one flame, and staring made his eyes run.
The bathtub of a grave displaces the exact weight in dirt as
Archimedes’ arse. Lift up that old Greek skirt,
and every girl sees what philosophy is about.
Genius was not arrested for its epoch-shattering shout
but for running in the streets naked, bearded, full-grown
in its dangling appropriate spheres, spluttering out
that what it discovers was always there to be known.
XIII
Today I respect structure, the antithesis of conceit.
The overworked muck of my paintings, my bad plots! But
always,
when the air is empty, I hear actors talking,
the resonance of what is both ordinary and wise.
Specters multiply with age, the peopled head
is crossed by impatient characters, the ears clamped shut;
behind them I hear the actors mutter and shout—
the lit stage is empty, the set prepared,
and I cannot find the key to let them out.
O Christ, my craft, and the long time it is taking!
Sometimes the flash is seen, a sudden exultation
of lightning fixing earth in its place; the asphalt’s skin
smells freshly of childhood in the drying rain.
Then I believe that it is still possible, the happiness
of truth, and the young poet who stands in the mirror
smiles with a nod. He looks beautiful from this distance.
And I hope I am what he saw, an enduring ruin.
XIV
With the frenzy of an old snake shedding its skin,
the speckled road, scored with ruts, smelling of mold,
twisted on itself and reentered the forest
where the dasheen leaves thicken and folk stories begin.
Sunset would threaten us as we climbed closer
to her house up the asphalt hill road, whose yam vines
wrangled over gutters with the dark reek of moss,
the shutters closing like the eyelids of that mimosa
called Ti-Marie; then—lucent as paper lanterns,
lamplight glowed through the ribs, house after house—
there was her own lamp at the black twist of the path.
There’s childhood, and there’s childhood’s aftermath.
She began to remember at the minute of the fireflies,
to the sound of pipe water banging in kerosene tins,
stories she told to my brother and myself.
Her leaves were the libraries of the Caribbean.
The luck that was ours, those fragrant origins!
Her head was magnificent, Sidone. In the gully of her voice
shadows stood up and walked, her voice travels my shelves.
She was the lamplight in the stare of two mesmerized boys
still joined in one shadow, indivisible twins.
XV
I can sense it coming from far, too, Maman, the tide
since day has passed its turn, but I still note
that as a white gull flashes over the sea, its underside
catches the green, and I promise to use it later.
The imagination no longer goes as far as the horizon,
but it keeps coming back. At the edge of the water
it returns clean, scoured things that, like rubbish,
the sea has whitened, chaste. Disparate scenes.
The pink and blue chattel houses in the Virgins
in the trade winds. My name caught in
the kernel of my great-aunt’s throat.
A yard, an old brown man with a mustache
like a general’s, a boy drawing castor-oil leaves in
great detail, hoping to be another Albrecht Dürer.
I have cherished these better than coherence
as the same tide for us both, Maman, comes nearer—
the vine leaves medalling an old wire fence
and, in the shade-freckled yard, an old man like a colonel
under the green cannonballs of a calabash.
XVI
So what shall we do for the dead, to whose conch-bordered
tumuli our lifelong attraction is drawn
as to a magnetic empire, whose cities lie ordered
with streets and rational avenues, exact as the grid
of our vibrating metropolis? In our arrogance, we imagine
that they, too, share the immense, inaudible pulse
of the clock-shaped earth, slower than ours, maybe, but within
our dimension, our simple mathematical formulae.
Any peace so indifferent, where all our differences fuse,
is an insult to imagine; what use is any labor we
accept? They must find our prayers boring, for one prays
that they will keep missing us when they have no urge
to be ever-remembered, they cannot see what we hoard—
photograph, letter, keepsake, muttered or knitted homily—
as we change flags and houses. We still wish them to serve
us, expecting from death what we expect of our prayers—
that their hearts lift like ours with the surge
of the surf and the cupolas of the sunset, that the kingfisher
startles their darkness sometimes. But each one prefers
the silence that was his birthright, and the shore
where the others wait neither to end nor begin.
XVII
I pause to hear a racketing triumph of cicadas
setting life’s pitch, but to live at their pitch
of joy is unendurable. Turn off
that sound. After the plunge of silence,
the eye gets used to the shapes of furniture, and the mind
to darkness. The cicadas are frantic as my mother’s
feet, treading the needles of approaching rain.
Days thick as leaves then, close to each other as hours,
and a sunburnt smell rose up from the drizzled road.
I stitch her lines to mine now with the same machine.
