Poetry by Derek Walcott

 

A City’s Death by Fire. 2

Blues 3

Codicil 4

Egypt, Tobago. 5

A Far Cry from Africa. 7

Forest of Europe. 8

In the Virgins 10

Love After Love. 11

Koening of the River 12

Midsummer, Tobago. 14

Parang. 15

Pentecost 16

R.T.S.L (1917-1977) 17

Sabbaths, W.I. 18

The Saddhu of Couva. 19

The Schooner “Flight”. 21

The Sea is History. 32

Winding Up. 34

The Star-Apple Kingdom.. 35

The Star 39


 

A City’s Death by Fire

 

After that hot gospeller has levelled all but the churched sky,

I wrote the tale by tallow of a city's death by fire;

Under a candle's eye, that smoked in tears, I

Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire.

All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales,

Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar;

Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the clouds were bales

Torn open by looting, and white, in spite of the fire.

By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked, why

Should a man wax tears, when his wooden world fails?

In town, leaves were paper, but the hills were a flock of faiths;

To a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a green breath

Rebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails,

Blessing the death and the baptism by fire.

 


Blues

 

Those five or six young guys

lunched on the stoop

that oven-hot summer night

whistled me over. Nice

and friendly. So, I stop.

MacDougal or Christopher

Street in chains of light.

 

A summer festival. Or some

saint's. I wasn't too far from

home, but not too bright

for a nigger, and not too dark.

I figured we were all

one, wop, nigger, jew,

besides, this wasn't Central Park.

I'm coming on too strong? You figure

right! They beat this yellow nigger

black and blue.

 

Yeah. During all this, scared

on case one used a knife,

I hung my olive-green, just-bought

sports coat on a fire plug.

I did nothing. They fought

each other, really. Life

gives them a few kcks,

that's all. The spades, the spicks.

 

My face smashed in, my bloddy mug

pouring, my olive-branch jacket saved

from cuts and tears,

I crawled four flights upstairs.

Sprawled in the gutter, I

remember a few watchers waved

loudly, and one kid's mother shouting

like "Jackie" or "Terry,"

"now that's enough!"

It's nothing really.

They don't get enough love.

 

You know they wouldn't kill

you. Just playing rough,

like young Americans will.

Still it taught me somthing

about love. If it's so tough,

forget it.


Codicil

 

Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,

one a hack's hired prose, I earn

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

 

tan, burn

to slough off

this live 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.

 

One I thought love of country was enough,

now, even if I chose, there is no room at the trough.

 

I watch the best minds rot like dogs

for scraps of flavour.

I am nearing middle

age, burnt skin

peels from my hand like paper, onion-thin,

like Peer Gynt's riddle.

 

At heart there is nothing, not the dread

of death. I know to 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

withering this beach again like a blank page.

 

All its indifference is a different rage.


Egypt, Tobago

 

There is a shattered palm

on this fierce shore,

its plumes the rusting helm-

et of a dead warrior.

 

Numb Antony, in the torpor

stretching her inert

sex near him like a sleeping cat,

knows his heart is the real desert.

 

Over the dunes

of her heaving,

to his heart's drumming

fades the mirage of the legions,

 

across love-tousled sheets,

the triremes fading.

Ar the carved door of her temple

a fly wrings its message.

 

He brushes a damp hair

away from an ear

as perfect as a sleeping child's.

He stares, inert, the fallen column.

 

He lies like a copper palm

tree at three in the afternoon

by a hot sea

and a river, in Egypt, Tobago

 

Her salt marsh dries in the heat

where he foundered

without armor.

He exchanged an empire for her beads of sweat,

 

the uproar of arenas,

the changing surf

of senators, for

this silent ceiling over silent sand -

 

this grizzled bear, whose fur,

moulting, is silvered -

for this quick fox with her

sweet stench. By sleep dismembered,

 

his head

is in Egypt, his feet

in Rome, his groin a desert

trench with its dead soldier.

 

He drifts a finger

through her stiff hair

crisp as a mare's fountaining tail.

Shadows creep up the palace tile.

 

He is too tired to move;

a groan would waken

trumpets, one more gesture

war. His glare,

 

a shield

reflecting fires,

a brass brow that cannot frown

at carnage, sweats the sun's force.

 

It is not the turmoil

of autumnal lust,

its treacheries, that drove

him, fired and grimed with dust,

 

this far, not even love,

but a great rage without

clamor, that grew great

because its depth is quiet;

 

it hears the river

of her young brown blood,

it feels the whole sky quiver

with her blue eyelid.

 

She sleeps with the soft engine of a child,

 

that sleep which scythes

the stalks of lances, fells the

harvest of legions

with nothing for its knives,

that makes Caesars,

 

sputtering at flies,

slapping their foreheads

with the laurel's imprint,

drunkards, comedians.

 

All-humbling sleep, whose peace

is sweet as death,

whose silence has

all the sea's weight and volubility,

 

who swings this globe by a hair's trembling breath.

 

Shattered and wild and

palm-crowned Antony,

rusting in Egypt,

ready to lose the world,

to Actium and sand,

 

everything else

is vanity, but this tenderness

for a woman not his mistress

but his sleeping child.

 

The sky is cloudless. The afternoon is mild.

 

A Far Cry from Africa

 

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt

Of Africa, Kikuyu, quick as flies,

Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.

Corpses are scattered through a paradise.

Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:

"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"

Statistics justify and scholars seize

The salients of colonial policy.

What is that to the white child hacked in bed?

To savages, expendable as Jews?

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break

In a white dust of ibises whose cries

Have wheeled since civilizations dawn

>From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.

The violence of beast on beast is read

As natural law, but upright man

Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.

Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars

Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,

While he calls courage still that native dread

Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

 

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands

Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again

A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,

The gorilla wrestles with the superman.

I who am poisoned with the blood of both,

Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?

I who have cursed

The drunken officer of British rule, how choose

Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?

Betray them both, or give back what they give?

How can I face such slaughter and be cool?

How can I turn from Africa and live?


Forest of Europe

 

The last leaves fell like notes from a piano

and left their ovals echoing in the ear;

with gawky music stands, the winter forest

looks like an empty orchestra, its lines

ruled on these scattered manuscripts of snow.

 

The inlaid copper laurel of an oak

shines though the brown-bricked glass above your head

as bright as whisky, while the wintry breath

of lines from Mandelstam, which you recite,

uncoils as visibly as cigarette smoke.

 

"The rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva."

