Midsummer Page 5

that has felt the wind, a sacramental stasis

  would bring you sleep, which is midsummer’s crown,

  sleep that divides its lovers without rancor,

  sweat without sin, the furnace without fire,

  calm without self, the dying with no fear,

  as afternoon removes those window bars

  that striped your sleep like a kitten’s, or a prisoner’s.

  XLIV

  I drag, as on a chain behind me, laterite landscapes—

  streams where the sunset has fallen, the fences of villages,

  and buffalo brooding like clouds of indigo. I pull the voices

  of children behind me that die with the first star, the shapes

  entering shops to buy kerosene, and the palms that darken

  with the lines in my mother’s hand. I cross the ditches

  carefully like smoke, and the darkness steps into my head

  like a mongrel under a house. The sunset has limits, the aching

  fence posts rush past without waving, some are dead,

  some faceless, black on the sky like erect kindling.

  Green-black dusk, red earth, long horizons of cane fields

  that shiver in the first breeze of night. Down a wet road

  where the sun fell behind Chaguanas, my heart

  is rattling. It is creaking like a rusty bullock cart

  breaking the panes of sky in the road. It is in the red

  glare of stiff cattle, in the boy who haies them with a switch

  and the rattle of a bucket. Over these fields that the hoe scrapes

  with its grating anguish, the furrows deepen. They are covered

  with grass. They are mud. They spring up again in the rains

  of November. I drag them behind me in chains.

  XLV

  What’s missing from the Charles is the smell of salt,

  though the thawed river, muscling toward its estuary,

  swims seaward with the spring, then with strong shoulders

  heaves up the ice. The floes crack like rifle fire.

  Then gulls glitter like flakes, as keyed in pitch

  as children’s summer voices at the sea’s edge

  chasing the surf, pygmies with little spades who harry

  a stumbling mastodon. But, like time, the sea

  can’t turn over on its side to die like a gray empire

  brought down by its own weight. On satellite maps, a patch

  of warring white says winter is fighting hard

  to be remembered, but that it will melt from the memory

  of even the Dakotas. The tines of willow branches

  along the walks stand pronged for the spring planting.

  When the light hits, they ring with the true pitch

  of the Appalachian idyll. Then this empire’s breath was

  closer to the earth’s. Through the iron net of a bridge,

  the sunrise climbs with the leisure of a nuclear blast.

  The Charles runs softly, carrying the shadow cast

  by a black fisherman, his muscles smooth as boulders,

  hurling his net at shoals of mackerel cirrus.

  XLVI

  Pale khaki fields of dehydrated grass

  peer behind pointless fences—all the corn farms, straw.

  A sky so huge, its haze is violet.

  Over gelid canals, the wands of the pollard willows

  fade when the highway branches into some small town;

  spring, this Sunday, has come in a single stride

  to Ohio, skipping the thaw. It’s still February,

  but the dazed hills couldn’t tell you where winter went;

  the light is rollering the white, facing side

  of houses in Athens, Lancaster, and Wheeling,

  polishing the stubble till it shines like brass.

  The heat increases. Over Columbus, a second ceiling

  coat of blue makes the day tropical. The law

  that the light has broken winks from windows.

  The spring was always free to violate

  its vernal equinox, its shadow line,

  but tirelessly a striped electric gate

  patrolled by dogma and black-gloved police

  decides where our devotions end and start,

  and men in helmets block the arteries

  of what was once the individual heart.

  At a hot railroad crossing where we wait

  till the light changes, a crossed black-and-white sign

  says MARTIN’S FERRY. The wind-bright

  stubble reaches Ohio’s skyline, till the whole state

  shines with the width of mercy in Jim Wright.

  XLVII

  Gulls bicker with the spray, while the frigate birds circle

  for hours, on one wingbeat, the reef where a pontoon rusts.

  One year has finished its storms, and frightened men

  have shielded their lives like lanterns from its gusts,

  or fallen together in bonfires. But now blue spaces open

  like gaps in the smoke, birds fold themselves in clefts

  of rocks whose sand is raked clean of footprints. Ocean,

  whose pride is that no man makes his mark on her,

  still offers such places for the selfish pen,

  and the brain’s coral island has places where the polyp’s

  republic was built for us only—mesmerized grottoes

  that wriggle with wave light, rockroses that whiten

  with growing indifference driftwood or foundered ships.

  After one year, you might call the commotion

  of surf-cannoned sandbars war, and the stabbing thefts

  the gulls beak each other for as all done in honor

  of the gull-god. But there are islets where our shadow

  is nameless, with minnows whose simile escapes

  us as the anchor chain rattles from the bow.

  XLVIII

  Raw ocher sea cliffs in the slanting afternoon,

  at the bursting end of Balandra, the dry beach’s end,

  that a shadow’s dial wipes out of sight and mind.

