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She’s sitting at my little desk, drinking decaf. How’d she get back in? Where’s her blind man gone? (I pray he’s gone— though the desk needs tuning.) What door was unlocked? They all seemed bastioned. I sight through the crack. That’s my favorite cup, with the bite out of it. She’s writing one of my poems. Just who’s sitting at that desk, playing me? Shrubbery, thrashing to get in, lines all panes, long windows split in parallels. My windows set out on separate expeditions. They never meet, no matter how far extended.

In memory of Sara Wilkinson and for Liz Miles Eyelids, fall softly, from their gritted corners chalk, let it drizzle, let the streams flow thick with a waste glaze, let imagery run off its surplus of kaolin, choke feed of sediment plumed into the blue, tulipping its stem. Cress bunches thickening in shallows, flukes stinging flank heifers in their shove and jostle down a bank, drinking, mud caking lips. Eyelids, fall softly, let me linger interrupted behind the curtains billowing with images, how the unseeable sill even so snags, how the very point lights from behind, thoughts dispersing into folds slung aloft in sea mist, impermissible point breaks every motive falling back behind the eyelids that then fall. I breathe, I look, I carry forward, I can sense the last of you, taking walks of air thick with waste breath your form displaces. O curtain! O rail! I hate the thick floor beneath, breathe over a market quarrel, rise over the bass sawing at its stems to crash down the vault, let the vault branch recklessly, light-streams maze, air’s stirring carry song back and forth; I hear your recorder pipe, long for its repeats giving what-for to earth seeming to attenuate, rock is marked with your aeolian flow. Eyelids, fall softly, the cast of their fluttering fans across the inlet a white shadow, writes over deep-set floor captivated ripples. World, gaze out! Rise from a shrouded point.

Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill; Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes! No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed, Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats, Nor the cropp'd herbage shoot another head. But when the fields are still, And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest, And only the white sheep are sometimes seen Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanch'd green. Come, shepherd, and again begin the quest! Here, where the reaper was at work of late— In this high field's dark corner, where he leaves His coat, his basket, and his earthen cruse, And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves, Then here, at noon, comes back his stores to use— Here will I sit and wait, While to my ear from uplands far away The bleating of the folded flocks is borne, With distant cries of reapers in the corn— All the live murmur of a summer's day. Screen'd is this nook o'er the high, half-reap'd field, And here till sun-down, shepherd! will I be. Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep, And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep; And air-swept lindens yield Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid, And bower me from the August sun with shade; And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers. And near me on the grass lies Glanvil's book— Come, let me read the oft-read tale again! The story of the Oxford scholar poor, Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain, Who, tired of knocking at preferment's door, One summer-morn forsook His friends, and went to learn the gipsy-lore, And roam'd the world with that wild brotherhood, And came, as most men deem'd, to little good, But came to Oxford and his friends no more. But once, years after, in the country-lanes, Two scholars, whom at college erst he knew, Met him, and of his way of life enquired; Whereat he answer'd, that the gipsy-crew, His mates, had arts to rule as they desired The workings of men's brains, And they can bind them to what thoughts they will. "And I," he said, "the secret of their art, When fully learn'd, will to the world impart; But it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill." This said, he left them, and return'd no more.— But rumours hung about the country-side, That the lost Scholar long was seen to stray, Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied, In hat of antique shape, and cloak of grey, The same the gipsies wore. Shepherds had met him on the Hurst in spring; At some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors, On the warm ingle-bench, the smock-frock'd boors Had found him seated at their entering, But, 'mid their drink and clatter, he would fly. And I myself seem half to know thy looks, And put the shepherds, wanderer! on thy trace; And boys who in lone wheatfields scare the rooks I ask if thou hast pass'd their quiet place; Or in my boat I lie Moor'd to the cool bank in the summer-heats, 'Mid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills, And watch the warm, green-muffled Cumner hills, And wonder if thou haunt'st their shy retreats. For most, I know, thou lov'st retired ground! Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe, Returning home on summer-nights, have met Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe, Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet, As the punt's rope chops round; And leaning backward in a pensive dream, And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers Pluck'd in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers, And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream. And then they land, and thou art seen no more!— Maidens, who from the distant hamlets come To dance around the Fyfield elm in May, Oft through the darkening fields have seen thee roam, Or cross a stile into the public way. Oft thou hast given them store Of flowers—the frail-leaf'd, white anemony, Dark bluebells drench'd with dews of summer eves, And purple orchises with spotted leaves— But none hath words she can report of thee. And, above Godstow Bridge, when hay-time's here In June, and many a scythe in sunshine flames, Men who through those wide fields of breezy grass Where black-wing'd swallows haunt the glittering Thames, To bathe in the abandon'd lasher pass, Have often pass'd thee near Sitting upon the river bank o'ergrown; Mark'd thine outlandish garb, thy figure spare, Thy dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted air— But, when they came from bathing, thou wast gone! At some lone homestead in the Cumner hills, Where at her open door the housewife darns, Thou hast been seen, or hanging on a gate To watch the threshers in the mossy barns. Children, who early range these slopes and late For cresses from the rills, Have known thee eyeing, all an April-day, The springing pasture and the feeding kine; And mark'd thee, when the stars come out and shine, Through the long dewy grass move slow away. In autumn, on the skirts of Bagley Wood— Where most the gipsies by the turf-edged way Pitch their smoked tents, and every bush you see With scarlet patches tagg'd and shreds of grey, Above the forest-ground called Thessaly— The blackbird, picking food, Sees thee, nor stops his meal, nor fears at all; So often has he known thee past him stray, Rapt, twirling in thy hand a wither'd spray, And waiting for the spark from heaven to fall. And once, in winter, on the causeway chill Where home through flooded fields foot-travellers go, Have I not pass'd thee on the wooden bridge, Wrapt in thy cloak and battling with the snow, Thy face tow'rd Hinksey and its wintry ridge? And thou has climb'd the hill, And gain'd the white brow of the Cumner range; Turn'd once to watch, while thick the snowflakes fall, The line of festal light in Christ-Church hall— Then sought thy straw in some sequester'd grange. But what—I dream! Two hundred years are flown Since first thy story ran through Oxford halls, And the grave Glanvil did the tale inscribe That thou wert wander'd from the studious walls To learn strange arts, and join a gipsy-tribe; And thou from earth art gone Long since, and in some quiet churchyard laid— Some country-nook, where o'er thy unknown grave Tall grasses and white flowering nettles wave, Under a dark, red-fruited yew-tree's shade. —No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours! For what wears out the life of mortal men? 'Tis that from change to change their being rolls; 'Tis that repeated shocks, again, again, Exhaust the energy of strongest souls And numb the elastic powers. Till having used our nerves with bliss and teen, And tired upon a thousand schemes our wit, To the just-pausing Genius we remit Our worn-out life, and are—what we have been. Thou hast not lived, why should'st thou perish, so? Thou hadst one aim, one business, one desire; Else wert thou long since number'd with the dead! Else hadst thou spent, like other men, thy fire! The generations of thy peers are fled, And we ourselves shall go; But thou possessest an immortal lot, And we imagine thee exempt from age And living as thou liv'st on Glanvil's page, Because thou hadst—what we, alas! have not. For early didst thou leave the world, with powers Fresh, undiverted to the world without, Firm to their mark, not spent on other things; Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt, Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings. O life unlike to ours! Who fluctuate idly without term or scope, Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives, And each half lives a hundred different lives; Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope. Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we, Light half-believers of our casual creeds, Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd, Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, Whose vague resolves never have been fulfill'd; For whom each year we see Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new; Who hesitate and falter life away, And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day— Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too? Yes, we await it!—but it still delays, And then we suffer! and amongst us one, Who most has suffer'd, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne; And all his store of sad experience he Lays bare of wretched days; Tells us his misery's birth and growth and signs, And how the dying spark of hope was fed, And how the breast was soothed, and how the head, And all his hourly varied anodynes. This for our wisest! and we others pine, And wish the long unhappy dream would end, And waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear; With close-lipp'd patience for our only friend, Sad patience, too near neighbour to despair— But none has hope like thine! Thou through the fields and through the woods dost stray, Roaming the country-side, a truant boy, Nursing thy project in unclouded joy, And every doubt long blown by time away. O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife— Fly hence, our contact fear! Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood! Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern From her false friend's approach in Hades turn, Wave us away, and keep thy solitude! Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade, With a free, onward impulse brushing through, By night, the silver'd branches of the glade— Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue, On some mild pastoral slope Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales Freshen thy flowers as in former years With dew, or listen with enchanted ears, From the dark tingles, to the nightingales! But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly! For strong the infection of our mental strife, Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest; And we should win thee from thy own fair life, Like us distracted, and like us unblest. Soon, soon thy cheer would die, Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfix'd thy powers, And thy clear aims be cross and shifting made; And then thy glad perennial youth would fade, Fade and grow old at last, and die like ours. Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles! —As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea, Descried at sunrise an emerging prow Lifting the cool-hair'd creepers stealthily, The fringes of a southward-facing brow Among the Ægæan Isles; And saw the merry Grecian coaster come, Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine, Green, bursting figs, and tunnies steep'd in brine— And knew the intruders on his ancient home, The young light-hearted masters of the waves— And snatch'd his rudder, and shook out more sail; And day and night held on indignantly O'er the blue Midland waters with the gale, Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily, To where the Atlantic raves Outside the western straits; and unbent sails There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam, Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come; And on the beach undid his corded bales.