Under your exile's tongue, crisp under heel,

the gutturals crackle like decaying leaves,

the phrase from Mandelstam circles with light

in a brown room, in barren Oklahoma.

 

There is a Gulag Archipelago

under this ice, where the salt, mineral spring

of the long Trail of Tears runnels these plains

as hard and open as a herdsman's face

sun-cracked and stubbled with unshaven snow.

 

Growing in whispers from the Writers' Congress,

the snow circles like cossacks round the corpse

of a tired Choctaw till it is a blizzard

of treaties and white papers as we lose

sight of the single human through the cause.

 

So every spring these branches load their shelves,

like libraries with newly published leaves,

till waste recycles them—paper to snow—

but, at zero of suffering, one mind

lasts like this oak with a few brazen leaves.

 

As the train passed the forest's tortured icons,

ths floes clanging like freight yards, then the spires

of frozen tears, the stations screeching steam,

he drew them in a single winters' breath

whose freezing consonants turned into stone.

 

He saw the poetry in forlorn stations

under clouds vast as Asia, through districts

that could gulp Oklahoma like a grape,

not these tree-shaded prairie halts but space

so desolate it mocked destinations.

 

Who is that dark child on the parapets

of Europe, watching the evening river mint

its sovereigns stamped with power, not with poets,

the Thames and the Neva rustling like banknotes,

then, black on gold, the Hudson's silhouettes?

 

From frozen Neva to the Hudson pours,

under the airport domes, the echoing stations,

the tributary of emigrants whom exile

has made as classless as the common cold,

citizens of a language that is now yours,

 

and every February, every "last autumn",

you write far from the threshing harvesters

folding wheat like a girl plaiting her hair,

far from Russia's canals quivering with sunstroke,

a man living with English in one room.

 

The tourist archipelagoes of my South

are prisons too, corruptible, and though

there is no harder prison than writing verse,

what's poetry, if it is worth its salt,

but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?

 

From hand to mouth, across the centuries,

the bread that lasts when systems have decayed,

when, in his forest of barbed-wire branches,

a prisoner circles, chewing the one phrase

whose music will last longer than the leaves,

 

whose condensation is the marble sweat

of angels' foreheads, which will never dry

till Borealis shuts the peacock lights

of its slow fan from L.A. to Archangel,

and memory needs nothing to repeat.

 

Frightened and starved, with divine fever

Osip Mandelstam shook, and every

metaphor shuddered him with ague,

each vowel heavier than a boundary stone,

"to the rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva,"

 

but now that fever is a fire whose glow

warms our hands, Joseph, as we grunt like primates

exchanging gutturals in this wintry cave

of a brown cottage, while in drifts outside

mastodons force their systems through the snow.


In the Virgins

 

You can't put in the ground swell of the organ

from the Christiansted, St.Croix, Anglican Church

behind the paratrooper's voice: "Turned cop

after Vietnam. I made thirty jumps."

Bells punish the dead street and pigeons lurch

from the stone belfry, opening their chutes,

circling until the rings of ringing stop.

"Salud!" The paratrooper's glass is raised.

The congregation rises to its feet

like a patrol, with scuffling shoes and boots,

repeating orders as the organ thumps:

"Praise Ye the Lord. The Lord's name be praised."

 

You cannot hear, beyond the quiet harbor,

the breakers cannonading on the bruised

horizon, or the charter engines gunning for

Buck Island. The only war here is a war

of silence between blue sky and sea,

and just one voice, the marching choir's, is raised

to draft new conscripts with the ancient cry

of "Onward, Christian Soldiers," into pews

half-empty still, or like a glass, half-full.

Pinning itself to a cornice, a gull

hangs like a medal from the serge-blue sky.

 

Are these boats all? Is the blue water all?

The rocks surpliced with lace where they are moored,

dinghy, catamaran, and racing yawl,

nodding to the ground swell of "Praise the Lord"?

Wesley and Watts, their evangelical light

lanced down the mine shafts to our chapel pew,

its beam gritted with motes of anthracite

that drifted on us in our chapel benches:

from God's slow-grinding mills in Lancashire,

ash on the dead mired in Flanders' trenches,

as a gray drizzle now defiles the view

 

of this blue harbor, framed in windows where

two yellow palm fronds, jerked by the wind's rain,

agree like horses' necks, and nodding bear,

slow as a hearse, a haze of tasseled rain,

and, as the weather changes in a child,

the paradisal day outside grows dark,

the yachts flutter like moths in a gray jar,

the martial voices fade in thunder, while

across the harbor, like a timid lure,

a rainbow casts its seven-colored arc.

 

Tonight, now Sunday has been put to rest.

Altar lights ride the black glass where the yachts

stiffly repeat themselves and phosphoresce

with every ripple - the wide parking-lots

of tidal affluence - and every mast

sways the night's dial as its needle veers

to find the station which is truly peace.

Like neon lasers shot across the bars

discos blast out the music of the spheres,

and, one by one, science infects the stars.

 

Love After Love

 

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

 

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

 

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

 

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

 

 


Koening of the River

 

Koening knew now there was no one on the river.

Entering its brown mouth choking with lilies

and curtained with midges, Koenig poled the shallop

past the abandoned ferry and the ferry piles

coated with coal dust. Staying aboard, he saw, up

in a thick meadow, a sand-colored mule,

untethered, with no harness, and no signs

of habitation round the ruined factory wheel

locked hard in rust, and through whose spokes the vines

of wild yam leaves leant from overweight;

the wild bananas in the yellowish sunlight

were dugged like aching cows with unmilked fruit.

This was the last of the productive mines.

Only the vegetation here looked right.

A crab of pain scuttled shooting up his foot

and fastened on his neck, at the brain's root.

He felt his reason curling back like parchment

in this fierce torpor. Well, he no longer taxed

and tired what was left of his memory;

he should thank heaven he had escaped the sea,

and anyway, he had demanded to be sent

here with the others - why get this river vexed

with his complaints? Koenig wanted to sing,

suddenly, if only to keep the river company -

this was a river, and Koenig, his name meant King.

They had all caught the missionary fever:

they were prepared to expiate the sins

os savages, to tame them as he would tame this river

subtly, as it flowed, accepting its bends;

he had seen how other missionaries met their ends -

swinging in the wind, like a dead clapper when

a bell is broken, if that sky was a bell -

for treating savages as if they were men,

and frightening them with talk of Heaven and Hell.