  White sanderlings race the withdrawing surf to pick,

  with wink-quick stabs, shellfish between the pebbles,

  ignoring the horizon where a sail goes out

  like the love of Prospero for his island kingdom.

  A grape leaf shields the sun with veined, orange hand,

  but its wick blows out, and the sanderlings are gone.

  Go, light, make weightless the burden of our thought,

  let our misfortune have no need for magic,

  be untranslatable in verse or prose.

  Let us darken like stones that have never frowned or known

  the need for art or medicine, for Prospero’s

  snake-knotted staff, or sea-bewildering stick;

  erase these ciphers of birds’ prints on sand.

  Proportion benedict us, as in fables,

  that in life’s last third, its movements, we accept the

  measurement of our acts from one to three,

  and boarding this craft, pull till a dark wind

  rolls this pen on a desktop, a broken oar, a scepter

  swayed by the surf, the scansion of the sea.

  XLIX

  A wind-scraped headland, a sludgy, dishwater sea,

  another storm-darkened village with fences of crucified tin.

  Give it up to a goat in the rain, whose iron muzzle

  can take anything, or to those hopping buzzards

  trailing their torn umbrellas in a silvery drizzle

  that slimes everything; on the horizon,

  the sea’s silver language shines like another era,

  and, seasick of poverty, my mind is out there.

  A storm has wrecked the island, the beach is a mess,

  a bent man, crouching, crosses it, cuffed by the wind;

  from that gap of blue, with seraphic highmindedness,

 
; the frigate birds are crying that foul weather lifts the soul,

  that the sodden red rag of the heart, when it has dried,

  will flutter like a lifeguard’s flag from its rusty pole.

  Though I curse the recurrence of each shining omen,

  the sun will come out, and warm up my right hand

  like that old crab flexing its fingers outside its hole.

  Frail from damp holes, the courageous, pale bestiary

  of the sand seethes, the goat nuzzles, head bent

  among flashing tins, and the light’s flood tide

  stutters up to a sandbar in the estuary,

  where, making the most of its Egyptian moment,

  the heron halts its abrupt, exalted stride—

  then a slow frieze of sunlit pelicans.

  L

  I once gave my daughters, separately, two conch shells

  that were dived from the reef, or sold on the beach, I forget.

  They use them as doorstops or bookends, but their wet

  pink palates are the soundless singing of angels.

  I once wrote a poem called “The Yellow Cemetery,”

  when I was nineteen. Lizzie’s age. I’m fifty-three.

  These poems I heaved aren’t linked to any tradition

  like a mossed cairn; each goes down like a stone

  to the seabed, settling, but let them, with luck, lie

  where stones are deep, in the sea’s memory.

  Let them be, in water, as my father, who did watercolors,

  entered his work. He became one of his shadows,

  wavering and faint in the midsummer sunlight.

  His name was Warwick Walcott. I sometimes believe

  that his father, in love or bitter benediction,

  named him for Warwickshire. Ironies

  are moving. Now, when I rewrite a line,

  or sketch on the fast-drying paper the coconut fronds

  that he did so faintly, my daughters’ hands move in mine.

  Conches move over the sea floor. I used to move

  my father’s grave from the blackened Anglican headstones

  in Castries to where I could love both at once—

  the sea and his absence. Youth is stronger than fiction.

  LI

  Since all of your work was really an effort to appease

  the past, a need to be admitted among your peers,

  let the inheritors question the sibyl and the Sphinx,

  and learn that a raceless critic is a primate’s dream.

  You were distressed by your habitat, you shall not find peace

  till you and your origins reconcile; your jaw must droop

  and your knuckles scrape the ground of your native place.

  Squat on a damp rock round which white lilies stiffen,

  pricking their ears; count as the syllables drop

  like dew from primeval ferns; note how the earth drinks

  language as precious, depending upon the race.

  Then, on dank ground, using a twig for a pen,

  write Genesis and watch the Word begin.

  Elephants will mill at their water hole to trumpet a

  new style. Mongoose, arrested in rut,

  and saucer-eyed mandrills, drinking from the leaves,

  will nod as a dew-lapped lizard discourses on “Lives

  of the Black Poets,” gripping a branch like a lectern for better

  delivery. Already, up in that simian Academe,

  a chimp in bifocals, his lower lip a jut,

  tears misting the lenses, is turning your Oeuvres Complètes.

  LII

  I heard them marching the leaf-wet roads of my head,

  the sucked vowels of a syntax trampled to mud,

  a division of dictions, one troop black, barefooted,

  the other in redcoats bright as their sovereign’s blood;

  their feet scuffled like rain, the bare soles with the shod.

  One fought for a queen, the other was chained in her service,

  but both, in bitterness, travelled the same road.

