Derek Walcott

Then all the nations of birds lifted together the huge net of the shadows of this earth in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues, stitching and crossing it. They lifted up the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes, the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets, the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill— the net rising soundless as night, the birds' cries soundless, until there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather, only this passage of phantasmal light that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever. And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew, what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries, bearing the net higher, covering this world like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes of a child fluttering to sleep; it was the light that you will see at evening on the side of a hill in yellow October, and no one hearing knew what change had brought into the raven's cawing, the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough such an immense, soundless, and high concern for the fields and cities where the birds belong, except it was their seasonal passing, Love, made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth, something brighter than pity for the wingless ones below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses, and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices above all change, betrayals of falling suns, and this season lasted one moment, like the pause between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace, but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.

That sail which leans on light, tired of islands, a schooner beating up the Caribbean for home, could be Odysseus, home-bound on the Aegean; that father and husband's longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name in every gull's outcry. This brings nobody peace. The ancient war between obsession and responsibility will never finish and has been the same for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore now wriggling on his sandals to walk home, since Troy sighed its last flame, and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough from whose groundswell the great hexameters come to the conclusions of exhausted surf. The classics can console. But not enough.

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 From a blue keg, the barrel's thumb-tuned goatskin, the choirs of ancestral ululation are psalms and pivot for the prodigal in a dirt yard at Piaille, are confrontation, old incantation and fresh sacrifice where a ram is tethered, without the scrolled horns, wool locks and beard of the scapegoat, in the Old Testament, or black blood gushing in a trench in Attic ceremony and rite. Death softens the eyes of the still, unbleating sheep, a common ewe, as for you this is common. There is no awe in repetition, no claim, no tribal ecstasy, no pardon in the bent smoke from Guinea, the sprinkled white rum, or the meal crumbled on the small stone altar, in the broken memory of the slaver's coast and the braided villages of thatch and coalpot from the salted passage to this paralysis where your pale feet cannot keep time feel no communion with its celebrants, they keep another time, the time you keep comes with a different metre, your skin what sheath and prison that it has become as a dried chrysalis with no ressurection and one unwished for. Star-embers fade. II I could give facts and dates, but to what use? In the lush chasms and fissures of Choiseul an ogre bred my grandam, whelped my father, erected my tall aunts; slopes with potato vines, and the narrow, clean dark water of River Doree, the fragrant hogplums and chapel of La Fargue; go in search of his own shire, unlatch a gate that opens into Albion, its faery flowers, its source of intellectual bastardy, without embarrassment or degradation, without belligerence or accusation, and mostly selfishly, without self-contempt, a curious and self-nourishing integer outside their given numbers and their dates, as nameless as the bush, beyond heredity or prophecy, or the quiet panic of clocks, the shallow penitence of mirrors. Mongrel. And out of this chord, this discord will come the Atlantic's drone, the Caribbean hum of chaos in an ochre afternoon the enclosing harmony that we call home when the sea mints its quicksilver, when the cedars sag and the light ends up with nothing. The facts! The Facts! The history. The cause. You need a history to make your case. III 1492. 1833. 1930. Dates. The one thing about which there is no discourse. Dates multiplied by events, by consequences, are what add up to History. We have a few coins struck for a mere handful of events, as amateur numismatists, regal profiles, none worthy in the traditional way of memory slavery being an infinity of endeavour without pause or payment, without commemoration, only the long division of day into dark, of drought into rainburst, equinoxes glide over their own shadows, and all our dates, our calendars, hymns and anniversaries, were bequeathed to us. Left to itself the brain would be mantled like coral in the cool shade of a reefs outcrop and turret, swayed like reeds in meditation, dateless. The petals of the sun curl, wilting on its stalk– here comes the quiet lily crescent of the moon. IV From this thick tree issues miraculous bread. The breadfruit makes itself from copious shade, whose dial is the ground's dry, palmate leaves, a voluble, invaluable dome, a library, where all the town's talk is stored, and in whose core is coiled—a tempest, a rising sea in wind, the spinning pages of remorseful texts, Bligh's log and cannonballs and bowling thunder, shelter from the rain and so magnanimous in circumference that it has no time without shade, and shade is suffering. The sun makes their suffering mute. This bedraggled backyard, this unfulfilled lot, this little field of leaves, brittle and fallen, of all the cities of the world, this is your centre. O to be luminous and exact! As this tree is in ripening sunshine, that your own leaves could shine with nourishment, and give such shade and peace, the mirror of each canvas that you sign. Despite acclamation, despite contempt, I was never part of that catalogue in spite of friends in the same business neither of the free-verse orthodoxy, nor the other— the clogged, elegiac thickness of memory; farther away from all that, forever, knee-high in the foam of the page wading by sounding caves. Gradually it hardens, the death-mask of Fame. V And Sancta Trinidad. It is that sacred to me. However fragmentary, through a sunlit hedge, by the running of clear water over the sun-wiry stones and a cool hoarding of bamboos without a bridge phrases of Spain in summer, in the vale of Santa Cruz, perhaps because of the name, but the bamboo's fountains arch, sounding sweet, surreptitious, twittering leaves and shadows moving over indigo mountains. In a green street of hedges and vermilion roofs, and gates that creak open into banana yards and doors that groan on the evocation of ginger behind which are the hill with five cresting palms whose long fingers are stirring tropical almanacs darkened with rain over the grey savannahs of zebu and bison and the small chalk temples of an almost erased Asia, and the ovations of cane through which turbaned horsemen carry feathering lances. The cloud-white egret, the heron whose hue is wet slate, move through a somnolence as sweet as malaria to a child whose parched lips are soothed by a servant or his own mother, to the sudden great sound of rain on the roofs, cloudburst of benediction, dry seas in his ears.