But I have forgotten our journey's origins,

mused Koenig, and our purpose. He knew it was noble,

based on some phrase, forgotten, from the Bible,

but he felt bodiless, like a man stumbling from

the pages of a novel, not a forest,

written a hundred years ago. He stroked his uniform,

clogged with the hooked burrs that had tried

to pull him, like the other drowning hands whom

his panic abandoned. The others had died,

like real men, by death. I, Koenig, am a ghost,

ghost-king of rivers. Well, even ghosts must rest.

If he knew he was lost he was not lost.

It was when you pretended that you were a fool.

He banked and leaned tiredly on the pole.

If I'm a character called Koenig, then I

shall dominate my future like a fiction

in which there is a real river and real sky,

so I'm not really tired, and should push on.

 

The lights between the leaves were beautiful,

and, as in that far life, now he was grateful

for any pool of light between the dull, usual

clouds of life: a sunspot haloed his tonsure;

silver and copper coins danced on the river;

his head felt warm - the light danced on his skull

like a benediction. Koenig closed his eyes,

and he felt blessed. It made direction sure.

He leant on the pole. He must push on some more.

He said his name. His voice sounded German,

then he said "river", but what was German

if he alone could hear it? Ich spreche Deutsch

sounded as genuine as his name in English,

Koenig in Deutsch, and, in English, King.

Did the river want to be called anything?

He asked the river. The river said nothing.

 

Around the bend the river poured its silver

like some remorseful mine, giving and giving

everything green and white: white sky, white

water, and the dull green like a drumbeat

of the slow-sliding forest, the green heat;

then, on some sandbar, a mirage ahead:

fabric of muslin sails, spiderweb rigging,

a schooner, foundered on black river mud,

was rising slowly up from the riverbed,

and a top-hatted native reading an inverted

newspaper.

                   "Where's our Queen?" Koenig shouted.

"Where's our Kaiser?"

                                      The nigger disappeared.

Koenig felt that he himself was being read

like the newspaper or a hundred-year-old novel.

"The Queen dead! Kaiser dead!" the voices shouted.

And it flashed through him those trunks were not wood

but that the ghosts of slaughtered Indians stood

there in the mangrroves, their eyes like fireflies

in the green dark, and that like hummingbirds

they sailed rather than ran between the trees.

The river carried him past his shouted words.

The schooner had gone down without a trace.

"There was a time when we ruled everything,"

Koenig sang to his corrugated white reflection.

"The German Eagle and the British Lion,

we ruled worlds wider than this river flows,

worlds with dyed elephants, with tassled howdahs,

tigers that carried the striped shade when they rose

from their palm coverts; men shall not see these days

again; our flags sank with the sunset on the dhows

of Egypt; we ruled rivers as huge as the Nile,

the Ganges, and the Congo, we tamed, we ruled

you when our empires reached their blazing peak."

This was a small creek somewhere in the world,

never mind where - victory was in sight.

Koenig laughed and spat in the brown creek.

The mosquitoes now were singing to the night

that rose up from the river, the fog uncurled

under the mangroves. Koenig clenched each fist

around his barge-pole scepter, as a mist

rises from the river and the page goes white.

 

Midsummer, Tobago

 

Broad sun-stoned beaches.

 

White heat.

A green river.

 

A bridge,

scorched yellow palms

 

from the summer-sleeping house

drowsing through August.

 

Days I have held,

days I have lost,

 

days that outgrow, like daughters,

my harbouring arms

 


Parang

 

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!

Oh, when I t'ink how from young

I wasted time at de fetes,

I could bawl in a red-eyed rage

For desire turned to regret,

Not knowing the truth that I sang

At parang and la commette.

Boy, every damned tune them tune

Of love that go 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.

Yound 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.


Pentecost

 

Better a jungle in the head

than rootless concrete.

Better to stand bewildered

by the fireflies' crooked street;

 

winter lamps do not show

where the sidewalk is lost,

nor can these tongues of snow

speak for the Holy Ghost;

 

the self-increasing silence

of words dropped from a roof

points along iron railings,

direction, in not proof.

 

But best is this night surf

with slow scriptures of sand,

that sends, not quite a seraph,

but a late cormorant,

 

whose fading cry propels

through phosphorescent shoal

what, in my childhood gospels,

used to be called the Soul.


R.T.S.L (1917-1977)

 

As for that other thing

which comes when the eyelid is glazed

and the wax gleam

from the unwrinkled forehead

asks no more questions

of the dry mouth,

 

whether they open the heart like a shirt

to release a rage of swallows,

whether the brain

is a library for worms,

on the instant of that knowledge

of the moment

when everything became so stiff,

 

so formal with ironical adieux,

organ and choir,

and I must borrow a black tie,

and at what moment in the oration

shall I break down and weep -

there was the startle of wings

breaking from the closing cage

of your body, your fist unclenching

these pigeons circling serenely

over the page,

 

and,

as the parentheses lock like a gate

1917 to 1977,

the semicircles close to form a face,

a world, a wholeness,

an unbreakable O,

and something that once had a fearful name

walks from the thing that used to wear its name,

transparent, exact representative,

so that we can see through it

churches, cars, sunlight,

and the Boston Common,

not needing any book.

 


Sabbaths, W.I.

 

Those villages stricken with the melancholia of Sunday,

in all of whose ocher streets one dog is sleeping

 

those volcanoes like ashen roses, or the incurable sore

of poverty, around whose puckered mouth thin boys are

selling yellow sulphur stone

 

the burnt banana leaves that used to dance

the river whose bed is made of broken bottles

the cocoa grove where a bird whose cry sounds green and

yellow and in the lights under the leaves crested with

orange flame has forgotten its flute

 

gommiers peeling from sunburn still wrestling to escape the sea

 

the dead lizard turning blue as stone

 

those rivers, threads of spittle, that forgot the old music

 

that dry, brief esplanade under the drier sea almonds

where the dry old men sat

 

watching a white schooner stuck in the branches

and playing draughts with the moving frigate birds

 

those hillsides like broken pots

 

those ferns that stamped their skeletons on the skin

 

and those roads that begin reciting their names at vespers

 

mention them and they will stop

those crabs that were willing to let an epoch pass

those herons like spinsters that doubted their reflections

inquiring, inquiring

 

those nettles that waited

those Sundays, those Sundays

 

those Sundays when the lights at the road's end were an occasion

 

those Sundays when my mother lay on her back

those Sundays when the sisters gathered like white moths

round their street lantern

 

and cities passed us by on the horizon

 


The Saddhu of Couva

 

When sunset, a brass gong,

vibrate through Couva,

is then I see my soul, swiftly unsheathed,

like a white cattle bird growing more small

over the ocean of the evening canes,

and I sit quiet, waiting for it to return

like a hog-cattle blistered with mud,

because, for my spirit, India is too far.

