The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (48 page)

sodden canvas of the sky like a hopeless sail,

gusting in sheets and hazing the hills completely

as if the whole valley were a hull outriding the gale

and the woods were not trees but waves of a running sea.

When light cracks and thunder groans as if cursed

and you are safe in a dark house deep in Santa

Cruz, with the lights out, the current suddenly gone,

you think: “Who'll house the shivering hawk, and the

impeccable egret and the cloud-colored heron,

and the parrots who panic at the false fire of dawn?”

    
IV

These birds keep modeling for Audubon,

the Snowy Egret or White Heron in a book

that, in my youth, would open like a lawn

in emerald Santa Cruz, knowing how well they look,

strutting perfection. They speckle the islands

on river-bank, in mangrove marsh or cattle pasture,

gliding over ponds, then balancing on the ridge

of a silken heifer, or fleeing disaster

in hurricane weather, and picking ticks

with their electric stab as if it were sheer privilege

to study them in their mythical conceit

that they have beat across the sea from Egypt

with the pharaonic ibis, its orange beak and feet

profiled in quiet to adorn a crypt,

then launch themselves with wings that, beating faster

are certain as a seraph's when they beat.

    
V

The perpetual ideal is astonishment.

The cool green lawn, the quiet trees, the forest

on the hill there, then, the white gasp of an egret sent

sailing into the frame then teetering to rest

with its gawky stride, erect, an egret-emblem!

Another thought surprises: a hawk on the wrist

of a branch, soundlessly, like a falcon,

shoots into heaven, circling above praise or blame,

with the same high indifference as yours,

now dropping to tear a field mouse with its claws.

The page of the lawn and this open page are the same,

an egret astonishes the page, the high hawk caws

over a dead thing, a love that was pure punishment.

    
VI

I hadn't seen them for half of the Christmas week,

the egrets, and no one told me why they had gone,

but they are back with the rain now, orange beak,

pink shanks and stabbing head, back on the lawn

where they used to be in the clear, limitless rain

of the Santa Cruz Valley, which, when it rains, falls

steadily against the cedars till it mists the plain.

The egrets are the color of waterfalls,

and of clouds. Some friends, the few I have left,

are dying, but the egrets stalk through the rain

as if nothing mortal can affect them, or they lift

like abrupt angels, sail, then settle again.

Sometimes the hills themselves disappear

like friends, slowly, but I am happier

that they have come back now, like memory, like prayer.

    
VII

With the leisure of a leaf falling in the forest,

pale yellow spinning against green—my ending.

Soon it will be the dry season, the hills will rust,

the egrets dip their necks undulant, bending,

stabbing at worms and grubs after the rain,

sometimes erect as bowling pins, they stand

as strips of cotton-wool peel from the mountain,

then when they move, gawkily, they move this hand

with their feet's splayed fingers, their darting necks.

We share one instinct, that ravenous feeding

my pen's beak, plucking up wriggling insects

like nouns and gulping them, the nib reading

as it writes, shaking off angrily what its beak rejects,

selection is what the egrets teach

on the wide-open lawn, heads nodding as they read

in purposeful silence, a language beyond speech.

    
VIII

We were by the pool of a friend's house in St. Croix

and Joseph and I were talking; he stopped the talk,

on this visit I had hoped that he would enjoy

to point out, with a gasp, not still or stalking

but fixed in the great fruit tree, a sight that shook him

“like something out of Bosch,” he said. The huge bird was

suddenly there, perhaps the same one that took him,

a sepulchral egret or heron; the unutterable word was

always with us, like Eumaeus, a third companion

and what got him, who loved snow, what brought it on

was that the bird was such a spectral white.

Now when at noon or evening on the lawn

the egrets soar together in noiseless flight

or tack, like a regatta, the sea-green grass,

they are seraphic souls, as Joseph was.

5   THE ACACIA TREES

    
I

You used to be able to drive (though I don't) across

the wide, pool-sheeted pasture below the house

to the hot, empty beach and park in the starved shade

of the acacias that print those tiny yellow flowers

(blank, printless beaches are part of my trade);

then there were men with tapes and theodolites who measured

the wild, uneven ground. I watched the doomed acres

where yet another luxury hotel will be built

with ordinary people fenced out. The new makers

of our history profit without guilt

and are, in fact, prophets of a policy

that will make the island a mall, and the breakers

grin like waiters, like taxi drivers, these new plantations

by the sea; a slavery without chains, with no blood spilt—

just chain-link fences and signs, the new degradations.

I felt such freedom writing under the acacias.

    
II

Bossman, if you look in those bush there, you'll find

a whole set of passport, wallet, ID, credit card,

that is no use to them, is money on their mind

and is not every time you'll find them afterwards.

You jest leave your bag wif these things on the sand,

and faster than wind they jump out of the bush

while you there swimming and rubbing tanning lotion

and when you find out it is no good to send

the Special Unit, they done reach Massade.

But I not in that, not me, I does make a lickle

change selling and blowing conch shells, is sad

but is true. Dem faster than any vehicle,

and I self never get in any commotion

except with the waves, and soon all that will be lost.

Is too much tourist and too lickle employment.

How about a lickle life there? Thanks, but Boss,

don't let what I say spoil your enjoyment.