What work lies ahead of us, what sunlight for generations!—
The lemon-rind light in Vermeer, to know it will wait
there for others, the broken eucalyptus
leaf, still sharply smelling of turpentine,
the breadfruit’s foliage, rust-edged like van Ruysdael.
The Dutch blood in me is drawn to detail.
I once brushed a drop of water from a Flemish still life
in a book of prints, believing it was real.
It reflected the world in its crystal, quivering with weight.
What joy in that sweat drop, knowing others will persevere!
Let them write, “At fifty he reversed the seasons,
the road of his blood sang with the chattering cicadas,”
as when I took to the road to paint in my eighteenth year.
XVIII
In the other ’eighties, a hundred midsummers gone
like the light of domestic paradise, the hedonist’s
idea of heaven was a French kitchen’s sideboard,
apples and clay carafes from Chardin to the Impressionists;
art was une tranche de vie, cheese or home-baked bread—
light, in their view, was the best that time offered.
The eye was the only truth, and whatever traverses
the retina fades when it darkens; the depth of nature morte
was that death itself is only another surface
like the canvas, since painting cannot capture thought.
A hundred midsummers gone, with the rippling accordion,
bustled skirts, boating parties, zinc-white strokes on water,
girls whose flushed cheeks wouldn’t outlast their roses.
Then, like dried-up tubes, the coiled soldiers
piled up on the Somme, and Verdun. And the dead
less real than a spray burst of chrysanthemums,
the identical carmine for still life and for the slaughter
of youth. They were right—everything becomes
its idea to the painter with easel rifled on his shoulders.
XIX
Gauguin / i
On the quays of Papeete, the dawdling white-ducked colonists
drinking with whores whose skin is the copper of pennies
pretend, watching the wild skins of the light and shade,
that a straight vermouth re-creates the metropolis,
but the sun has scorched those memories from my head—
Cézanne bricking in color, each brick no bigger than a square inch,
the pointillists’ dots like a million irises.
I saw in my own cheekbones the mule’s head of a Breton,
the placid, implacable strategy of the Mongol,
the mustache like the downturned horns of a helmet;
the chain of my blood pulled me to darker nations,
though I looked like any other sallow, crumpled colon
stepping up to the pier that day from the customs launch.
I am Watteau’s wild oats, his illegitimate heir.
Get off your arses, you clerks, and find your fate,
the devil’s prayer book is the hymn of patience,
grumbling in the fog. Pack, leave! I left too late.
ii
I have never pretended that summer was paradise,
or that these virgins were virginal; on their wooden trays
are the fruits of my knowledge, radiant with disease,
and they offer you this, in their ripe sea-almond eyes,
their clay breasts glowing like ingots in a furnace.
No, what I have plated in amber is not an ideal, as
Puvis de Chavannes desired it, but corrupt—
the spot on the ginger lily’s vulva, the plantain’s phalloi,
the volcano that chafes like a chancre, the lava’s smoke
that climbs to the sibilant goddess with its hiss.
I have baked the gold of their bodies in that alloy;
tell the Evangelists paradise smells of sulphur,
that I have felt the beads in my blood erupt
as my brush stroked their backs, the cervix
of a defrocked Jesuit numbering his chaplet.
I placed a blue death mask there in my Book of Hours
that those who dream of an earthly paradise may read it
as men. My frescoes in sackcloth to the goddess Maya.
The mangoes redden like coals in a barbecue pit,
patient as the palms of Atlas, the papaya.
XX
Watteau
The amber spray of trees feather-brushed with the dusk,
the ruined cavity of some spectral château, the groin
of a leering satyr eaten with ivy. In the distance, the grain
of some unreapable, alchemical harvest, the hollow at
the heart of all embarkations. Nothing stays green
in that prodigious urging toward twilight;
in all of his journeys the pilgrims are in fever
from the tremulous strokes of malaria’s laureate.
So where is Cythera? It, too, is far and feverish,
it dilates on the horizon of his near-delirium, near
and then further, it can break like the spidery rigging
of his ribboned barquentines, it is as much nowhere
as these broad-leafed islands, it is the disease
of elephantine vegetation in Baudelaire,
the tropic bug in the Paris fog. For him, it is the mirror
of what is. Paradise is life repeated spectrally,
an empty chair echoing the emptiness.
XXI
A long, white, summer cloud, like a cleared linen table,
makes heaven emptier, like after-dinner Sundays
when the Bible begs to be lifted, and the old terrifying verses
raise a sandstorm and bone-white Palestinian rocks
where a ram totters for purchase, bleating like Isaiah.