And to that gong

sometimes bald clouds in saffron robes assemble

sacred to the evening,

sacred even to Ramlochan,

singing Indian hits from his jute hammock

while evening strokes the flanks

and silver horns of his maroon taxi,

as the mosquitoes whine their evening mantras,

my friend Anopheles, on the sitar,

and the fireflies making every dusk Divali.

 

I knot my head with a cloud,

my white mustache bristle like horns,

my hands are brittle as the pages of Ramayana.

Once the sacred monkeys multiplied like branches

in the ancient temples: I did not miss them,

because these fields sang of Bengal,

behind Ramlochan Repairs there was Uttar Pradesh;

but time roars in my ears like a river,

old age is a conflagration

as fierce as the cane fires of crop time.

I will pass through these people like a cloud,

they will see a white bird beating the evening sea

of the canes behind Couva,

and who will point it as my soul unsheathed?

Naither the bridegroom in beads,

nor the bride in her veils,

their sacred language on the cinema hoardings.

 

I talked too damn much on the Couva Village Council.

I talked too softly, I was always drowned

by the loudspeakers in front of the stores

or the loudspeakers with the greatest pictures.

I am best suited to stalk like a white cattle bird

on legs like sticks, with sticking to the Path

between the canes on a district road at dusk.

Playing the Elder. There are no more elders.

Is only old people.

 

My friends spit on the government.

I do not think is just the government.

Suppose all the gods too old,

Suppose they dead and they burning them,

supposing when some cane cutter

start chopping up snakes with a cutlass

he is severing the snake-armed god,

and suppose some hunter has caught

Hanuman in his mischief in a monkey cage.

Suppose all the gods were killed by electric light?

Sunset, a bonfire, roars in my ears;

embers of brown swallows dart and cry,

like women distracted,

around its cremation.

I ascend to my bed of sweet sandalwood.


The Schooner “Flight”

 

1  Adios, Carenage

 

In idle August, while the sea soft,

and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim

of this Carribean, I blow out the light

by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion

to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight.

Out in the yard turning gray in the dawn,

I stood like a stone and nothing else move

but the cold sea rippling like galvanize

and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof,

till a wind start to interfere with the trees.

I pass me dry neighbor sweeping she yard

as I went downhill, and I nearly said:

"Sweep soft, you witch, 'cause she don't sleep hard,"

but the bitch look through me like I was dead.

A route taxi pull up, park-lights still on.

The driver size up my bags with a grin:

"This time, Shabine, like you really gone!"

I ain't answer the ass, I simply pile in

the back seat and watch the sky burn

above Laventille pink as the gown

in which the woman I left was sleeping,

and I look in the rearview and see a man

exactly like me, and the man was weeping

for the houses, the street, that whole fucking island.

 

Christ have mercy on all sleeping things!

From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road

to when I was a dog on these streets;

if loving these islands must be my load.

out of corruption my soul takes wings,

But they had started to poison my soul

with their big house, big car, big time bohbohl,

coolie, nigger, Syrian and French Creole,

so I leave it for them and their carnival -

I taking a sea bath, I gone down the road.

I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,

a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes

that they nickname Shabine, the patois for

any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw

when these slums of empire was paradise.

I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,

I had a sound colonial education,

I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,

and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation,

 

But Maria Concepcion was all my thought

watching the sea heaving up and down

as the port side of dories, schooners, and yachts

was painted afresh by the strokes of the sun

signing her name with every reflection;

I knew when dark-haired evening put on

her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea,

sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh,

that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting.

Is like telling mourners round the graveside

about resurrection, they want the dead back,

so I smile to myself as the bow rope untied

and the Flight swing seaward:"Is no use repeating

that the sea have more fish. I ain't want her

dressed in the sexless light of a seraph,

I want those round brown eyes like a marmoset, and

till the day when I can lean back and laugh,

those claws that tickled my back on sweating

Sunday afternoons, like a crab on wet sand."

 

As I worked, watching the rotting waves come

past the bow that scissor the sea like milk,

I swear to you all, by my mother's milk,

by the stars that shall fly from tonight's furnace,

that I loved them, my children, my wife, my home;

I loved them as poets love the poetry

that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea.

 

You ever look up from some lonely beach

and see a far schooner? Well, when I write

this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt;

I go draw and knot every line as tight

as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech

my common language go be the wind,

my pages the sails of the schooner Flight.

But let me tell you how this business begin.

 

 

2  Raptures of the Deep

 

Smuggled Scotch for O'Hara, big government man,

between Cedros and the Main, so the Coast Guard couldn't touch us,

and the Spanish pirogues always met us halfway,

but a voice kept saying: "Shabine, see this business

of playing pirate?" Well, so said, so done!

That whole racket crash. And I for a woman,

for her laces and silks, Maria Concepcion.

Ay, ay! Next thing I hear, some Commission of Enquiry

was being organized to conduct a big quiz,

with himself as chairman investigating himself.

Well, I knew damn well who the suckers would be,

not that shark in shark skin, but his pilot fish,

khaki-pants red nigger like you or me.

What worse, I fighting with Maria Concepcion,

plates flying and thing, so I swear: "Not again!"

It was mashing up my house and my family.

I was so broke all I needed was shades and a cup

or four shades and four cups in four-cup Port of Spain;

all the silver I had was the coins on the sea.

 

You saw them ministers in The Express,

guardians of the poor - one hand at their back,

and one set o'police only guarding their house,

and the Scotch pouring in through the back door.

As for that minister-monster who smuggled the booze,

that half-Syrian saurian, I got so vex to see

that face thick with powder, the warts, the stone lids

like a dinosaur caked with primordial ooze

by the lightning of flashbulbs sinking in wealth,

that I said: "Shabine, this is shit, understand!"

But he get somebody to kick my crutch out his office

like I was some artist! That bitch was so grand,

couldn't get off his high horse and kick me himself.

I have seen things that would make a slave sick

in this Trinidad, the Limers' Republic.

 

I couldn't shake the sea noise out of my head,

the shell of my ears sang Maria Concepcion,

so I start salvage diving with a crazy Mick,

name O'Shaugnessy, and a limey named Head;

but this Carribean so choke with the dead

that when I would melt in emerald water,

whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent,

I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea fans,

dead-men's-fingers, and then, the dead men.

