wound shuts itself in sleep,

As water closes round the oar,

And as no oar can wound the sea.

Confused, the senses waken

To a renewed delight,

She to herself has taken

Sea-music and sea-light.

A SEA-CHANTEY

    
Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,

    
Luxe, calme, et volupté.

 

Anguilla, Adina,

Antigua, Cannelles,

Andreuille, all the l's,

Voyelles, of the liquid Antilles,

The names tremble like needles

Of anchored frigates,

Yachts tranquil as lilies,

In ports of calm coral,

The lithe, ebony hulls

Of strait-stitching schooners,

The needles of their masts

That thread archipelagoes

Refracted embroidery

In feverish waters

Of the sea-farer's islands,

Their shorn, leaning palms,

Shaft of Odysseus,

Cyclopic volcanoes,

Creak their own histories,

In the peace of green anchorage;

Flight, and Phyllis,

Returned from the Grenadines,

Names entered this Sabbath,

In the port-clerk's register;

Their baptismal names,

The sea's liquid letters,

Repos donnez a cils …

And their blazing cargoes

Of charcoal and oranges;

Quiet, the fury of their ropes.

Daybreak is breaking

On the green chrome water,

The white herons of yachts

Are at Sabbath communion,

The histories of schooners

Are murmured in coral,

Their cargoes of sponges

On sandspits of islets

Barques white as white salt

Of acrid Saint Maarten,

Hulls crusted with barnacles,

Holds foul with great turtles,

Whose ship-boys have seen

The blue heave of Leviathan,

A sea-faring, Christian,

And intrepid people.

Now an apprentice washes his cheeks

With salt water and sunlight.

In the middle of the harbor

A fish breaks the Sabbath

With a silvery leap.

The scales fall from him

In a tinkle of church-bells;

The town streets are orange

With the week-ripened sunlight,

Balanced on the bowsprit

A young sailor is playing

His grandfather's chantey

On a trembling mouth-organ.

The music curls, dwindling

Like smoke from blue galleys,

To dissolve near the mountains.

The music uncurls with

The soft vowels of inlets,

The christening of vessels,

The titles of portages,

The colors of sea-grapes,

The tartness of sea-almonds,

The alphabet of church-bells,

The peace of white horses,

The pastures of ports,

The litany of islands,

The rosary of archipelagoes,

Anguilla, Antigua,

Virgin of Guadeloupe,

And stone-white Grenada

Of sunlight and pigeons,

The amen of calm waters,

The amen of calm waters,

The amen of calm waters.

IN A GREEN NIGHT

The orange tree, in various light,

Proclaims perfected fables now

That her last season's summer height

Bends from each overburdened bough.

She has her winters and her spring,

Her molt of leaves, which in their fall

Reveal, as with each living thing,

Zones truer than the tropical.

For if by night each golden sun

Burns in a comfortable creed,

By noon harsh fires have begun

To quail those splendors which they feed.

Or mixtures of the dew and dust

That early shone her orbs of brass,

Mottle her splendors with the rust

She sought all summer to surpass.

By such strange, cyclic chemistry

That dooms and glories all at once

As green yet aging orange tree,

The mind enspheres all circumstance.

No Florida loud with citron leaves

With crystal falls to heal this age

Shall calm the darkening fear that grieves

The loss of visionary rage.

Or if Time's fires seem to blight

The nature ripening into art,

Not the fierce noon or lampless night

Can quail the comprehending heart.

The orange tree, in various light

Proclaims that fable perfect now

That her last season's summer height

Bends from each overburdened bough.

ISLANDS

for Margaret

Merely to name them is the prose

Of diarists, to make you a name

For readers who like travellers praise

Their beds and beaches as the same;

But islands can only exist

If we have loved in them. I seek

As climate seeks its style, to write

Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight,

Cold as the curled wave, ordinary

As a tumbler of island water;

Yet, like a diarist, thereafter

I savor their salt-haunted rooms,

(Your body stirring the creased sea

Of crumpled sheets), whose mirrors lose

Our huddled, sleeping images,

Like words which love had hoped to use

Erased with the surf's pages.

So, like a diarist in sand,

I mark the peace with which you graced

Particular islands, descending

A narrow stair to light the lamps

Against the night surf's noises, shielding

A leaping mantle with one hand,

Or simply scaling fish for supper,

Onions, jack-fish, bread, red snapper;

And on each kiss the harsh sea-taste,

And how by moonlight you were made

To study most the surf's unyielding

Patience though it seems a waste.

