for Elizabeth and Anna
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
PART ONE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
PART TWO
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
XXXVIII
XXXIX
XL
XLI
XLII
XLIII
XLIV
XLV
XLVI
XLVII
XLVIII
XLIX
L
LI
LII
LIII
LIV
Index of First Lines
About the Author
Copyright
PART ONE
I
The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud—
clouds that will keep no record of where we have passed,
nor the sea’s mirror, nor the coral busy with its own
culture; they aren’t doors of dissolving stone,
but pages in a damp culture that come apart.
So a hole in their parchment opens, and suddenly, in a vast
dereliction of sunlight, there’s that island known
to the traveller Trollope, and the fellow traveller Froude,
for making nothing. Not even a people. The jet’s shadow
ripples over green jungles as steadily as a minnow
through seaweed. Our sunlight is shared by Rome
and your white paper, Joseph. Here, as everywhere else,
it is the same age. In cities, in settlements of mud,
light has never had epochs. Near the rusty harbor
around Port of Spain bright suburbs fade into words—
Maraval, Diego Martin—the highways long as regrets,
and steeples so tiny you couldn’t hear their bells,
nor the sharp exclamations of whitewashed minarets
from green villages. The lowering window resounds
over pages of earth, the canefields set in stanzas.
Skimming over an ocher swamp like a fast cloud of egrets
are nouns that find their branches as simply as birds.
It comes too fast, this shelving sense of home—
canes rushing the wing, a fence; a world that still stands as
the trundling tires keep shaking and shaking the heart.
II
Companion in Rome, whom Rome makes as old as Rome,
old as that peeling fresco whose flaking paint
is the clouds, you are crouched in some ancient pensione
where the only new thing is paper, like young St. Jerome
with his rock vault. Tonsured, you’re muttering a line
that your exiled country will soon learn by heart,
to a flaking, sunlit ledge where a pigeon gurgles.
Midsummer’s furnace casts everything in bronze.
Traffic flows in slow coils, like the doors of a baptistry,
and even the kitten’s eyes blaze with Byzantine icons.
That old woman in black, unwrinkling your sheet with a palm,
her home is Rome, its history is her house.
Every Caesar’s life has shrunk to a candle’s column
in her saucer. Salt cleans their bloodstained togas.
She stacks up the popes like towels in cathedral drawers;
now in her stone kitchen, under the domes of onions,
she slices a light, as thick as cheese, into epochs.
Her kitchen wall flakes like an atlas where, once,
Ibi dracones was written, where unchristened cannibals
gnawed on the dry heads of coconuts as Ugolino did.
Hell’s hearth is as cold as Pompeii’s. We’re punished by bells
as gentle as lilies. Luck to your Roman elegies
that the honey of time will riddle like those of Ovid.
Corals up to their windows in sand are my sacred domes,
gulls circling a seine are the pigeons of my St. Mark’s,
silver legions of mackerel race through our catacombs.
III
At the Queen’s Park Hotel, with its white, high-ceilinged rooms,
I reenter my first local mirror. A skidding roach
in the porcelain basin slides from its path to Parnassus.
Every word I have written took the wrong approach.
I cannot connect these lines with the lines in my face.
The child who died in me has left his print on
the tangled bed linen, and it was his small voice
that whispered from the gargling throat of the basin.
Out on the balcony I remember how morning was:
It was like a granite corner in Piero della Francesca’s
“Resurrection,” the cold, sleeping foot
prickling like the small palms up by the Hilton.
On the dewy Savannah, gently revolved by their grooms,
snorting, delicate-ankled racehorses exercise,
as delicate-ankled as brown smoke from the bakeries.
Sweat darkens their sides, and dew has frosted the skins
of the big American taxis parked all night on the street.
In black asphalt alleys marked by a ribbon of sunlight,
the closed faces of shacks are touched by that phrase in
Traherne:
“The corn was orient and immortal wheat,”
and the canefields of Caroni. With all summer to burn,
a breeze strolls down to the docks, and the sea begins.
IV
This Spanish port, piratical in diverseness,
with its one-eyed lighthouse, this damned sea of noise,
this ocher harbor, mantled by its own scum,
offers, from white wrought-iron balconies,
the nineteenth-century view. You can watch it become
more African hourly—crusted roofs, hot as skillets
peppered with cries; between fast-fry wagons,
floating seraphic Muslims cannot make it hush.