I saw that the powdery sand was their bones

ground white from Senegal to San Salvador,

so, I panic third dive, and surface for a month

in the Seamen's Hostel. Fish broth and sermons.

When I thought of the woe I had brought my wife,

when I saw my worries with that other woman,

I wept under water, salt seeking salt,

for her beauty had fallen on me like a sword

cleaving me from my children, flesh of my flesh!

 

There was this barge from St. Vincent, but she was too deep

to float her again. When we drank, the limey

got tired of my sobbing for Maria Concepcion.

He said he was getting the bends. Good for him!

The pain in my heart for Maria Concepcion,

the hurt I had done to my wife and children,

was worse than the bends. In the rapturous deep

there was no cleft rock where my soul could hide

like the boobies each sunset, no sandbar of light

where I could rest, like the pelicans know,

so I got raptures once, and I saw God

like a harpooned grouper bleeding, and a far

voice was rumbling, "Shabine, if you leave her,

if you leave her, I shall give you the morning star."

When I left the madhouse I tried other women

but, once they stripped naked, their spiky cunts

bristled like sea eggs and I couldn't dive.

The chaplain came round. I paid him no mind.

Where is my rest place, Jesus? Where is my harbor?

Where is the pillow I will not have to pay for,

and the window I can look from that frames my life?

 

 

3   Shabine Leaves the Republic

 

I had no nation now but the imagination.

After the white man, the niggers didn't want me

when the power swing to their side.

The first chain my hands and apologize, "History";

the next said I wasn't black enough for their pride.

Tell me, what power, on these unknown rocks -

a spray-plane Air Force, the Fire Brigade,

the Red Cross, the Regiment, two, three police dogs

that pass before you finish bawling "Parade!"?

I met History once, but he ain't recognize me,

a parchment Creole, with warts

like an old sea bottle, crawling like a crab

through the holes of shadow cast by the net

of a grille balcony ; cream linen, cream hat.

I confront him and shout, "Sir, is Shabine!

They say I'se your grandson. You remember Grandma,

your blck cook, at all?" The bitch hawk and spat.

A spit like that worth any number of words.

But that's all them bastards have left us: words.

 

I no longer believed in the revolution.

I was losing faith in the love of my woman.

I had seen that moment Aleksandr Blok

crystallize in The Twelve. Was between

the Police Marine Branch and Hotel Venezuelana

one Sunday at noon. Young men without flags

using shirts, their chests waiting for holes.

They kept marching into the mountains, and their

noise ceased as foam sinks into sand.

They sank in the bright hills like rain, every one

with his own nimbus, leaving shirts in the streets,

and the echo of power at the end of the street.

Propeller-blade fans turn over the Senate;

the judges, they say, still sweat in carmine,

on Frederick Street the idlers all marching

by standing still, the Budget turns a new leaf.

In the 12.30 movies the projectors best

not break down, or you go see revolution. Aleksandr Blok

enters and sits in the third row of pit eating choc-

olate cone, waiting for a spaghetti West-

ern with Clint Eastwood and featuring Lee Van Cleef.

 

 

4   The Flight, Passing

     Blanchisseuse.

 

Dusk. The Flight passing Blanchisseuse.

Gulls wheel like from a gun again,

and foam gone amber that was white,

lighthouse and star start making friends,

down every beach the long day ends,

and there, on that last stretch of sand,

on a beach bare of all but light,

dark hands start pulling in the seine

of the dark sea, deep, deep inland.

 

 

5    Shabine Encounters the

      Middle Passage

 

Man, I brisk in the galley first thing next dawn,

brewing li'l coffee; fog coil from the sea

like the kettle steaming when I put it down

slow, slow, 'cause I couldn't believe what I see:

where the horizon was one silver haze,

the fog swirl and swell into sails, so close

that I saw it was sails, my hair grip my skull,

it was horrors, but it was beautiful.

We float through a rustling forest of ships

with sails dry like paper, behind the glass

I saw men with rusty eyeholes like cannons,

and whenever their half-naked crews cross the sun,

right through their tissue, you traced their bones

like leaves against the sunlight; frigates, barkentines,

the backward-moving current swept them on,

and high on their decks I saw great admirals,

Rodney, Nelson, de Grasse, I heard the hoarse orders

they gave those Shabines, and that forest

of masts sail right through the Flight,

and all you could hear was the ghostly sound

of waves rustling like grass in a low wind

and the hissing weds they trail from the stern;

slowly they heaved past from east to west

like this round world was some cranked water wheel,

every ship pouring like a wooden bucket

dredged from the deep; my memory revolve

on all sailors before me, then the sun

heat the horizon's ring and they was mist.

 

Next we pass slave ships. Flags of all nations,

our fathers below deck too deep, I suppose,

to hear us shouting. So we stop shouting. Who knows

who his grandfather is, much less his name?

Tomorrow our landfall will be the Barbados.

 

 

6   The Sailor Sings Back to the

     Casuarinas

 

You see them on the low hills of Barbados

bracing like windbreaks, needles for hurricanes,

trailing, like masts, the cirrus of torn sails;

when I was green like them, I used to think

those cypresses, leaning against the sea,

that take the sea noise up into their branches,

are not real cypresses but casuarinas.

Now captain just call them Canadian cedars.

But cedars, cypresses, or casuarinas,

whoever called them so had a good cause,

watching their bending bodies wail like women

after a storm, when some schooner came home

with news of one more sailor drowned again.

Once the sound "cypress" used to make more sense

than the green "casuarinas", though, to the wind

whatever grief bent them was all the same,

since they were trees with nothing else in mind

but heavenly leaping or to guard a grave;

but we live like our names and you would have

to be colonial to know the difference,

to know the pain of history words contain,

to love those trees with an inferior love,

and to believe: "Those casuarinas bend

like cypresses, their hair hangs down in rain

like sailors' wives. They're classic trees, and we,

if we live like the names our masters please,

by careful mimicry might become men."

 

 

7  The Flight Anchors in

    Castries Harbor

 

When the stars self were young over Castries,

I loved you alone and I loved the whole world.

What does it matter that our lives are different?

Burdened with the loves of our different children?

When I think of your young face washed by the wind

and your voice that chuckles in the slap of the sea?

The lights are out on La Toc promontory,

except for the hospital. Across at Vigie

the marina arcs keep vigil. I have kept my own

promise, to leave you the one thing I own,

you whom I loved first: my poetry.

We here for one night. Tomorrow, the Flight will be gone.