FROM

The Castaway

(1965)

THE CASTAWAY

The starved eye devours the seascape for the morsel

Of a sail.

The horizon threads it infinitely.

Action breeds frenzy. I lie,

Sailing the ribbed shadow of a palm,

Afraid lest my own footprints multiply.

Blowing sand, thin as smoke,

Bored, shifts its dunes.

The surf tires of its castles like a child.

The salt-green vine with yellow trumpet-flower,

A net, inches across nothing.

Nothing: the rage with which the sandfly's head is filled.

Pleasures of an old man:

Morning: contemplative evacuation, considering

The dried leaf, nature's plan.

In the sun, the dog's feces

Crusts, whitens like coral.

We end in earth, from earth began.

In our own entrails, genesis.

If I listen I can hear the polyp build,

The silence thwanged by two waves of the sea.

Cracking a sea-louse, I make thunder split.

Godlike, annihilating Godhead, art

And self, I abandon

Dead metaphors: the almond's leaflike heart,

The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut

Hatching

Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly and maggot,

That green wine bottle's gospel choked with sand,

Labeled, a wrecked ship,

Clenched seawood nailed and white as a man's hand.

THE SWAMP

Gnawing the highway's edges, its black mouth

Hums quietly: “Home, come home…”

Behind its viscous breath the very word “growth”

Grows fungi, rot;

White mottling its root.

More dreaded

Than canebrake, quarry, or sun-shocked gully-bed

Its horrors held Hemingway's hero rooted

To sure, clear shallows.

It begins nothing. Limbo of cracker convicts, Negroes.

Its black mood

Each sunset takes a smear of your life's blood.

Fearful, original sinuosities! Each mangrove sapling

Serpentlike, its roots obscene

As a six-fingered hand,

Conceals within its clutch the mossbacked toad,

Toadstools, the potent ginger-lily,

Petals of blood,

The speckled vulva of the tiger-orchid;

Outlandish phalloi

Haunting the travellers of its one road.

Deep, deeper than sleep

Like death,

Too rich in its decrescence, too close of breath,

In the fast-filling night, note

How the last bird drinks darkness with its throat,

How the wild saplings slip

Backward to darkness, go black

With widening amnesia, take the edge

Of nothing to them slowly, merge

Limb, tongue and sinew into a knot

Like chaos, like the road

Ahead.

A VILLAGE LIFE

for John Robertson

    
I

Through the wide, gray loft window,

I watched that winter morning, my first snow

crusting the sill, puzzle the black,

nuzzling tom. Behind my back

a rime of crud glazed my cracked coffee-cup,

a snowfall of torn poems piling up

heaped by a rhyming spade.

Starved, on the prowl,

I was a frightened cat in that gray city.

I floated, a cat's shadow, through the black wool

sweaters, leotards, and parkas of the fire-haired,

snow-shouldered Greenwich Village mädchen,

homesick, my desire

crawled across snow

like smoke, for its lost fire.

All that winter I haunted

your house on Hudson Street, a tiring friend,

demanding to be taken in, drunk, and fed.

I thought winter would never end.

I cannot imagine you dead.

But that stare, frozen,

a frosted pane in sunlight,

gives nothing back by letting nothing in,

your kindness or my pity.

No self-reflection lies

within those silent, ice-blue irises,

whose image is some snow-locked mountain lake

in numb Montana.

And since that winter I have learnt to gaze

on life indifferently as through a pane of glass.

    
II

Your image rattled on the subway glass

is my own death-mask in an overcoat;

under New York, the subterranean freight

of human souls, locked in an iron cell,

station to station cowed with swaying calm,

thunders to its end, each in its private hell,

each plumped, prime bulk still swinging by its arm

upon a hook. You're two years dead. And yet

I watch that silence spreading through our souls:

that horn-rimmed midget who consoles

his own deformity with Sartre on Genet.

Terror still eats the nerves, the Word

is gibberish, the plot Absurd.

The turnstile slots, like addicts, still consume

obols and aspirin, Charon in his grilled cell

grows vague about our crime, our destination.

Not all are silent, or endure

the enormity of silence; at one station,

somewhere off 33rd and Lexington,

a fur-wrapped matron screamed above the roar

of rattling iron. Nobody took her on,

we looked away. Such scenes

rattle our trust in nerves tuned like machines.

All drives as you remember it, the pace