I Prodigal, what were your wanderings about? The smoke of homecoming, the smoke of departure. The earth grew music and the tubers sprouted to Sesenne's singing, rain-water, fresh patois in a clay carafe, a clear spring in the ferns, and pure things took root like the sweet-potato vine. Over the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew, as the sun turns into a cipher from a green flash, clouds crumble like cities, the embers of Carthage; any man without a history stands in nettles and no butterflies console him, like surrendering flags, does he, still a child, long for battles and castles from the books of his beginning, in a hieratic language he will never inherit, but one in which he writes "Over the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew," his whole life a language awaiting translation? Since I am what I am, how was I made? To ascribe complexion to the intellect is not an insult, since it takes its plaid like the invaluable lizard from its background, and if our work is piebald mimicry then virtue lies in its variety to be adept. On the warm stones of Florence I subtly alter to a Florentine till the sun passes, in London I am pieced by fog, and shaken from reflection in Venice, a printed page in the sun on which a cabbage-white unfolds, a bookmark. To break through veils like spiders' webs, crack carapaces like a day-moth and achieve a clarified frenzy and feel the blood settle like a brown afternoon stream in River Doree is what I pulsed for in my brain and wrist for the drifting benediction of a drizzle drying on this page like asphalt, for peace that passes like a changing cloud, to a hawk's slow pivot. II In the vale of Santa Cruz I look to the hills. The white flowers have the fury of battle, they lay siege to the mountains, for war there is the tumult of the white ravines, and the cascade's assault; they bow their plumes, Queen Anne's lace, bougainvillea, orchid and oleander, and they are as white as arrested avalanches, angry and Alpine, their petals blur into a white gust from the Matterhom or the streets of Zermatt. Both worlds are welded, they were seamed by delight. Santa Cruz, in spring. Deep hills with blue clefts. I have come back for the white egrets feeding in a flock on the lawn, darting their bills in that finical stride, gawkily elegant, then suddenly but leisurely sailing to settle, but not too far off, like angels. III I wake at sunrise to angelic screams. And time is measuring my grandchildren's cries and time outpaces the sepia water of the racing creek, time takes its leisure, cunning in the blocked hollows of the pool, the elephantine stones in the leaf-marked lagoon, time sails with the soundless buzzard over the smoking hills and the clouds that fray and change and time waits very quiet between the mountains and the brown tracks in the valleys of the Northern Range, a cover of overhanging bamboo, in Maraval where, if the bed were steeper, a brown stream races or tries to, pooling in rocks, with great avail for me at least, or where a range's blues and indigo over which wide hawks sail their shadows on the wells of Santa Cruz, dark benedictions on the brook's muttering shale, and the horses are slowly plunging their manes as they climb up from the paved-with-lilies pond, so much mythology in their unharnessed necks! These little things take root as I add my praise to the huge lawn at the back of the house, a field, a bright, unaltered meadow, a small savannah for cries and bicycles and joy-crazed dogs bolting after pedalling boys, the crescent ghost of the new moon showing and on the thick slopes this forest like green billowing smoke pierced by the flame petals of the immortelle. IV Petals of the flame tree against ice-cream walls and the arches across the park with its tacit fountain, the old idlers on the benches, this is the prose that spreads like the shade of an immortal banyan in front of the library, the bulk that darkens the violin of twilight when traffic has vanished and nearly over also the colonial regime when the wharves cradled the rocking schooners of our boyhood to the echo of vespers in the alien cathedral. In the hot green silence a dragonfly's drone crossing the scorched hill to the shade of the cedars and spiced laurels, the lauriers canelles, the word itself lifting the plurals of its leaves, from the hot ground, from this page, the singeing smells. How simple to write this after you have gone, that your death that afternoon had the same ease as stopping at the side of the road under the trees to buy cassava bread that comes in two sorts sweet and unsweetened, from the huge cauldron, on the road between Soufrière and Canaries. The heat collects in the depths between the ridges and the high hawks circle in the gathering haze; like consonants round a vowel, insistent midges hum round noun's hexagon, and the hornet's house. Delve in the hot, still valley of Soufrière, the black, baking asphalt and its hedges dripping shade and here is the ultimate nullity despite the moil of the churning vegetation. The small church hidden in leaves. In mid-afternoon, the halt– then dart of a quizzical lizard across the road.

I The dialect of the scrub in the dry season withers the flow of English. Things burn for days without translation, with the heat of the scorched pastures and their skeletal cows. Every noun is a stump with its roots showing, and the creole language rushes like weeds until the entire island is overrun, then the rain begins to come in paragraphs and hazes this page, hazes the grey of islets, the grey of eyes, the rainstorm's wild-haired beauty. The first daybreak of rain, the crusted drought broken in half like bread, the quiet trumpet mouth of a rainbow and the wiry drizzle fighting decease, half the year blowing out to sea in hale, refreshing gusts, the withered lilies drink with grateful mouths, and the first blackbird of the new season announces itself on a bough the hummingbird is reglistened drilling the pierced hedges, my small shaft to your heart, my emerald arrow: A crowd crosses a bridge from Canaries to the Ponte Vecchio, from Piaille to Pescara, and a volley of blackbirds fans over Venice or the broken pier of Choiseul, and love is as wide as the span of my open palm for frontiers that read like one country, one map of affection that closes around my pen. I had forgotten the benediction of rain edged with sunlight, the prayers of dripping leaves and the cat testing the edge of the season with careful paw. And I have nothing more to write about than gratitude. For la mer, soleil-là, the bow of the arc-en-ciel and the archery of blackbirds from its radiant bow. The rest of the year is rain. II There was a beautiful rain this morning." "I was asleep." He stroked her forehead. She smiled at him, then laughed as she kept yawning. "It was lovely rain." But I thought of the dead I know. The sun shone through the rain and it was lovely. "I'm sure," she said. There were so many names the rain recited: Alan, Joseph and Claude and Charles and Roddy. The sunlight came through the rain and the drizzle shone as it had done before for everybody. For John and Inge, Devindra and Hamilton. "Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon," wrote Edward Thomas. Her eyes closed in my arms, but it was sleep. She was asleep again, while the bright rain moved from Massade to Monchy. Sometimes I stretch out, or you stretch out your hand, and we lock palms; our criss-crossed histories join and two maps fit. Bays, boundaries, rivers, roads, one country, one warm island. Is that noise rain on the hot roof, is it sweeping out to sea by the stones and shells of the almond cemetery? III The road is wet, the leaves wet, but the sun inching, and always the astonishment: in March? This blustery, this grey? The waves chopping and circling and ramming into one another like sheep in a maddened pen from a whiff of wolf, or white mares, bug-eyed from the lightning's whip, and, if they could, whinnying. But the light will win. The sun fought with the rain in the leaves and won; then the rain came back and it was finer out to sea. A drizzle blurred the promontories evenly and now the manchineels and acacias sparkled with the new rain and the cows' hides darkened as the horses dipped their heads and shook their manes, and over the horizon the faint arc of an almost imperceptible bow appeared then dimmed across the channel towards Martinique. This miracle was usual for the season. "The sun came out just for you," he said. And it was true. The light entered her forehead and blazoned her difference there. The pastures were beaded, roofs shone on the hills, a sloop was working its way against huge clouds as patches of sunlight widened with a new zeal towards detachment, towards simplicity. Who said that they were lying side by side, the cupped spoon of her torso in his own in the striped shadows of mid-afternoon? IV The doors are open, the house breathes and I feel a balm so heavy and a benediction so weightless that the past is just blue air and cobalt motion lanced with emerald and sail-flecks and the dove's continuous complaint about repletion, its swollen note of gratitude- all incantation is the monody of thanks to the sky's motionless or moving altars, even to the faint drone of that silver insect that is the morning plane over Martinique, while, take this for what you will, the frangipani that, for dry months, contorted, crucified in impotence or barrenness, endured, has come with pale pink petals and blades of olive leaves, parable of my loin-longing, my silver age. From the salt brightness of my balcony I look across to the abandoned fort; no History left, just natural history, as a cloud's shadow subtilizes thought. On a sloped meadow lifted by the light, the Hessians spun like blossoms from the immortelle, the tattered pennons of the sea-almond fluttered to the spray-white detonations of the lilac against blue the hue of a grenadier, dried pods of the flamboyant rattle their sabres and a mare's whinny across the parched pastures launches white scuds of sails across the channel, the race of a schooner launched in a canal. A grey sky trawls its silver wires of rain; these are the subtleties of the noon sea: lime, emerald, lilac, cobalt, ultramarine.