 

 

8  Fight with the Crew

 

It had one bitch on board, like he had me mark -

that was the cook, some Vincentian arse

with a skin like a gommier tree, red peeling bark,

and wash-out blue eyes; he wouldn't give me a ease,

like he feel he was white. Had an exercise book,

this same one here, that I was using to write

my poetry, so one day this man snatch it

from my hand, and start throwing it left and right

to the rest of the crew,bawling out, "Catch it,"

and start mincing me like I was some hen

because of the poems. Some case is for fist,

some case is for tholing pin, some is for knife -

this one was for knife. Well, I beg him first,

but he kept reading, "O my children, my wife,"

and playing he crying, to make the crew laugh;

it move like a flying fish, the silver knife

that catch him right in the plump of his calf,

and he faint so slowly, and he turn more white

than he thought he was. I suppose among men

you need that sort of thing. It ain't right

but that's how it is. There wasn't much pain,

just plenty blood, and Vincie and me best friend,

but none of them go fuck with my poetry again.

 

 

9  Maria Concepcion & the Book of Dreams

 

The jet that was screeching over the Flight

was opening a curtain into the past.

"Dominica ahead!"

                               "It still have Caribs there."

"One day go be planes only, no more boat."

"Vince, God ain't made nigger to fly through the air."

"Progress, Shabine, that's what it's all about.

Progress leaving all we small islands behind."

I was at the wheel, Vince sitting next to me

gaffing. Crisp, bracing day. A high-running sea.

"Progress is something to ask Caribs about.

They kill them by millions, some in war,

some by forced labor dying in the mines

looking for silver, after that niggers; more

progress. Until I see definite signs

that mankind change, Vince, I ain't want to hear.

Progress is history's dirty joke.

Ask that sad green island getting nearer."

Green islands, like mangoes pickled in brine.

In such fierce salt let my wound be healed,

me, in my freshness as a seafarer.

 

That night, with the sky sparks frosty with fire,

I ran like a Carib through Dominica,

my nose holes choked with memory of smoke;

I heard the screams of my burning children,

I ate the brains of mushrooms, the fungi

of devil's parasols under white, leprous rocks;

my breakfast was leaf mold in leaking forests,

with leaves big as maps, and when I heard noise

of the soldiers' progress through the thick leaves,

though my heart was bursting, I get up and ran

through the blades of balisier sharper than spears:

with the blood of my race, I ran, boy, I ran

with moss-footed speed like a painted bird;

then I fall, but I fall by an icy stream under

cool fountains of fern, and a screaming parrot

catch the dry branches and I drowned at last

in big breakers of smoke; then when that ocean

of black smoke pass, and the sky turn white,

there was nothing but Progress, if Progress is

an iguana as still as a young leaf in sunlight.

I bawl for Maria, and her Book of Dreams.

 

It anchored her sleep, that insomniac's Bible,

a soiled orange booklet with a cyclop's eye

center, from the Dominican Republic.

Its coarse pages were black with the usual

symbols of prophecy, in excited Spanish:

an open palm upright, sectioned and numbered

like a butcher chart, delivered the future.

One night, in a fever, radiantly ill,

she say, "Bring me the book, the end has come."

She said, "I dreamt of whales and a storm,"

but for that dream, the book had no answer.

A next night I dreamed of three old women

featureless as silkworms, stitching my fate,

and I scream at them to come out of my house,

and I try beating them away with a broom,

but as they go out, so they crawl back again,

until I start screaming and crying, my flesh

raining with sweat, and she ravage the book

for the dream meaning, and there was nothing;

my nerves melt like a jellyfish - that was when I broke -

they found me round the Savannah, screaming:

 

All you see me talking to the wind, so you think I mad.

Well, Shabine has bridled the horses of the sea;

you see me watching the sun till my eyeballs seared,

so all you mad people feel Shabine crazy,

but all you ain't know my strength, hear? The coconuts

standing by in their regiments in yellow khaki,

they waiting for Shabine to take over these islands,

and all you best dread the day I am healed

of being a human. All you fate in my hand,

ministers, businessmen, Shabine have you, friend,

I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand,

I who have no weapon but poetry and

the lances of palms and the sea's shining shield!

 

 

10  Out of the Depths

 

Next day, dark sea. A arse-aching dawn.

"Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind."

The slow swell start cresting like some mountain range

with snow on the top.

                                       "Ay, skipper, sky dark!"

"This ain't right for August."

                                       "This light damn strange,

this season, sky should be clear as a field."

 

A stingray steeplechase across the sea,

tail whipping water, the high man-o'-wars

start reeling inland, quick, quick an archery

of flying fish miss us! Vince say: "You notice?"

and a black-mane squall pounce on the sail

like a dog on a pigeon, and it snap the neck

of the Flight and shake it from head to tail.

"Be Jesus, I never see sea get so rough

so fast! That wind come from God back pocket!"

"Where Cap'n headin? Like the man gone blind!"

"If we's to drong, we go drong, Vince, fock-it!"

"Shabine, say your prayers, if life leave you any!"

 

I have not loved those that I loved enough.

Worse than the mule kick of Kick-'Em-Jenny

Channel, rain start to pelt the Flight between

mountains of water. If I was frighten?

The tent poles of water spouts bracing the sky

start wobbling, clouds  unstitch at the seams

and sky water drench us, and I hear myself cry,

"I'm the drowned sailor in her Book of Dreams."

I remembered those ghost ships, I saw me corkscrewing

to the sea bed of sae worms, fathom past fathom,

my jaw clench like a fist, and only one thing

hold me, trembling, how my family safe home.

Then a strength like it seize me and the strength said:

"I from backward people who still fear God."

Let Him, in His might, heave Leviathan upward

by the winch of His will, the beast pouring lace

from his sea-bottom bed; and that was the faith

that had fade from a child in the Methodist chapel

in Chisel Street, Castries, when the whale-bell

sang service and, in hard pews ribbed like the whale,

proud with despair, we sang how our race

survive the sea's maw, our history, our peril,

and now I was ready for whatever death will.

But if that storm had strength, was in Cap'n face,

beard beading with spray, tears salting his eyes,

crucify to his post, that nigger hold fast

to that wheel, man, like the cross held Jesus,

and the wounds of his eyes like they crying for us,

and I feeding him white rum, while every crest

with Leviathan-lash made the Flight quail

like two criminal. Whole night, with no rest,

till red-eyed like dawn, we watch our travail

subsiding, subside, and there was no more storm.

And the noon sea get calm as Thy Kingdom come.