I was sent home the first day with a note: Danny needs a ruler. My father nodded, nothing seemed so apt. School is for rules, countries need rulers, graphs need graphing, the world is straight ahead. It had metrics one side, inches the other. You could see where it started and why it stopped, a foot along, how it ruled the flighty pen, which petered out sideways when you dreamt. I could have learned a lot, understood latitude, or the border with Canada, so stern compared to the South and its unruly river with two names. But that first day, meandering home, I dropped it.

All winter we sat blind, I next to the girl who loved her scabs, the blood shields her head gave up, her face a sun of blank amazement. She drew.This means love: a circle with a line through it.More work: a cross. More crosses. Ice sloughed through fields. Ice river, the pages of our notebooks. Outside: limbs and roads and wires. Outside cracked with force and turning. Our poems filled with salt. He took me to his bed. The writer never speaks. The writer speaks in details, the sateen lining of my coat, the star point of tongue kissing. The winter speaks in the whip. Runoff nixed with ash. I spilt water on my notebook. Words went back to ink; paper back to ruffle, pulp.You smell like dog, the girl said. You will be left like the winter. Little sputter in the car’s craw. Little crevice in the pavement. Ice reminder. He took me to his bed, saying:Ali, Ali, tell no one.

“Joey, 4th grade, 1992” He’s been on the fridge since it happened, sneaking glances from underneath the cat magnet at our dinners, coffee habits, arguments. We posted him on the database of items found, hoping that someone would recognize his messy hair, Batman t-shirt, blue eyes, but no one answered the post or claimed him. Somewhere a childhood photo album is not quite complete, or a grandmother’s mantelpiece; an uncle’s wallet. One afternoon I got restless, flipped through my old yearbooks, trying to find him, looking to see how he might have aged: did he lose the chubby cheeks? dye his hair? how long did he have to wear braces? But he’s too young to have passed me in the halls, the picture just a stranger, a small reminder of the whirling aftermath when Joplin was clutching at scraps: everything displaced, even this poor kid who doesn’t even know he’s lost.

I passed by the school where I studied as a boy and said in my heart: here I learned certain things and didn't learn others. All my life I have loved in vain the things I didn't learn. I am filled with knowledge, I know all about the flowering of the tree of knowledge, the shape of its leaves, the function of its root system, its pests and parasites. I'm an expert on the botany of good and evil, I'm still studying it, I'll go on studying till the day I die. I stood near the school building and looked in. This is the room where we sat and learned. The windows of a classroom always open to the future, but in our innocence we thought it was only landscape we were seeing from the window. The schoolyard was narrow, paved with large stones. I remember the brief tumult of the two of us near the rickety steps, the tumult that was the beginning of a first great love. Now it outlives us, as if in a museum, like everything else in Jerusalem.

