The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (7 page)

Walking, I'd stop and turn. What had I heard,

wheezing behind my heel with whitening breath?

Nothing. Sixth Avenue yawned wet and wide.

The night was white. There was nowhere to hide.

CRUSOE'S JOURNAL

I looked now upon the world as a thing remote, which I had nothing to do with, no expectation from, and, indeed, no desires about. In a word, I had nothing indeed to do with it, nor was ever like to have; so I thought it looked as we may perhaps look upon it hereafter, viz., as a place I had lived in but was come out of it; and well might I say, as Father Abraham to Dives, “Between me and thee is a great gulf fixed.”

Robinson Crusoe

 

Once we have driven past Mundo Nuevo trace

             safely to this beach house

perched between ocean and green, churning forest

             the intellect appraises

objects surely, even the bare necessities

             of style are turned to use,

like those plain iron tools he salvages

             from shipwreck, hewing a prose

as odorous as raw wood to the adze,

             out of such timbers

came our first book, our profane Genesis

             whose Adam speaks that prose

which, blessing some sea-rock, startles itself

             with poetry's surprise,

in a green world, one without metaphors;

             like Christofer he bears

in speech mnemonic as a missionary's

             the Word to savages,

its shape an earthen, water-bearing vessel's

             whose sprinkling alters us

into good Fridays who recite His praise,

             parroting our master's

style and voice, we make his language ours,

             converted cannibals

we learn with him to eat the flesh of Christ.

All shapes, all objects multiplied from his,

             our ocean's Proteus;

in childhood, his derelict's old age

             was like a god's. (Now pass

in memory, in serene parenthesis,

             the cliff-deep leeward coast

of my own island filing past the noise

             of stuttering canvas,

some noon-struck village, Choiseul, Canaries,

             with crocodile canoes,

a savage settlement from Henty's novels,

             Marryat or R.L.S.,

with one boy signaling at the sea's edge,

             though what he cried is lost;)

So time that makes us objects, multiplies

             our natural loneliness.

For the hermetic skill, that from earth's clays

             shapes something without use,

and separate from itself, lives somewhere else,

             sharing with every beach

a longing for those gulls that cloud the cays

             with raw, mimetic cries,

never surrenders wholly for it knows

             it needs another's praise

like hoar, half-cracked Ben Gunn, until it cries

             at last, “O happy desert!”

and learns again the self-creating peace

             of islands. So from this house

that faces nothing but the sea, his journals

             assume a household use,

We learn to shape from them, where nothing was

             the language of a race,

and since the intellect demands its mask

             that sun-cracked, bearded face

provides us with the wish to dramatize

             ourselves at nature's cost,

to attempt a beard, to squint through the sea-haze,

             posing as naturalists,

drunks, castaways, beachcombers, all of us

             yearn for those fantasies

of innocence, for our faith's arrested phase

             when the clear voice

startled itself saying “water, heaven, Christ,”

             hoarding such heresies as

God's loneliness moves in His smallest creatures.

CRUSOE'S ISLAND

    
I

The chapel's cowbell

Like God's anvil

Hammers ocean to a blinding shield;

Fired, the sea-grapes slowly yield

Bronze plates to the metallic heat.

Red, corrugated iron

Roofs roar in the sun.

The wiry, ribbed air

Above earth's open kiln

Writhes like a child's vision

Of hell, but nearer, nearer.

Below, the picnic plaid

Of Scarborough is spread

To a blue, perfect sky,

Dome of our hedonist philosophy.

Bethel and Canaan's heart

Lie open like a psalm.

I labor at my art.

My father, God, is dead.

Past thirty now I know

To love the self is dread

Of being swallowed by the blue

Of heaven overhead

Or rougher blue below.

Some lesion of the brain

From art or alcohol

Flashes this fear by day:

As startling as his shadow

Grows to the castaway.

Upon this rock the bearded hermit built

His Eden:

Goats, corn-crop, fort, parasol, garden,

Bible for Sabbath, all the joys

But one

Which sent him howling for a human voice.

Exiled by a flaming sun

The rotting nut, bowled in the surf

Became his own brain rotting from the guilt

Of heaven without his kind,

Crazed by such paradisal calm

The spinal shadow of a palm

Built keel and gunwale in his mind.

The second Adam since the fall

His germinal

Corruption held the seed

Of that congenital heresy that men fail

According to their creed.

Craftsman and castaway

All heaven in his head,

He watched his shadow pray

Not for God's love but human love instead.

    
II

We came here for the cure

Of quiet in the whelk's center,

From the fierce, sudden quarrel,

From kitchens where the mind

Like bread, disintegrates in water,

To let a salt sun scour

The brain as harsh as coral

To bathe like stones in wind,

To be, like beast or natural object, pure.

That fabled, occupational

Compassion, supposedly inherited with the gift

Of poetry had fed

With a rat's thrift on faith, shifted

Its trust to corners, hoarded

Its mania like bread,

Its brain a white, nocturnal bloom

That in a drunken, moonlit room

Saw my son's head

Swaddled in sheets

Like a lopped nut, lolling in foam.

O love, we die alone!