 

 

11  After the Storm

 

There's a fresh light that follows a storm

while the whole sea still havoc; in its bright wake

I saw the veiled face of Maria Concepcion

marrying the ocean, then drifting away

in the widening lace of her bridal train

with white gulls her bridesmaids, till she was gone.

I wanted nothing after that day.

Across my own face, like the face of the sun,

a light rain was falling, wih the sea calm.

 

Fall gently, rain, on the sea's upturned face

like a girl showering; make these islands fresh

as Shabine once knew them! Let every trace,

every hot road, smell like clothes she just press

and sprinkle with drizzle. I finish dream;

whatever the rain wash and the sun iron:

the white clouds, the sea and sky wih one seam,

is clothes enough for my nakedness.

Though my Flight never pass the incoming tide

of this inland sea beyond the loud reefs

of the final Bahamas, I am satisfied

if my hand gave voice to one people's grief.

Open the map. More islands there, man,

than peas on a tin plate, all different size,

one thousand in the Bahamas alone,

from mountains to low scrub with coral keys,

and from this bowsprit, I bless every town,

the blue smell of smoke in hills behind them,

and the one small road winding down them like twine

to the roofs below; I have only one theme:

The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart -

the flight to a target whose aim we'll never know,

vain search for an island that heals with its harbor

and a guiltless horizon, where the almond's shadow

doesn't injure the sand. There are so many islands!

As many islands as the stars at night

like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.

But things must fall, and so it always was,

on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;

fall, and are one, just as this earth is one

island in archipelagoes of stars.

My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last.

I stop talking now. I work, then I read,

cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.

I try to forget what happiness was,

and when that don't work, I study the stars.

Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam

as the deck turn white and the moon open

a cloud like a door, and the light over me

is a road in white moonlight taking me home.

Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.

 


The Sea is History

 

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?

Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,

in that gray vault. The sea. The sea

has locked them up. The sea is History.

 

First, there was the heaving oil,

heavy as chaos;

then, likea light at the end of a tunnel,

 

the lantern of a caravel,

and that was Genesis.

Then there were the packed cries,

the shit, the moaning:

 

Exodus.

Bone soldered by coral to bone,

mosaics

mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,

 

that was the Ark of the Covenant.

Then came from the plucked wires

of sunlight on the sea floor

 

the plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage,

as the white cowries clustered like manacles

on the drowned women,

 

and those were the ivory bracelets

of the Song of Solomon,

but the ocean kept turning blank pages

 

looking for History.

Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors

who sank without tombs,

 

brigands who barbecued cattle,

leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,

then the foaming, rabid maw

 

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,

and that was Jonah,

but where is your Renaissance?

 

Sir, it is locked in them sea sands

out there past the reef's moiling shelf,

where the men-o'-war floated down;

 

strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.

It's all subtle and submarine,

through colonnades of coral,

 

past the gothic windows of sea fans

to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,

blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

 

and these groined caves with barnacles

pitted like stone

are our cathedrals,

 

and the furnace before the hurricanes:

Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills

into marl and cornmeal,

 

and that was Lamentations -

that was just Lamentations,

it was not History;

 

then came, like scum on the river's drying lip,

the brown reeds of villages

mantling and congealing into towns,

 

and at evening, the midges' choirs,

and above them, the spires

lancing the side of God

 

as His son set, and that was the New Testament.

 

Then came the white sisters clapping

to the waves' progress,

and that was Emancipation -

 

jubilation, O jubilation -

vanishing swiftly

as the sea's lace dries in the sun,

 

but that was not History,

that was only faith,

and then each rock broke into its own nation;

 

then came the synod of flies,

then came the secretarial heron,

then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,

 

fireflies with bright ideas

and bats like jetting ambassadors

and the mantis, like khaki police,

 

and the furred caterpillars of judges

examining each case closely,

and then in the dark ears of ferns

 

and in the salt chuckle of rocks

with their sea pools, there was the sound

like a rumour without any echo

 

of History, really beginning.

 

Winding Up

I live on the water,
alone. Without wife and children,
I have circled every possibility
to come to this:

a low house by grey water,
with windows always open
to the stale sea. We do not choose such things,

but we are what we have made.
We suffer, the years pass,
we shed freight but not our need

for encumbrances. Love is a stone
that settled on the sea-bed
under grey water. Now, I require nothing

from poetry but true feeling,
no pity, no fame, no healing. Silent wife,
we can sit watching grey water,

and in a life awash
with mediocrity and trash
live rock-like.

I shall unlearn feeling,
unlearn my gift. That is greater
and harder than what passes there for life.


The Star-Apple Kingdom

 

There were still shards of an ancient pastoral

in those shires of the island where the cattle drank

their pools of shadow from an older sky,

surviving from when the landscape copied such objects as

"Herefords at Sunset in the valley of the Wye."

The mountain water that fell white from the mill wheel

sprinkling like petals from the star-apple trees,

and all of the windmills and sugar mills moved by mules

on the treadmill of Monday to Monday, would repeat

in tongues of water and wind and fire, in tongues

of Mission School pickaninnies, like rivers remembering

their source, Parish Trelawny, Parish St David, Parish

St Andrew, the names afflicting the pastures,

the lime groves and fences of marl stone and the cattle

with a docile longing, an epochal content.

And there were, like old wedding lace in an attic,

among the boas and parasols and the tea-colored

daguerreotypes, hints of an epochal happiness

as ordered and infinite to the child

as the great house road to the Great House

down a perspective of casuarinas plunging green manes

in time to the horses, an orderly life

reduced by lorgnettes day and night, one disc the sun,

the other the moon, reduced into a pier glass:

nannies diminished to dolls, mahogany stairways

no larger than those of an album in which

the flash of cutlery yellows, as gamboge as

the piled cakes of teatime on that latticed

bougainvillea verandah that looked down toward

a prospect of Cuyp-like Herefords under a sky

lurid as a porcelain souvenir with these words:

"Herefords at Sunset in the Valley of the Wye."

 

Strange, that the rancor of hatred hid in that dream

of slow rivers and lily-like parasols, in snaps

of fine old colonial families, curled at the edge

not from age of from fire or the chemicals, no, not at all,

but because, off at its edges, innocently excluded

stood the groom, the cattle boy, the housemaid, the gardeners,

the tenants, the good Negroes down in the village,

their mouth in the locked jaw of a silent scream.