By the pitch of noon, the one thing wanting
is a paddle-wheeler with its rusty parrot’s scream,
whistling in to be warped, and Mr. Kurtz on the landing.
Stay on the right bank in the imperial dream—
the Thames, not the Congo. From the small-island masts
of the schooner basin to the plate-glass fronts
of the Holiday Inn is one step, and from need to greed
through the river of clogged, circling traffic is
a few steps more. The world had no time to change
to a doorman’s braid from the loincloths of Africa.
So, when the stores draw their blinds, like an empire’s ending,
and the banks fade like the peaks of the Hindu Kush,
a cloaked wind, bent like a scavenger, rakes the trash
in the gutters. It is hard not to see the past’s
vision of lampposts branchi
ng over streets of bush,
the plazas cracked by the jungle’s furious seed.
V
The hemispheres lie sweating, flesh to flesh,
on a damp bed. The far ocean grinds in waves
of air-conditioning. The air is scaled like a fish
that leaves dry salt on the hands, and one believes
only in ice, the white zones of refrigerators.
In muslin midsummer along Fourteenth Street, hucksters
with cardboard luggage stacked near the peeling rind
of advertisements have made the Big Apple a mango;
shy as wallflowers at first, the dazed high-rises
rock to reggae and salsa; democracy’s price is
two steps forward and three steps back in the Aztec tango
of assimilation, with no bar to the barrio.
On Fridays, an exodus crawls to the Hamptons.
Spit dries on the lips of the curb, and sweat
makes the furniture float away in islands.
Walk the breezy scrub dunes from Montauk to Amagansett,
while the salt of the earth turns into dirt in the cities. The vista
in dusty travel windows blooms with umbrellas
that they cannot go back to. Rats, biting the hands
that fed them. In that drugged dance of dealers,
remote-controlled by a Walkman like he can’t stop,
Jesus propositions a seersucker suit, “Hey, mister,
just a sec …” The thumb of an Irish cop
rolls his bullets like beads. Glued to his own transistor.
VI
Midsummer stretches beside me with its cat’s yawn.
Trees with dust on their lips, cars melting down
in its furnace. Heat staggers the drifting mongrels.
The capitol has been repainted rose, the rails
round Woodford Square the color of rusting blood.
Casa Rosada, the Argentinian mood,
croons from the balcony. Monotonous lurid bushes
brush the damp clouds with the ideograms of buzzards
over the Chinese groceries. The oven alleys stifle.
In Belmont, mournful tailors peer over old machines,
stitching June and July together seamlessly.
And one waits for midsummer lightning as the armed sentry
in boredom waits for the crack of a rifle.
But I feed on its dust, its ordinariness,
on the faith that fills its exiles with horror,
on the hills at dusk with their dusty orange lights,
even on the pilot light in the reeking harbor
that turns like a police car’s. The terror
is local, at least. Like the magnolia’s whorish whiff.
All night, the barks of a revolution crying wolf.
The moon shines like a lost button.
The yellow sodium lights on the wharf come on.
In streets, dishes clatter behind dim windows.
The night is companionable, the future as fierce as
tomorrow’s sun everywhere. I can understand
Borges’s blind love for Buenos Aires,
how a man feels the streets of a city swell in his hand.
VII
Our houses are one step from the gutter. Plastic curtains
or cheap prints hide what is dark behind windows—
the pedalled sewing machine, the photos, the paper rose
on its doily. The porch rail is lined with red tins.
A man’s passing height is the same size as their doors,
and the doors themselves, usually no wider than coffins,
sometimes have carved in their fretwork little half-moons.
The hills have no echoes. Not the echo of ruins.
Empty lots nod with their palanquins of green.
Any crack in the sidewalk was made by the primal fault
of the first map of the world, its boundaries and powers.
By a pile of red sand, of seeding, abandoned gravel
near a burnt-out lot, a fresh jungle unfurls its green
elephants’ ears of wild yams and dasheen.
One step over the low wall, if you should care to,
recaptures a childhood whose vines fasten your foot.
And this is the lot of all wanderers, this is their fate,
that the more they wander, the more the world grows wide.