    
III

You see those breakers coming around Pigeon Island

bowing like nuns in a procession? One thing I know,

when you're gone like my other friends, not to Thailand

or Russia, but wherever it is loved friends go

with their different beliefs, who were like a flock

of seagulls leaving the mirror of the sand,

or a bittern passing lonely Barrel of Beef,

or the sails that an egret hoists leaving its rock;

I go down to the same sea by another road

with manchineel shadows and stunted sea grapes

dwarfed by the wind. I carry something to read:

the wind is bright and shadows race like grief,

I open their books and see their distant shapes

approaching and always arriving, their voices heard

in the page of a cloud, like the soft surf in my head.

6

for August Wilson

August, the quarter-moon dangles like a bugle

over the brick cantonments of the Morne

whose barrack apartments have the serial glow

of postage stamps; the clouds' letters are torn,

and your sweet instrument is put away as

your silver cornet lies in its velvet case

with all those riffs and arias whose characters argue

the way that wind elates the acacias

until they wrestle with the roar of torrents,

black, jagged silhouettes ready to do battle

with enormous hands and eyes with the coming day

in the brick thickets of Pittsburgh and Seattle,

in plays that are their own battle cry and anthem,

I unhook the quarter-moon to blow their praises,

you, Horace Pippin, Romare, Jacob Lawrence,

I saw the moon's bugle there and thought of them.

7

for Oliver Jackman

It's what others do, not us, die, even the closest

on a vainglorious, glorious morning, as the song goes,

the yellow or golden palms glorious and all the rest

a sparkling splendor, die. They're practicing calypsos,

they're putting up and pulling down tents, vendors are slicing

the heads of coconuts around the Savannah, men

are leaning on, then leaping into pirogues, a moon will be rising

tonight in the same place over Morne Coco, then

the full grief will hit me and my heart will toss

like a horse's head or a threshing bamboo grove

that even you could be part of the increasing loss

that is the daily dial of the revolving shade. Love

lies underneath it all though, the more surprising

the death, the deeper the love, the tougher the life.

The pain is over, feathers close your eyelids, Oliver.

What a happy friend and what a fine wife!

Your death is like our friendship beginning over.

8   SICILIAN SUITE

    
I

Like a blackbird that shot out of the daylight

into the benign gloom of the studio, butting the glass,

fluttering and darting then thudding it again,

as if it were searching for a cage that calms

like my mind with its pitiful searching for an exit

from itself, and thinking these days of Pavese,

of a flight from you (who would have thought your shadow

could have been so solid?) that I would easily

like the trapped bird keep butting the wall of your forehead

till you let me fly through the window of your gaze

past Pigeon Island to Isola (to sacred Sicily)

from the opening parenthesis of your palms.

    
II

I am haunted by hedges of pink oleander

along the Sicilian roads, their consonants of gravel

under the tires, by stone piles, by walls whose wonder

is that there was no need to travel

this far, to recognize things I already knew,

except, and now it grows, the odd broken castle

through whose doors peered a Caribbean blue,

and the name Ortigia that rings like crystal

in its fragile balance. In the pine's rustle

and the silver alder's and the olive's, a difference began,

sounds that needed translation. The sea was the same

except for its history. The island was our patron saint's

birthplace. They shared the same name:

Lucia. The heat had the identical innocence

of an island afternoon, but with a difference,

the way the oleanders looked and the olive's green flame.

    
III

Soothe me, Vittorio, calm me, Quasimodo,

bless me with your clasped palms, cypress, and syllables

of the trimmed orange oleander on Somebody Street.

Screech my pain, starlings, from the stone balcony

that faces the Saracen coast, blind me, Santa Lucia,

patron saint of both isles and eyes, for my lack of vision!

There was a prophecy repeated in her smallest gestures

to the madness of an old man who loved a brown faun

that grazed on his heart even in drought.

All of you, save him! Save his clogged heart

like a tree thick with prayers like the starlings

repeating their verses from the barred windows

of Passeggio Adorno, vowing a new start,

as he watches the transients hunched over the duck pond

that was Arethusa's fountain, tomorrow, tomorrow.

All of those people and their lucky lives.

I know what I've done, I cannot look beyond.

I treated all of them badly, my three wives.

    
IV

On the cathedral steps sprinkled by the bells' benediction

like water that blissfully stained the scorching street,

you were not among the small crowd in the sun,

so many in black against the Sicilian heat.

I never entered the shaded church with its pews

facing the tortured altar, but I hoped to find you:

Oh, I did, half-heartedly, but by now it was no use.

The bells meant nothing or the swallows they lifted;

still I felt you were ahead and I was right behind you,

and that you would stop on your shadow and turn your head,

and there in Sicily turn into salt, into fiction.

I don't know the cathedral's name. It's in Syracuse.

I bought a paper in a language I cannot read.

There was nothing in the paper about this. It wasn't news.

    
V

We never know what memory will do—

my body humming with so much excitement,

I thought my heartbeat sprouted wings and flew

to Syracuse, your harbor, that its flight meant

a return to Sicily and all its sunlit error

where a Greek tanker lay anchored in the blue;

my shadowy treachery, my columned patience

darted through balconies to the gusting area

of the bandstand facing the Bay of the Saracens.

Translucent ghosts, performing without shadows

silhouettes of black actors, shapes on a vase,

their quarrels caught in an oval, while what she does