All day they stream past, petitioners for understanding, accolade, critique. I read them all, a vast anthology of jumbled genres on a common theme: affliction. So I parse, interpret, scan. I graph dysrhythmias, dysmetrias; I eavesdrop on caesuras for unsaid murmurs, gallops, rubs, snaps, flutters, clicks. The perils of misreading harrow me— beware the treacheries of metaphor!— the elephant that squats upon a chest is not a burning heart or waterbrash. Just take the imagists. Their heads explode. St Elmo's fire flashdances on their limbs. They float, they swim. Knives twist within their flesh. They're ball-and-chained by lead, filled with concrete. Butterflies inhabit them. Their pipes are wrong, and clogged. Their systems freeze and crash. Invaded, they resist; defenses fail. What they need, they think, is you to flush it out of them, whatever it is, doc. The formalists present minutiae, in alphabetical enjambed iambs— pentameter's ten digits, five lub-dubs— from acne, backpain, catarrh, dandruff, eye- strain, flatfoot, gas pains, hangnail, itchiness, the jitters, kinks, lethargies, migraines, nose- bleeds, obstipation, panics, queasy retch- ings, styes and tremors, ulcers, vertigo, to wandering womb, xerosis, yaws and zits. Free versers, on the other hand, wax Walt Whitmanic: their barbaric yawps celebrate and sing incantatory songs of themselves, songs of the breath as it wheezes and rales through them, the short breath and long breath, the breath that is moist or dry, songs of the blood, the thick- and thinness of it, its heat, its turbulence, songs of the gut, its rippling coils, the dark burden of its secret indulgences, songs of the muscled limb, inflamed with toil or the languid thrash of love. Didacticists, of course, will always add their theories of omission or commission: slept in a draft, got their feet wet, caught a chill, forgot their overshoes and oversoul, ate too little roughage, too much ham, should have pumped less iron or pumped more, Mea culpa, meus morbus they intone, certain you'll absolve them back to health. Narrativists enshrine a fleeting pain within an epic of chronology I woke at six—I'm a morning person— brushed my teeth, ate oatmeal with a pat of low-fat margarine, the kind that has the dancing turkey on the tub, on sale for .99 at Johnnie's , by the time you tune back in it's afternoon, the pain has come and gone; they're vacuuming the rug, the doorbell rings, the kettle's whistling, you try to interrupt— where did you say that pain was? —loquacity steamrolls on through supper, TV, bedtime, dreams, alarm clock going off at six. Try Tylenol , you say, your fingers crossed. Call if it's worse. Then there's the avant garde. The cutting edge. The text Munchausens off the sizzling page. Hypoglossalalia muscles in, between John Cagey silences, the din and Sturm of wild unsound, unsense. O, there are stranger dysphasias, Wernicke, than are dreamt of in your neurologies, mutant L=A=N=G=U=A=G=Es that cacophone far off the beaten geographic tongue, where elephants explode and overshoes fibrillate with longing—El Dorado, Shangri-la, Eden, Heaven, Hell—you name it, it's yours. And that's, of course, the joke. You nod. You say, "I understand." You really don't.

1 Adios, Carenage In idle August, while the sea soft, and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim of this Caribbean, 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 streets, 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 silk, 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 Inquiry 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 niggers like you and 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 Caribbean 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 black 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 street, 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 weeds they trailed 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 keep 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 make 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 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 them ghost ships, I saw me corkscrewing to the sea bed of sea worms, fathom pass 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 make 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, with 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 with 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 one 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 on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken 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.

I hate the phrase “inner life.” My attic hurts, and I’d like to quit the committee for naming tornadoes. Do you remember how easy and sad it was to be young and defined by our bicycles? My first was yellow, and though it was no Black Phantom or Sting-Ray but merely a Varsity I loved the afternoon it was suddenly gone, chasing its apian flash through the neighborhoods with my father in vain. Like being a nuclear family in a television show totally unaffected by a distant war. Then we returned to the green living room to watch the No Names hold our Over the Hill Gang under the monotinted chromatic defeated Super Bowl waters. 1973, year of the Black Fly caught in my Jell-O. Year of the Suffrage Building on K Street NW where a few minor law firms mingle proudly with the Union of Butchers and Meat Cutters. A black hand already visits my father in sleep, moving up his spine to touch his amygdala. I will never know a single thing anyone feels, just how they say it, which is why I am standing here exactly, covered in shame and lightning, doing what I’m supposed to do.