Dry rage of the desert fathers that scared a child,
the Baptist crying by the cracked river basin, curses
that made the rose an intellectual fire.
Through the skull’s stone eyes, the radiant logwood
consumes this August, and a white sun sucks
sweat from the desert. A shadow marks the Word.
I have forgotten a child’s hope of the resurrection,
bodies locked up in musting cupboard drawers
among the fish knives and the napery (all the dead earth holds),
to be pulled open at the hour of our birth—
the cloud waits in emptiness for the apostles,
for the fruit, wine amphoras, mutton on groaning trestles,
but only the servant knows heaven is still possible,
some freckled Martha, radiant, dependable,
singing a hymn from your childhood while she folds
her Saviour like a white napkin in the earth.
XXII
Rest, Christ! from tireless war. See, it’s midsummer,
but what roars in the throat of the oaks is martial man,
the marching hosannas darken the wheat of Russia,
the coiled ram hides in the rocks of Afghanistan.
Crowned hydrants gush, baptizing the street urchins,
the water cannons blot their screams in mist,
but snow does not melt from the furnace brow of Mahomet,
or napkins hemorrhage from the brow of Christ.
Along the island the almonds seethe with anger,
the wind that churns these orchards of white surf
and whistles dervishes up from the hot sand
revolves this globe, this painted O that spins,
reciting as it moves, tribes, frontiers,
dots that are sounds, cities that love their names,
while weather vanes still scrape the sky for omens.
Though they have different sounds for “God” or “hunger,”
the opposing alphabets in city squares
shout with one voice, nation takes on nation,
and, from their fury of pronunciation,
children lie torn on rubble for a noun.
XXIII
With the stampeding hiss and scurry of green lemmings,
midsummer’s leaves race to extinction like the roar
of a Brixton riot tunnelled by water hoses;
they seethe toward autumn’s fire—it is in their nature,
being men as well as leaves, to die for the sun.
The leaf stems tug at their chains, the branches bending
like Boer cattle under Tory whips that drag every wagon
nearer to apartheid. And, for me, that closes
the child’s fairy tale of an antic England—fairy rings,
thatched cottages fenced with dog roses,
a green gale lifting the hair of Warwickshire.
I was there to add some color to the British theater.
“But the blacks can’t do Shakespeare, they have no experience.”
This was true. Their thick skulls bled with rancor
when the riot police and the skinheads exchanged quips
you could trace to the Sonnets, or the Moor’s eclipse.
Praise had bled my lines white of any more anger,
and snow had inducted me into white fellowships,
while Calibans howled down the barred streets of an empire
that began with Caedmon’s raceless dew, and is ending
in the alleys of Brixton, burning like Turner’s ships.
XXIV
What broke the green lianas’ ropes? Scaled armor.
What folded the bittern in midflight? One arrow.
What flapped the mackerel agape into quiet? A lancer.
Who flew level as morning? The sea sparrow.
>
Yes, the sea swift flew nameless that wordless summer
in the leafy silence before their christening language.
The berry leaf died of its own accord, as always, and
the parakeet screeched its own question and answer,
the right verb leapt like a fish from its element,
the tadpole wriggled like an eager comma,
and the snake coiled round its trunk in an ampersand.
It was the snake that linked two hemispheres,
since in the world’s bitter half of churches and domes
another new epoch groaned, opening on its hinge;
from his balcony another monarch pronounced a new age
as gargoyles shifted their haunches with a fixed grimace;
in an alley another throat was opened by a cutpurse
like the valve of an oyster. Was evil brought to this place
with language? Did the sea worm bury that secret in clear sand,
in the coral cathedrals, the submarine catacombs
where the jellyfish trails its purple, imperial fringe?
XXV
The sun has fired my face to terra-cotta.
It carries the heat from his kiln all through the house.
But I cherish its wrinkles as much as those on blue water.
Gnats drill little holes around a saw-toothed cactus,
a furnace has curled the knives of the oleander,
and a branch of the logwood blurs with wild characters.
A stone house waits on the steps. Its white porch blazes.
I tell you a promise brought to me by the surf:
You shall see transparent Helen pass like a candle
flame in sunlight, weightless as woodsmoke that hazes
the sand with no shadow. My palms have been sliced by the twine
of the craft I have pulled at for more than forty years.
My Ionia is the smell of burnt grass, the scorched handle
of a cistern in August squeaking to rusty islands;
the lines I love have all their knots left in.
Through the stunned afternoon, when it’s too hot to think
and the muse of this inland ocean still waits for a name,
Midsummer Page 2