I The ground dove stuttered for a few steps then flew up from his path to settle in the sun-browned branches that were now barely twigs; in drought it coos with its relentless valve, a tiring sound, not like the sweet exchanges of turtles in the Song of Solomon, or the flutes of Venus in frescoes though all the mounds in the dove-calling drought the hills and gulches all briary and ochre and the small dervishes that swivelled in the dust were like an umber study for a fresco of The Prodigal Son, this scorched, barren acre. He had the smell of cities in his clothes, the steam and soot of trains of Fascist stations and their resounding vaults, he had the memory of rain carried in his head, the rain on Pescara's beach with the pastel hotels, and instead of the doves the air-show with the jets soaring and swooping over the Fair, the smell off that beach came back on the rock-road where the turtle lifted its mating music into the dry acacias, and mixed with the smell off the galloping sea-flock, each odour distinct, of sheep trampling their pens as if their fear had caught the wolf-scent. The rock-brown dove had fluttered from that fear that what he loved and knew once as a boy would panic and forget him from the change of character that the grunting swine could smell. A sow and her litter. Acknowledged prodigal. Grey sunrise through a sky of frosted glass, the great trees sodden, the paths below them pooled, the headlands veiled and muslin-thin, no birds, and pale green combers cresting through the drizzle; a change of climate, the clouding of the self in a sudden culture but one more confident in its glazed equestrian statues in wet parks, its railway stations echoing like the combers in the ground-shaken caves under the cliff; gathering, cresting then dissolving shallows as light steps quietly into the house. Light that inaudibly fits in the house as a book on a bookshelf with its spines of tombs and names, mouths slightly parted, eager to speak wherever their station now. Every library is a cemetery in sunlight. Sometimes, a shaft . . . Across the dry hillock, leaves chasing dead leaves in resurrecting gusts, or in the ochre quiet leaves too many to rake on the road's margins, too loaded to lift themselves, they lapsed singly or in a yellow chute from the cedar, burnt branches; lyres of desiccation choked the dry gutters everywhere in the country, La Feuillée, Monchy, by the caked track to Saltibus, over D'ennery. Drought. Song of the wireless harp of the frangipani that still makes a tangled music out of silence. II Now to cherish the depredations of April even on the threshold of March, its sunlit eve— the gommier maudit unshouldering its leaves, barrow after loaded barrow, the leaves fading, yellow, burnt grass and the tigerish shadows on the hillside, and the azure a trowelled blue, and blue hill-smoke, parched shortcuts and rust, cattle anchored in shadows and groaning like winches, the didactic drought against the hot sea that teaches what? Thirst for the grace that springs in grooves of oblivious dust. A fine haze screens the headland, the drizzle drifts. Is every noun: breakwater, headland, haze, seen through a gauze of English, a bright scrim, a mesh in which light now defines the wires and not its natural language? Were your life and work simply a good translation? Would headland, haze and the spray-wracked breakwater pronounce their own names differently? And have I looked at life, in other words, through some inoperable cataract? "What language do you speak in your own country?" Every noun has its echo, a noun is a noise, as every stone in the expanding sunlight finds an exact translation in its shadow, and it may be that you were halved by language as definitively as the meridian of Greenwich or by Pope Alexander's line, but what makes this, if this is all it is, more than just bearable, in fact, exultation is the stone that is looked at, and the manchineels, bitter, poisonous yellow berries, treacherous apples that look like Eden's on the tree of knowledge when the first noun was picked and named and eaten and the shadow of knowledge defined every edge originating language and then difference, and subtlety, the snake and contradiction and the sudden Babel of the manchineel. III The blank page grows a visionary wood. A parallel section, no, in fact a whole province of far, of foreign, of self-translating leaves stands on the place where it has always stood the right-hand margin of the page loud, soft but voluble in their original language, an orchestrating lexicon, veined manuscripts going far back in time and deep in roots and echoing in the tunnel of the right ear with echoes: oak-echo, beech-echo, linden-echo, and beech and birds a half-ancestral forest whose metre was an ocean's and whose break, parting declared the white-lined conjugation of combers' centuries. This ocean, English and this forest weald, this clattering natterer "burn," this distance, mist, kept its high columns marching as my pen moves towards that gap of light that comes upon the bright salt arc of a bare unprinted beach or where the piper leaves a print, its claws, dim, imperceptible as an ancient rune— that is the landscape, that, the stand of forest made up of all these leaves and lines that still rasp with delight with rhyme and incantation pages of shade turning into translation. And my left hand another vegetation but not their opposite or their enemy, palms and wild fern and praising them, the sea, sea-almond, grape and vine and agave that the wind's finger folded carefully drawing its thumb to mark the dog-eared wave across the dry hill, leaves chasing leaves in a shiny, scurrying wind, and, in the brown quiet, leaves, unraked, tiling the road's margins, so loaded they don't lift, they lapse singly, yellow, or chute from the cedars. Lyres of desiccation in March's autumn, filling the dry gutters, everywhere in the country, La Feuillée, Monchy, except for the wireless harp of the frangipani that still makes its music out of extreme stillness. In my own botanic origins,frangere panem to break bread, flower-flour in its white lilies, except that in rare blossom I now remember the flower is pink. It doesn't matter. Since whatever hue it is, its wafer it serves that need, petal on the sky's open palate at early mass every morning but here most on this Sunday with its Lenten drought, the heart-coloured flowers then the caterpillars determinedly devour, on a Sunday when a sadness still eats at the parallel petals of my beaten heart, and the white pews of the sea, the waves coming in aisles, my longing for the communion of breakfast, the leafless, flower-less but crusted bark of the frangipani, frangere panem, the pain that I break and eat flower and flour, pain and pain, bright Easter coming, like the seas white communion. IV In the country of the ochre afternoon it is always still and hot, the dry leaves stirring infrequently sometimes with the rattling pods of what they call "women's tongues," in the afternoon country the far hills are very quiet and heat-hazed, but mostly in the middle of the country of the afternoon I see the brown heat of the skin of my first love, so still, so perfect, so unaltered, and I see how she walked with her sunburnt hands against the still sea-almonds, to a remembered cove, where she stood on the small dock— that was when I thought we were immortal and that love would be folded doves and folded oars and water lapping against eroding stone in the ochre country of the afternoon.

