High Yellow

Errol drives me to Treasure Beach It’s an old story, the terrible storm swerving the dark country roads the ship going down, half the sailors I think about what you will be, your mix drowned, half swimming the white, black, Chinese, and your father’s slate waves, spat hard onto shore Scottish-Englishness. We cross the Black River Smashed crates, bodies where they shipped cane sugar and molasses choking on the black sand upstream past a sign One man stands —What is this place? A woman for Lover’s Leap. The air stinks of sulphur in the trees, one hand raised Errol drops me at a blue gate.Be safe This is how the Scotsmen came behind the house, the thin beach why the black people here have red hair of black sand, the water warm and gray Or the other story, no storm I am deep before I know it, groundless no wrecked ship. Just the miles the swell stops the sickness of cane fields and mulatto children named under a crooked tree, perched on sea rocks McDonald or McArthur for two fishermen in torn denims, smoking their fathers, who owned them I dry in the sun. They pass, turn, come close Nothing grows at Lover’s Leap they have rust afros, gold faces splashed with freckles where two runaways one ripped with muscle, one with eyes cornered by their master, held hands like razors.What you want here they say and jumped down into the clouds