So, however far you have travelled, your
steps make more holes and the mesh is multiplied—
or why should you suddenly think of Tomas Venclova,
and why should I care about whatever they did to Heberto
when exiles must make their own maps, when this asphalt
takes you far from the action, past hedges of unaligned flowers?
VIII
A radiant summer, so fierce it turns yellow
like the haze before a holocaust. Like a general,
I arrange lines that must increase its radiance, work
that will ripen with peace, like a gold-framed meadow
in Brueghel or Pissarro. No, let the imagination range wherever
its correspondences take it, let it take its luck
on the roads, a Flemish road fenced with poplars,
or grind with Rimbaud the white shale of Charleroi;
let it come back tired to say that summer is the same
everywhere. Black leaves churn in its bonfires, rooks
clatter from my hair, and where is the difference?
The heart is housebound in books—open your leaves,
let light freckle the earth-colored earth, since
light is plenty to make do with. Midsummer bursts
out of its body, and its poems come unwarranted,
as when, hearing what sounds like rain, we startle a place
where a waterfall crashes down rocks. Abounding grace!
IX
It touches earth, that branched diviner’s rod
the lightning, like the swift note of a swallow on the staff
of four electric wires, while everything I read
or write goes on too long. Ah, to have
a tone colloquial and stiff,
the brevity of that short syllable, God,
all synthesis in one heraldic stroke,
like Li Po or a Chinese laundry mark! Walk
these hot streets, their signs a dusty backdrop stuck
to the maundering ego. The lines that jerk
into step do not fit any mold. More than time
keeps shifting. Language never fits geography
except when the earth and summer lightning rhyme.
When I was greener, I strained with a branch
to utter every tongue, language, and life at once.
More skillful now, I’m more dissatisfied.
They never align, nature and your
own nature. Too rapid the lightning’s shorthand,
too patient the sea repeatedly tearing up paper,
too frantic the wind unravelling the same knot,
too slow the stones crawling toward language every night.
X
No subtle fugues between black day, black night,
no grays, no subterfuge in this straight light.
A smoky, churning dark, shot with the white-hot pokers
of street lamps. The beast with two backs growls from the bushes,
and the harbor hisses like a whore over its fence.
When sonnets come, they come not single spies but in
battalions. They breed like larvae from your boredom. Sin
finds its own level, so, like a rising fish, you are drawn
to surfaces, passing again the simplified silhouettes
outside hot cinemas. Summer is one-dimensional
as lust, and boredom like a whetstone grinds a knife
or a pen. Above the flat, starlit roofs, ambition
is vertical. You miss the other city’s blazing towers,<
br />
passing repeated hedges of hibiscus, allamanda, croton.
Walk around the black summer streets like an automaton—
midsummer sticks to your thoughts like a damp shirt.
Your life and your work are here, both transient powers.
In phosphorescent sludge, black schooners
break into silver one last time, as the moon sets.
XI
My double, tired of morning, closes the door
of the motel bathroom; then, wiping the steamed mirror,
refuses to acknowledge me staring back at him.
With the softest grunt, he stretches my throat for the function
of scraping it clean, his dispassionate care
like a barber’s lathering a corpse—extreme unction.
The old ritual would have been as grim
if the small wisps that curled there in the basin
were not hairs but minuscular seraphim.
He clips our mustache with a snickering scissors,
then stops, reflecting, in midair. Certain sadnesses
are not immense, but fatal, like the sense of sin
while shaving. And empty cupboards where her dresses
shone. But why flushing a faucet, its vortex
swivelling with bits of hair, could make some men’s
hands quietly put aside their razors,
and sense their veins as filth floating downriver
after the dolorous industries of sex,
is a question swans may raise with their white necks,
that the cockerel answers quickly, treading his hens.
XII
To betray philosophy is the gentle treason
of poets, to smile at all science, scorning its instruments;
these lines will wilt like mayflies, or termites butting
a hotel lamp to pile in a dust heap at its pediments,
kamikazes or Icari singed in empirical radiance,
thoughts off-the-cuff scorched in the sight of reason.
How profound were they, anyway, those sheeted blighters,
the Stoics, muttering in their beards what every kid knows,
that to everything there is a time and a season,
that we never enter a river or the same bed twice?
The smokeless fire of time scared Heraclitus—
he saw this hotel lamp, midsummer, and the inner light as
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