BOOK SIX Chapter XLIV I In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez, the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane down the archipelago’s highways. The first breeze rattled the spears and their noise was like distant rain marching down from the hills, like a shell at your ears. In the cool asphalt Sundays of the Antilles the light brought the bitter history of sugar across the squared fields, heightening towards harvest, to the bleached flags of the Indian diaspora. The drizzling light blew across the savannah darkening the racehorses’ hides; mist slowly erased the royal palms on the crests of the hills and the hills themselves. The brown patches the horses had grazed shone as wet as their hides. A skittish stallion jerked at his bridle, marble-eyed at the thunder muffling the hills, but the groom was drawing him in like a fisherman, wrapping the slack line under one fist, then with the other tightening the rein and narrowing the circle. The sky cracked asunder and a forked tree flashed, and suddenly that black rain which can lose an entire archipelago in broad daylight was pouring tin nails on the roof, hammering the balcony. I closed the French window, and thought of the horses in their stalls with one hoof tilted, watching the ropes of rain. I lay in bed with current gone from the bed-lamp and heard the roar of wind shaking the windows, and I remembered Achille on his own mattress and desperate Hector trying to save his canoe, I thought of Helen as my island lost in the haze, and I was sure I’d never see her again. All of a sudden the rain stopped and I heard the sluicing of water down the guttering. I opened the window when the sun came out. It replaced the tiny brooms of palms on the ridges. On the red galvanized roof of the paddock, the wet sparkled, then the grooms led the horses over the new grass and exercised them again, and there was a different brightness in everything, in the leaves, in the horses’ eyes. II I smelt the leaves threshing at the top of the year in green January over the orange villas and military barracks where the Plunketts were, the harbour flecked by the wind that comes with Christmas, edged with the Arctic, that was christened Vent Noël; it stayed until March and, with luck, until Easter. It freshened the cedars, waxed the laurier-cannelle, and hid the African swift. I smelt the drizzle on the asphalt leaving the Morne, it was the smell of an iron on damp cloth; I heard the sizzle of fried jackfish in oil with their coppery skin; I smelt ham studded with cloves, the crusted accra, the wax in the varnished parlour: Come in. Come in, the arm of the Morris chair sticky with lacquer; I saw a sail going out and a sail coming in, and a breeze so fresh it lifted the lace curtains like a petticoat, like a sail towards Ithaca; I smelt a dead rivulet in the clogged drains. III Ah, twin-headed January, seeing either tense: a past, they assured us, born in degradation, and a present that lifted us up with the wind’s noise in the breadfruit leaves with such an elation that it contradicts what is past! The cannonballs of rotting breadfruit from the Battle of the Saints, the asterisks of bulletholes in the brick walls of the redoubt. I lived there with every sense. I smelt with my eyes, I could see with my nostrils. Chapter XLV I One side of the coast plunges its precipices into the Atlantic. Turns require wide locks, since the shoulder is sharp and the curve just misses a long drop over the wind-bent trees and the rocks between the trees. There is a wide view of Dennery, with its stone church and raw ochre cliffs at whose base the African breakers end. Across the flecked sea whose combers veil and unveil the rocks with their lace the next port is Dakar. The uninterrupted wind thuds under the wings of frigates, you see them bent from a force that has crossed the world, tilting to find purchase in the sudden downdrafts of its current. The breeze threshed the palms on the cool December road where the Comet hurtled with empty leopard seats, so fast a man on a donkey trying to read its oncoming fiery sign heard only two thudding beats from the up-tempo zouk that its stereo played when it screeched round a bridge and began to ascend away from the palm-fronds and their wickerwork shade that left the windscreen clear as it locked round the bend, where Hector suddenly saw the trotting piglet and thought of Plunkett’s warning as he heard it screel with the same sound that the tires of the Comet made rounding the curve from the sweat-greased steering wheel. The rear wheels spin to a dead stop, like a helm. The piglet trots down the safer side of the road. Lodged in their broken branches the curled letters flame. Hector had both hands on the wheel. His head was bowed under the swaying statue of the Madonna of the Rocks, her smile swayed under the blue hood, and when her fluted robe stilled, the smile stayed on her dimpled porcelain. She saw, in the bowed man, the calm common oval of prayer, the head’s usual angle over the pew of the dashboard. Her lifted palm, small as a doll’s from its cerulean mantle, indicated that he had prayed enough to the lace of foam round the cliff’s altar, that now, if he wished, he could lift his head, but he stayed in the same place, the way a man will remain when Mass is finished, not unclenching his hands or freeing one to cross forehead, heart, and shoulders swiftly and then kneel facing the altar. He bowed in endless remorse, for her mercy at what he had done to Achille, his brother. But his arc was over, for the course of every comet is such. The fated crescent was printed on the road by the scorching tires. A salt tear ran down the porcelain cheek and it went in one slow drop to the clenched knuckle that still gripped the wheel. On the flecked sea, the uninterrupted wind herded the long African combers, and whipped the small flag of the island on its silver spearhead. II Drivers leant over the rail. One seized my luggage off the porter’s cart. The rest burst into patois, with gestures of despair at the lost privilege of driving me, then turned to other customers. In the evening pastures horses grazed, their hides wet with light that shot its lances over the combers. I had the transport all to myself. “You all set? Good. A good pal of mine died in that chariot of his called the Comet.” He turned in the front seat, spinning the air with his free hand. I sat, sprawled out in the back, discouraging talk, with my crossed feet. “You never know when, eh? I was at the airport that day. I see him take off like a rocket. I always said that thing have too much horsepower. And so said, so done. The same hotel, chief, correct?” I saw the coastal villages receding as the highway’s tongue translated bush into forest, the wild savannah into moderate pastures, that other life going in its “change for the best,” its peace paralyzed in a postcard, a concrete future ahead of it all, in the