  Our occupation and the Army of Occupation

  are born enemies, but what mortar can size

  the broken stones of the barracks of Brimstone Hill

  to the gaping brick of Belfast? Have we changed sides

  to the mustached sergeants and the horsy gentry

  because we serve English, like a two-headed sentry

  guarding its borders? No language is neutral;

  the green oak of English is a murmurous cathedral

  where some took umbrage, some peace, but every shade, all,

  helped widen its shadow. I used to haunt the arches

  of the British barracks of Vigie. There were leaves there,

  bright, rotting like revers or epaulettes, and the stenches

  of history and piss. Leaves piled like the dropped aitches

  of soldiers from rival shires, from the brimstone trenches

  of Agincourt to the gas of the Somme. On Poppy Day

  our schools bought red paper flowers. They were for Flanders.

  I saw Hotspur cursing the smoke through which a popinjay

  minced from the battle. Those raging commanders

  from Thersites to Percy, their rant is our model.

  I pinned the poppy to my blazer. It bled like a vowel.

  LIII

  There was one Syrian, with his bicycle, in our town.

  I didn’t know if he was a Syrian or an Assyrian.

  When I asked him his race, about which Saroyan had written

  that all that was left were seventy thousand Assyrians,

  where were sixty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine?

  he didn’t answer, but smiled at the length of our street.

  His pupils flashed like the hot spokes of a chariot,

  or the silver wires of his secondhand machine.

  I should have asked him about the patterns of birds

  migrating in Aramaic, or the correct

  pronunciation of wrinkled rivers like “Tagus.”

  Assyria was far as the ancient world that was taught us,

  but then, so was he, from his hot-skinned camels and tents.

  I was young and direct and my tense

  was the present; if I, in my ignorance,

  had distorted time, it was less than some tyrant’s

  indifference that altered his future.

  He wore a white shirt. A black hat. His bicycle

  had an iron basket in front. It moved through the mirage

  of sugar-cane fields, crediting suits to the cutters.

  Next, two more Syrians appeared. All three shared a store

  behind which they slept. After that, there was

  a sign with that name, so comical to us, of mythical

  spade-bearded, anointed, and ringleted kings: ABDUL.

  But to me there were still only seventy thousand

  Assyrians, and all of them lived next door

  in a hot dark room, muttering a language whose sound

  had winged lions in it, and birds cut into a wall.

  LIV

  The midsummer sea, the hot pitch road, this grass, these shacks

  that made me,

  jungle and razor grass shimmering by the roadside, the edge

  of art;

  wood lice are humming in the sacred wood,

  nothing can burn them out, they are in the blood;

  their rose mouths, like cherubs, sing of the slow science

  of dying—all heads, with, at each ear, a gauzy wing.

  Up at Forest Reserve, before branches break into sea,

  I looked through the moving, grassed window and thought

  “pines,”

  or conifers of some sort. I thought, they must suffer

  in this tropical heat with their child’s idea of Russia.

  Then suddenly, from their rotting logs, distracting signs

  of the faith I betra
yed, or the faith that betrayed me—

  yellow butterflies rising on the road to Valencia

  stuttering “yes” to the resurrection; “yes, yes is our answer,”

  the gold-robed Nunc Dimittis of their certain choir.

  Where’s my child’s hymnbook, the poems edged in gold leaf,

  the heaven I worship with no faith in heaven,

  as the Word turned toward poetry in its grief?

  Ah, bread of life, that only love can leaven!

  Ah, Joseph, though no man ever dies in his own country,

  the grateful grass will grow thick from his heart.

  Index of First Lines

  A long, white, summer cloud, like a cleared linen table 1

  A radiant summer, so fierce it turns yellow 1

  A trembling thought, no bigger than a hurt 1

  A white dory, face down, its rusted keel staining 1

  A wind-scraped headland, a sludgy, dishwater sea 1

  Above hot tin billboards, above Hostería del Mar 1

  Along Cape Cod, salt crannies of white harbors 1

  At the Queen’s Park Hotel, with its white, high-ceilinged rooms 1

  Autumn’s music grates. From tuning forks of branches 1

  Before that thundercloud breaks from its hawsers 1

  Certain things here are quietly American— 1

  Chicago’s avenues, as white as Poland 1

  Companion in Rome, whom Rome makes as old as Rome 1

  Gold dung and urinous straw from the horse garages 1

  Gulls bicker with the spray, while the frigate birds circle 1

  I can sense it coming from far, too, Maman, the tide 1

  I drag, as on a chain behind me, laterite landscapes— 1

  I have never pretended that summer was paradise 1

  I heard them marching the leaf-wet roads of my head 1

  I once gave my daughters, separately, two conch shells 1

  I pause to hear a racketing triumph of cicadas 1

  If you were here, in this white room, in this hotel 1

  Imagine, where sand is now, the crawling lava 1

  In the other’ eighties, a hundred midsummers gone 1