A scream which would open the doors to swing wildly

all night, that was bringing in heavier clouds,

more black smoke than cloud, frightening the cattle

in whose bulging eyes the Great House diminished;

a scorching wind of a scream

that began to extinguish the fireflies,

that dried the water mill creaking to a stop

as it was about to pronounce Parish Trelawny

all over, in the ancient pastoral voice,

a wind that blew all without bending anything,

neither the leaves of the album nor the lime groves;

blew Nanny floating back in white from a feather

to a chimerical, chemical pin speck that shrank

the drinking Herefords to brown porcelain cows

on a mantelpiece, Trelawny trembling with dusk,

the scorched pastures of the old benign Custos; blew

far the decent servants and the lifelong cook,

and shriveled to a shard that ancient pastoral

of dusk in a gilt-edged frame now catching the evening sun

in Jamaica, making both epochs one.

 

He looked out from the Great House windows on

clouds that still held the fragrance of fire,

he saw the Botanical Gardens officially drown

in a formal dusk, where governors had strolled

and black gardeners had smiled over glinting shears

at the lilies of parasols on the floating lawns,

the flame trees obeyed his will and lowered their wicks,

the flowers tightened their fists in the name of thrift,

the porcelain lamps of ripe cocoa, the magnolia's jet

dimmed on the one circuit with the ginger lilies

and left a lonely bulb on the verandah,

and, had his mandate extended to that ceiling

of star-apple candelabra, he would have ordered

the sky to sleep, saying, I'm tired,

save the starlight for victories, we can't afford it,

leave the moon on for one more hour,and that's it.

But though his power, the given mandate, extended

from tangerine daybreaks to star-apple dusks,

his hand could not dam that ceaseless torrent of dust

that carried the shacks of the poor, to their root-rock music,

down the gullies of Yallahs and August Town,

to lodge them on thorns of maca, with their rags

crucified by cactus, tins, old tires, cartons;

from the black Warieka Hills the sky glowed fierce as

the dials of a million radios,

a throbbing sunset that glowed like a grid

where the dread beat rose from the jukebox of Kingston.

He saw the fountains dried of quadrilles, the water-music

of the country dancers, the fiddlers like fifes

put aside. He had to heal

this malarial island in its bath of bay leaves,

its forests tossing with fever, the dry cattle

groaning like winches, the grass that kept shaking

its head to remember its name. No vowels left

in the mill wheel, the river. Rock stone. Rock stone.

 

The mountains rolled like whales through phosphorous stars,

as he swayed like a stone down fathoms into sleep,

drawn by that magnet which pulls down half the world

between a star and a star, by that black power

that has the assassin dreaming of snow,

that poleaxes the tyrant to a sleeping child.

The house is rocking at anchor, but as he falls

his mind is a mill wheel in moonlight,

and he hears, in the sleep of his moonlight, the drowned

bell of Port Royal's cathedral, sees the copper pennies

of bubbles rising from the empty eye-pockets

of green buccaneers, the parrot fish floating

from the frayed shoulders of pirates, sea horses

drawing gowned ladies in their liquid promenade

across the moss-green meadows of the sea;

he heard the drowned choirs under Palisadoes,

a hymn ascending to earth from a heaven inverted

by water, a crab climbing the steeple,

and he climbed from that submarine kingdom

as the evening lights came on in the institute,

the scholars lamplit in their own aquarium,

he saw them mouthing like parrot fish, as he passed

upward from that baptism, their history lessons,

the bubbles like ideas which he could not break:

Jamaica was captured by Penn and Venables,

Port Royal perished in a cataclysmic earthquake.

 

Before the coruscating façades of cathedrals

from Santiago to Caracas, where penitential archbishops

washed the feet of paupers (a parenthetical moment

that made the Caribbean a baptismal font,

turned butterflies to stone, and whitened like doves

the buzzards circling municipal garbage),

the Caribbean was borne like an elliptical basin

in the hands of acolytes, and a people were absolved

of a history which they did not commit;

the slave pardoned his whip, and the dispossessed

said the rosary of islands for three hundred years,

a hymn that resounded like the hum of the sea

inside a sea cave, as their knees turned to stone,

while the bodies of patriots were melting down walls

still crusted with mute outcries of La Revolucion!

"San Salvador, pray for us,St. Thomas, San Domingo,

ora pro nobis, intercede for us, Sancta Lucia

of no eyes," and when the circular chaplet

reached the last black bead of Sancta Trinidad

they began again, their knees drilled into stone,

where Colon had begun, with San Salvador's bead,

beads of black colonies round the necks of Indians.

And while they prayed for an economic miracle,

ulcers formed on the municipal portraits,

the hotels went up, and the casinos and brothels,

and the empires of tobacco, sugar, and bananas,

until a black woman, shawled like a buzzard,

climbed up the stairs and knocked at the door

of his dream, whispering in the ear of the keyhole:

"Let me in, I'm finished with praying, I'm the Revolution.

I am the darker, the older America."

 

She was as beautiful as a stone in the sunrise,

her voice had the gutturals of machine guns

across khaki deserts where the cactus flower

detonates like grenades, her sex was the slit throat

of an Indian, her hair had the blue-black sheen of the crow.

She was a black umbrella blown inside out

by the wind of revolution, La Madre Dolorosa,

a black rose of sorrow, a black mine of silence,

raped wife, empty mother, Aztec virgin

transfixed by arrows from a thousand guitars,

a stone full of silence, which, if it gave tongue

to the tortures done in the name of the Father,

would curdle the blood of the marauding wolf,

the fountain of generals, poets, and cripples

who danced without moving over their graves

with each revolution; her Caesarean was stitched

by the teeth of machine guns,and every sunset

she carried the Caribbean's elliptical basin

as she had once carried the penitential napkins

to be the footbath of dictators, Trujillo, Machado,

and those whose faces had yellowed like posters

on municipal walls. Now she stroked his hair

until it turned white, but she would not understand

that he wanted no other power but peace,

that he wanted a revolution without any bloodshed,

he wanted a history without any memory,

streets without statues,

and a geography without myth. He wanted no armies

but those regiments of bananas, thick lances of cane,

and he sobbed,"I am powerless, except for love."

She faded from him, because he could not kill;

she shrunk to a bat that hung day and night

in the back of his brain. He rose in his dream.

(to be continued)

 


The Star


If, in the light of things, you fade
real, yet wanly withdrawn
to our determined and appropriate
distance, like the moon left on
all night among the leaves, may
you invisibly delight this house;
O star, doubly compassionate, who came
too soon for twilight, too late
for dawn, may your pale flame
direct the worst in us
through chaos
with the passion of
plain day.