cinder-blocks of hotel development with the obsolete craft of the carpenter, as I sensed, in the neat marinas, the fisherman’s phantom. Old oarlocks and rusting fretsaw. My craft required the same crouching care, the same crabbed, natural devotion of the hand that stencilled a flowered window-frame or planed an elegant canoe; its time was gone with the spirit in the wood, as wood grew obsolete and plasterers smoothed the blank page of white concrete. I watched the afternoon sea. Didn’t I want the poor to stay in the same light so that I could transfix them in amber, the afterglow of an empire, preferring a shed of palm-thatch with tilted sticks to that blue bus-stop? Didn’t I prefer a road from which tracks climbed into the thickening syntax of colonial travellers, the measured prose I read as a schoolboy? That cove, with its brown shallows there, Praslin? That heron? Had they waited for me to develop my craft? Why hallow that pretence of preserving what they left, the hypocrisy of loving them from hotels, a biscuit-tin fence smothered in love-vines, scenes to which I was attached as blindly as Plunkett with his remorseful research? Art is History’s nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village. The gap between the driver and me increased when he said: “The place changing, eh?” where an old rumshop had gone, but not that river with its clogged shadows.That would make me a stranger. “All to the good,” he said. I said, “All to the good,” then, “whoever they are,” to myself. I caught his eyes in the mirror. We were climbing out of Micoud. Hadn’t I made their poverty my paradise? His back could have been Hector’s, ferrying tourists in the other direction home, the leopard seat scratching their damp backs like the fur-covered armrests. He had driven his burnt-out cargo, tired of sweat, who longed for snow on the moon and didn’t have to face the heat of that sinking sun, who knew a climate as monotonous as this one could only produce from its unvarying vegetation flashes of a primal insight like those red-pronged lilies that shot from the verge, that their dried calabashes of fake African masks for a fake Achilles rattled with the seeds that came from other men’s minds. So let them think that. Who needed art in this place where even the old women strode with stiff-backed spines, and the fishermen had such adept thumbs, such grace these people had, but what they envied most in them was the calypso part, the Caribbean lilt still in the shells of their ears, like the surf’s rhythm, until too much happiness was shadowed with guilt like any Eden, and they sighed at the sign: HEWANNORRA (Iounalao), the gold sea flat as a credit-card, extending its line to a beach that now looked just like everywhere else, Greece or Hawaii. Now the goddamn souvenir felt absurd, excessive. The painted gourds, the shells. Their own faces as brown as gourds. Mine felt as strange as those at the counter feeling their bodies change. III Change lay in our silence. We had come to that bend where the trees are warped by wind, and the cliffs, raw, shelve surely to foam. “Is right here everything end,” the driver said, and rammed open the transport door on his side, then mine. “Anyway, chief, the view nice.” I joined him at the gusting edge. “His name was Hector.” The name was bent like the trees on the precipice to point inland. In its echo a man-o’-war screamed on the wind. The driver moved off for a piss, then shouted over his shoulder: “A road-warrior. He would drive like a madman when the power took. He had a nice woman. Maybe he died for her.” For her and tourism, I thought. The driver shook himself, zipping then hoisting his crotch. “Crazy, but a gentle fellow anyway, with a very good brain.” Cut to a leopard galloping on a dry plain across Serengeti. Cut to the spraying fans drummed by a riderless stallion, its wild mane scaring the Scamander. Cut to a woman’s hands clenched towards her mouth with no sound. Cut to the wheel of a chariot’s spiked hubcap. Cut to the face of his muscling jaw, then flashback to Achille hurling a red tin and a cutlass. Next, a vase with a girl’s hoarse whisper echoing “Omeros,” as in a conch-shell. Cut to a shield of silver rolling like a hubcap. Rewind, in slow motion, myrmidons gathering by a village river with lances for oars. Cut to the surpliced ocean droning its missal. Cut. A crane hoisting a wreck. A horse nosing the surf, then shuddering its neck. He’d paid the penalty of giving up the sea as graceless and as treacherous as it had seemed, for the taxi-business; he was making money, but all of that money was making him ashamed of the long afternoons of shouting by the wharf hustling passengers. He missed the uncertain sand under his feet, he sighed for the trough of a wave, and the jerk of the oar when it turned in his hand, and the rose conch sunset with its low pelicans. Castries was corrupting him with its roaring life, its littered market, with too many transport vans competing. Castries had been his common-law wife who, like Helen, he had longed for from a distance, and now he had both, but a frightening discontent hollowed his face; to find that the sea was a love he could never lose made every gesture violent: ramming the side-door shut, raking the clutch. He drove as if driven by furies, but furies paid the rent. A man who cursed the sea had cursed his own mother. Mer was both mother and sea. In his lost canoe he had said his prayers. But now he was in another kind of life that was changing him with his brand-new stereo, its endless garages, where he could not whip off his shirt, hearing the conch’s summoning note. Chapter XLVI I Hector was buried near the sea he had loved once. Not too far from the shallows where he fought Achille for a tin and Helen. He did not hear the sea-almond’s moan over the bay when Philoctete blew the shell, nor the one drumbeat of a wave-thud, nor a sail rattling to rest as its day’s work was over, and its mate, gauging depth, bent over the gunwale, then wearily sounding the fathoms with an oar, the same rite his shipmates would repeat soon enough when it was their turn to lie quiet as Hector, lowering a pitch-pine canoe in the earth’s trough, to sleep under the piled conchs, through every weather on the violet-wreathed mound. Crouching for his friend to hear, Achille whispered about their ancestral river, and those things he would recognize when he got there, his true home, forever and ever and ever, forever,compère. Then Philoctete limped over and rested his hand firmly on a shaking shoulder to anchor his sorrow. Seven Seas and Helen did not come nearer. Achille had carried an oar to the church and propped it outside with the red tin. Now his voice strengthened. He said: “Mate, this is your spear,” and laid the oar slowly, the same way he had placed the parallel oars in the hull of the gommier the day the African swift and its shadow raced. And this was the prayer that Achille could