I am borne by the bell

Backward to boyhood

To the gray wood

Spire, harvest and marigold,

To those whom a cruel

Just God could gather

To His blue breast, His beard

A folding cloud,

As He gathered my father.

Irresolute and proud,

I can never go back.

I have lost sight of hell,

Of heaven, of human will,

My skill

Is not enough,

I am struck by this bell

To the root.

Crazed by a racking sun,

I stand at my life's noon,

On parched, delirious sand

My shadow lengthens.

    
III

Art is profane and pagan,

The most it has revealed

Is what a crippled Vulcan

Beat on Achilles' shield.

By these blue, changing graves

Fanned by the furnace blast

Of heaven, may the mind

Catch fire till it cleaves

Its mold of clay at last.

Now Friday's progeny,

The brood of Crusoe's slave,

Black little girls in pink

Organdy, crinolines,

Walk in their air of glory

Beside a breaking wave;

Below their feet the surf

Hisses like tambourines.

At dusk when they return

For vespers, every dress

Touched by the sun will burn

A seraph's, an angel's,

And nothing I can learn

From art or loneliness

Can bless them as the bell's

Transfiguring tongue can bless.

CODICIL

Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,

one a hack's hired prose, I earn

my exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles,

tan, burn

to slough off

this love of ocean that's self-love.

To change your language you must change your life.

I cannot right old wrongs.

Waves tire of horizon and return.

Gulls screech with rusty tongues

Above the beached, rotting pirogues,

they were a venomous beaked cloud at Charlotteville.

Once I thought love of country was enough,

now, even I chose, there's no room at the trough.

I watch the best minds root like dogs

for scraps of favor.

I am nearing middle-

age, burnt skin

peels from my hand like paper, onion-thin,

like Peer Gynt's riddle.

At heart there's nothing, not the dread

of death. I know too many dead.

They're all familiar, all in character,

even how they died. On fire,

the flesh no longer fears that furnace mouth

of earth,

that kiln or ashpit of the sun,

nor this clouding, unclouding sickle moon

whitening this beach again like a blank page.

All its indifference is a different rage.

FROM

The Gulf

(1969)

THE CORN GODDESS

Silence asphalts the highway, our tires hiss

like serpents, of God's touching weariness,

his toil unfinished, while in endless rows

the cabbage fields, like lilies, spin in air;

his flags rot, and the monkey god's nerves rattle

lances in rage. Human rags tend cattle

more venal every year, and chrome-tooled cars

lathered like estate horses nose the shallows.

At dusk the Presbyterian cattle-bell

collects lean, charcoal-brittle elders,

stalled in their vision of a second hell,

as every crossroad crucifies its sect

of bell-voiced, bell-robed sisters, gold-gelders

baying for self-respect. But, over braziers

of roasting corn while their shucked souls

evenly char, the sybil glows. Her seal's skin

shines like drizzled asphalt, in that grin

all knowledges burnt out. Jeer, but their souls

catch an elation fiercer than your desolate

envy; from their fanned, twisting coals

their shrieks crackle and fly. The sparks

are sorrowing upward though they die.

from
METAMORPHOSES

    
MOON

Resisting poetry I am becoming a poem.

O lolling Orphic head silently howling,

my own head rises from its surf of cloud.

Slowly my body grows a single sound,

slowly I become

a bell,

an oval, disembodied vowel,

I grow, an owl,

an aureole, white fire.

I watch the moonstruck image of the moon burn,

a candle mesmerized by its own aura,

and turn

my hot, congealing face, towards that forked mountain

which wedges the drowned singer.

That frozen glare,

that morsured, classic petrifaction.

Haven't you sworn off such poems for this year,

and no more on the moon?

Why are you gripped by demons of inaction?

Whose silence shrieks so soon?

JUNTA

The sun's brass clamp electrifies a skull

kept shone since he won Individual

of the Year, their first year on the road,

as Vercingetorix And His Barbarous Horde;

lurching from lounge to air-conditioned lounge

with the crazed soldier ant's logistic skill

of pause as capture, he stirs again to plunge,

his brain's antennae on fire through the black ants

milling and mulling through each city fissure;

banlon-cool limers, shopgirls, Civil Servants.

“Caesar,” the hecklers siegheil, “Julius Seizure!”

He fakes an epileptic, clenched salute,

taking their tone, is no use getting vex,

some day those brains will squelch below his boot

as sheaves of swords hoist Vercingetorix!

So that day bursts to bugling cocks, the sun's gong

clangs the coup, a church, a bank explodes

and, bullet-headed with his cow-horned gang

of marabunta hordes, he hits the road.

Dust powders the white dead in Woodford Square;

his black, khaki canaille, panting for orders,

surge round the kiosk, then divide to hear

him clomp up silence louder than the roars

of rapine. Silence. Dust. A microphone

crackles the tinfoil quiet. On its paws

the beast mills, basilisk-eyed, for its one

voice. He clears his gorge and feels the bile

of rhetoric rising. Enraged that every clause

“por la patria, la muerte” resounds

the same, he fakes a frothing fit and shows his wounds,

while, as the cold sheaves heighten, his eyes fix

on one black, bush-haired convict's widening smile.