not utter: “The spear that I give you, my friend, is only wood. Vexation is past. I know how well you treat her. You never know my admiration, when you stood crossing the sun at the bow of the long canoe with the plates of your chest like a shield; I would say any enemy so was a compliment. ’Cause no African ever hurled his wide seine at the bay by which he was born with such beauty. You hear me? Men did not know you like me. All right. Sleep good. Good night.” Achille moved Philoctete’s hand, then he saw Helen standing alone and veiled in the widowing light. Then he reached down to the grave and lifted the tin to her. Helen nodded. A wind blew out the sun. II Pride set in Helen’s face after this, like a stone bracketed with Hector’s name; her lips were incised by its dates in parenthesis. She seemed more stern, more ennobled by distance as she slowly crossed the hot street of the village like a distant sail on the horizon. Grief heightened her. When she smiled it was with such distance that it was hard to tell if she had heard your condolence. It was the child, Ma Kilman told them, that made her more beautiful. III The rites of the island were simplified by its elements, which changed places. The grooved sea was Achille’s garden, the ridged plot of rattling plantains carried their sense of the sea, and Philoctete, on his height, often heard, in a wind that suddenly churned the rage of deep gorges, the leafy sound of far breakers plunging with smoke, and for smoke there were the bonfires which the sun catches on the blue heights at sunrise, doing the same work as Philoctete clearing his plot, just as, at sunset, smoke came from the glowing rim of the horizon as if from his enamel pot. The woodsmoke smelt of a regret that men cannot name. On the charred field, the massive sawn trunks burnt slowly like towers, and the great indigo dusk slowly plumed down, devouring the still leaves, igniting the firefly huts, lifting the panicky egret to beat its lagoon and shelve in the cage of the mangroves, take in the spars of its sails, then with quick-pricking head anchor itself shiftingly, and lift its question again. At night, the island reversed its elements, the heron of a quarter-moon floated from Hector’s grave, rain rose upwards from the sea, and the corrugated iron of the sea glittered with nailheads. Ragged plantains bent and stepped with their rustling powers over the furrows of Philoctete’s garden, a chorus of aged ancestors and straw, and, rustling, surrounded every house in the village with its back garden, with its rank midden of rusted chamber pots, rotting nets, and the moon’s cold basin. They sounded, when they shook, after the moonlit meridian of their crossing, like the night-surf; they gazed in silence at the shadows of their lamplit children. At Philoctete, groaning and soaking the flower on his shin with hot sulphur, cleaning its edges with yellow Vaseline, and, gripping his knee, squeezing rags from the basin. At night, when yards are asleep, and the broken line of the surf hisses like Philo,“Bon Dieu, aie, waie, my sin is this sore?” the old plantains suffer and shine. Chapter XLVII I Islands of bay leaves in the medicinal bath of a cauldron, a sibylline cure. The citron sprig of a lime-tree dividing the sky in half dipped its divining rod. The white spray of the thorn, which the swift bends lightly, waited for a black hand to break it in bits and boil its leaves for the wound from the pronged anchor rusting in clean bottom-sand. Ma Kilman, in a black hat with its berried fringe, eased herself sideways down the broken concrete step of the rumshop’s back door, closed it, and rammed the hinge tight. The bolt caught a finger and with that her instep arch twisted and she let out a soft Catholic curse, then crossed herself. She closed the gate. The asphalt sweated with the heat, the limp breadfruit leaves were thick over the fence. Her spectacles swam in their sweat. She plucked an armpit. The damn wig was badly made. She was going to five o’clock Mass, to la Messe, and sometimes she had to straighten it as she prayed until the wafer dissolved her with tenderness, the way a raindrop melts on the tongue of a breeze. In the church’s cool cave the sweat dried from her eyes. She rolled down the elastic bands below the knees of her swollen stockings. It was then that their vise round her calves reminded her of Philoctete. Then, numbering her beads, she began her own litany of berries, Hail Mary marigolds that stiffen their aureoles in the heights, mild anemone and clear watercress, the sacred heart of Jesus pierced like the anthurium, the thorns of logwood, called the tree of life, the aloe good for seizures, the hole in the daisy’s palm, with its drying blood that was the hole in the fisherman’s shin since he was pierced by a hook; there was the pale, roadside tisane of her malarial childhood. There was this one for easing a birth-breach, that one for a love-bath, before the buds of green sugar-apples in the sun ripened like her nipples in girlhood. But what path led through nettles to the cure, the furious sibyl couldn’t remember. Mimosa winced from her fingers, shutting like jalousies at some passing evil when she reached for them. The smell of incense lingers in her clothes. Inside, the candle-flames are erect round the bier of the altar while she and her friends old-talk on the steps, but the plant keeps its secret when her memory reaches, shuttering in its fronds. II The dew had not yet dried on the white-ribbed awnings and the nodding palanquins of umbrella yams where the dark grove had not heat but early mornings of perpetual freshness, in which the bearded arms of a cedar held council. Between its gnarled toes grew the reek of an unknown weed; its pronged flower sprang like a buried anchor; its windborne odours diverted the bee from its pollen, but its power, rooted in bitterness, drew her bowed head by the nose as a spike does a circling bull. To approach it Ma Kilman lowered her head to one side and screened the stench with a cologned handkerchief. The mulch it was rooted in carried the smell, when it gangrened, of Philoctete’s cut. In her black dress, her berried black hat, she climbed a goat-path up from the village, past the stones with dried palms and conchs, where the buried suffer the sun all day Sunday, while goats forage the new wreaths. Once more she pulled at the itch in her armpits, nearly dropping her purse. Then she climbed hard up the rain-cracked path, the bay closing behind her like a wound, and rested. Everything that echoed repeated its outline: a goat’s doddering bleat, a hammer multiplying a roof, and, through the back yards, a mother cursing a boy too nimble to beat. Ma Kilman picked up her purse and sighed on upwards to the thread of the smell, one arm behind her back, passing the cactus, the thorn trees, and then the wood appeared over her, thick green, the green almost black as her dress in its shade, its border of flowers flecking the pasture with spray. Then she staggered back from the line of ants at her feet. She saw the course they had kept behind her, following her from church, signalling a language she could not recognize. III A swift had carried the strong seed in its stomach centuries ago from its antipodal shore, skimming the sea-troughs, outdarting ospreys, her luck held to its shadow. She aimed to carry the cure that precedes every wound; the reversible Bight of Benin was her bow, her target the ringed haze of a circling horizon. The star-grains at night made her hungrier; the leafless sea with no house for her weariness. Sometimes she dozed in her flight for a swift’s second, closing the seeds of her stare, then ruddering straight. The dry sea-flakes whitened her breast, her feathers thinned. Then, one dawn the day-star rose slowly from the wrong place and it frightened her because all the breakers were blowing from the wrong east. She saw the horned island and uncurled her claws with one frail cry, since swifts are not given to song, and fluttered down to a beach, ejecting the seed in grass near the sand. She nestled in dry seaweed. In a year she was bleached bone. All of that motion a pile of fragile ash from the fire of her will, but the vine grew its own wings, out of the ocean it climbed like the ants, the ancestors of Achille, the women carrying coals after the dark door slid over the hold. As the weed grew in odour so did its strength at the damp root of the cedar, where the flower was anchored at the mottled root as a lizard crawled upwards, foot by sallow foot.

The fist clenched round my heart loosens a little, and I gasp brightness; but it tightens again. When have I ever not loved the pain of love? But this has moved past love to mania. This has the strong clench of the madman, this is gripping the ledge of unreason, before plunging howling into the abyss. Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.

[for Alix Walcott] i Between the vision of the Tourist Board and the true Paradise lies the desert where Isaiah’s elations force a rose from the sand. The thirty-third canto cores the dawn clouds with concentric radiance, the breadfruit opens its palms in praise of the bounty, bois-pain, tree of bread, slave food, the bliss of John Clare, torn, wandering Tom, stoat-stroker in his county of reeds and stalk-crickets, fiddling the dank air, lacing his boots with vines, steering glazed beetles with the tenderest prods, knight of the cockchafer, wrapped in the mists of shires, their snail-horned steeples palms opening to the cupped pool—but his soul safer than ours, though iron streams fetter his ankles. Frost whitening his stubble, he stands in the ford of a brook like the Baptist lifting his branches to bless cathedrals and snails, the breaking of this new day, and the shadows of the beach road near which my mother lies, with the traffic of insects going to work anyway. The lizard on the white wall fixed on the hieroglyph of its stone shadow, the palms’ rustling archery, the souls and sails of circling gulls rhyme with: “In la sua volont    è nostra pace,” In His will is our peace. Peace in white harbours, in marinas whose masts agree, in crescent melons left all night in the fridge, in the Egyptian labours of ants moving boulders of sugar, words in this sentence, shadow and light, who live next door like neighbours, and in sardines with pepper sauce. My mother lies near the white beach stones, John Clare near the sea-almonds, yet the bounty returns each daybreak, to my surprise, to my surprise and betrayal, yes, both at once. I am moved like you, mad Tom, by a line of ants; I behold their industry and they are giants. ii There on the beach, in the desert, lies the dark well where the rose of my life was lowered, near the shaken plants, near a pool of fresh tears, tolled by the golden bell of allamanda, thorns of the bougainvillea, and that is their bounty! They shine with defiance from weed and flower, even those that flourish elsewhere, vetch, ivy, clematis, on whom the sun now rises with all its power, not for the Tourist Board or for Dante Alighieri, but because there is no other path for its wheel to take except to make the ruts of the beach road an allegory of this poem’s career, of yours, that she died for the sake of a crowning wreath of false laurel; so, John Clare, forgive me, for this morning’s sake, forgive me, coffee, and pardon me, milk with two packets of artificial sugar, as I watch these lines grow and the art of poetry harden me into sorrow as measured as this, to draw the veiled figure of Mamma entering the standard elegiac. No, there is grief, there will always be, but it must not madden, like Clare, who wept for a beetle’s loss, for the weight of the world in a bead of dew on clematis or vetch, and the fire in these tinder-dry lines of this poem I hate as much as I love her, poor rain-beaten wretch, redeemer of mice, earl of the doomed protectorate of cavalry under your cloak; come on now, enough! iii Bounty! In the bells of tree-frogs with their steady clamour in the indigo dark before dawn, the fading morse of fireflies and crickets, then light on the beetle’s armour, and the toad’s too-late presages, nettles of remorse that shall spring from her grave from the spade’s heartbreak. And yet not to have loved her enough is to love more, if I confess it, and I confess it. The trickle of underground springs, the babble of swollen gulches under drenched ferns, loosening the grip of their roots, till their hairy clods like unclenching fists swirl wherever the gulch turns them, and the shuddering aftermath bends the rods of wild cane. Bounty in the ant’s waking fury, in the snail’s chapel stirring under wild yams, praise in decay and process, awe in the ordinary in wind that reads the lines of the breadfruit’s palms in the sun contained in a globe of the crystal dew, bounty in the ants’ continuing a line of raw flour, mercy on the mongoose scuttling past my door, in the light’s parallelogram laid on the kitchen floor, for Thine is the Kingdom, the Glory, and the Power, the bells of Saint Clement’s in the marigolds on the altar, in the bougainvillea’s thorns, in the imperial lilac and the feathery palms that nodded at the entry into Jerusalem, the weight of the world on the back of an ass; dismounting, He left His cross there for sentry and sneering centurion; then I believed in His Word, in a widow’s immaculate husband, in pews of brown wood, when the cattle-bell of the chapel summoned our herd into the varnished stalls, in whose rustling hymnals I heard the fresh Jacobean springs, the murmur Clare heard of bounty abiding, the clear language she taught us, “as the hart panteth,” at this, her keen ears pronged while her three fawns nibbled the soul-freshening waters, “as the hart panteth for the water-brooks” that belonged to the language in which I mourn her now, or when I showed her my first elegy, her husband’s, and then her own. iv But can she or can she not read this? Can you read this, Mamma, or hear it? If I took the pulpit, lay-preacher like tender Clare, like poor Tom, so that look, Miss! the ants come to you like children, their beloved teacher Alix, but unlike the silent recitation of the infants, the choir that Clare and Tom heard in their rainy county, we have no solace but utterance, hence this wild cry. Snails move into harbour, the breadfruit plants on the Bounty will be heaved aboard, and the white God is Captain Bligh. Across white feathery grave-grass the shadow of the soul passes, the canvas cracks open on the cross-trees of the Bounty, and the Trades lift the shrouds of the resurrected sail. All move in their passage to the same mother-country, the dirt-clawing weasel, the blank owl or sunning seal. Faith grows mutinous. The ribbed body with its cargo stalls in its doldrums, the God-captain is cast adrift by a mutinous Christian, in the wake of the turning Argo plants bob in the ocean’s furrows, their shoots dip and lift, and the soul’s Australia is like the New Testament after the Old World, the code of an eye for an eye; the horizon spins slowly and Authority’s argument diminishes in power, in the longboat with Captain Bligh. This was one of your earliest lessons, how the Christ-Son questions the Father, to settle on another island, haunted by Him, by the speck of a raging deity on the ruled horizon, diminishing in meaning and distance, growing more dim: all these predictable passages that we first disobey before we become what we challenged; but you never altered your voice, either sighing or sewing, you would pray to your husband aloud, pedalling the hymns we all heard in the varnished pew: “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” “Jerusalem the Golden.” Your melody faltered but never your faith in the bounty which is His Word. v All of these waves crepitate from the culture of Ovid, its sibilants and consonants; a universal metre piles up these signatures like inscriptions of seaweed that dry in the pungent sun, lines ruled by mitre and laurel, or spray swiftly garlanding the forehead of an outcrop (and I hope this settles the matter of presences). No soul was ever invented, yet every presence is transparent; if I met her (in her nightdress ankling barefoot, crooning to the shallows), should I call her shadow that of a pattern invented by Graeco-Roman design, columns of shadows cast by the Forum, Augustan perspectives— poplars, casuarina-colonnades, the in-and-out light of almonds made from original Latin, no leaf but the olive’s? Questions of pitch. Faced with seraphic radiance (don’t interrupt!), mortals rub their skeptical eyes that hell is a beach-fire at night where embers dance, with temporal fireflies like thoughts of Paradise; but there are inexplicable instincts that keep recurring not from hope or fear only, that are real as stones, the faces of the dead we wait for as ants are transferring their cities, though we no longer believe in the shining ones. I half-expect to see you no longer, then more than half, almost never, or never then—there I have said it— but felt something less than final at the edge of your grave, some other something somewhere, equally dreaded, since the fear of the infinite is the same as death, unendurable brightness, the substantial dreading its own substance, dissolving to gases and vapours, like our dread of distance; we need a horizon, a dividing line that turns the stars into neighbours though infinity separates them, we can think of only one sun: all I am saying is that the dread of death is in the faces we love, the dread of our dying, or theirs; therefore we see in the glint of immeasurable spaces not stars or falling embers, not meteors, but tears. vi The mango trees serenely rust when they are in flower, nobody knows the name for that voluble cedar whose bell-flowers fall, the pomme-arac purples its floor. The blue hills in late afternoon always look sadder. The country night waiting to come in outside the door; the firefly keeps striking matches, and the hillside fumes with a bluish signal of charcoal, then the smoke burns into a larger question, one that forms and unforms, then loses itself in a cloud, till the question returns. Buckets clatter under pipes, villages begin at corners. A man and his trotting dog come back from their garden. The sea blazes beyond the rust roofs, dark is on us before we know it. The earth smells of what’s done, small yards brighten, day dies and its mourners begin, the first wreath of gnats; this was when we sat down on bright verandahs watching the hills die. Nothing is trite once the beloved have vanished; empty clothes in a row, but perhaps our sadness tires them who cherished delight; not only are they relieved of our customary sorrow, they are without hunger, without any appetite, but are part of earth’s vegetal fury; their veins grow with the wild mammy-apple, the open-handed breadfruit, their heart in the open pomegranate, in the sliced avocado; ground-doves pick from their palms; ants carry the freight of their sweetness, their absence in all that we eat, their savour that sweetens all of our multiple juices, their faith that we break and chew in a wedge of cassava, and here at first is the astonishment: that earth rejoices in the middle of our agony, earth that will have her for good: wind shines white stones and the shallows’ voices. vii In spring, after the bear’s self-burial, the stuttering crocuses open and choir, glaciers shelve and thaw, frozen ponds crack into maps, green lances spring from the melting fields, flags of rooks rise and tatter the pierced light, the crumbling quiet avalanches of an unsteady sky; the vole uncoils and the otter worries his sleek head through the verge’s branches; crannies, culverts, and creeks roar with wrist-numbing water. Deer vault invisible hurdles and sniff the sharp air, squirrels spring up like questions, berries easily redden, edges delight in their own shapes (whoever their shaper). But here there is one season, our viridian Eden is that of the primal garden that engendered decay, from the seed of a beetle’s shard or a dead hare white and forgotten as winter with spring on its way. There is no change now, no cycles of spring, autumn, winter, nor an island’s perpetual summer; she took time with her; no climate, no calendar except for this bountiful day. As poor Tom fed his last crust to trembling birds, as by reeds and cold pools John Clare blest these thin musicians, let the ants teach me again with the long lines of words, my business and duty, the lesson you taught your sons, to write of the light’s bounty on familiar things that stand on the verge of translating themselves into news: the crab, the frigate that floats on cruciform wings, and that nailed and thorn riddled tree that opens its pews to the blackbird that hasn’t forgotten her because it sings.