these loud-mouthed forests on their illiterate heights,
these springs speaking a dialect that cooled his mind
more than pastures with castles! To prefer the hush
of a hazed Atlantic worried by the salt wind!
Others could read it as “going back to the bush,”
but harbour after crescent harbour closed his wound.
There was a lot in the island that Maud hated:
the moisture rotting their library; that was the worst.
It seeped through the shawled piano and created
havoc with the felt hammers, so the tuner cost
a regular fortune. After that, the cluttered light
on the choked market steps; insects of any kind,
especially rain-flies; a small, riddling termite
that cored houses into shells and left windows blind;
barefoot Americans strolling into the banks—
there was a plague of them now, worse than the insects
who, at least, were natives. Turbanned religious cranks
urging sisters with candles to the joy of sects,
the velocity of passenger transports on
uncurbed highway, comets that hurtled out of sight
and brought a flash to the heart; the darkening monsoon
of merciless July with patches of sunlight
mercurial as Helen, the slanted, almond eyes
of her ebony beauty. And then an elate
sunrise would flood Maud’s garden, pouring relentless
light in angelic lilies, yellow chalices
of morning-glories, and Queen Anne’s seraphic lace.
Just then he saw the butterfly pinned to a blade
like a nervous pennant. She had followed him here.
The dilating panels pulsed to his trembling blood,
the wing-folded palms in their parody of prayer;
then they would widen, like the eyes of Maud’s scissors
following a seam. Was he condemned to see her
every time one twinkled up out of Maud’s garden?
What did she want? For History to exorcise her
theft of the yellow frock? Did she crave his pardon?
After a while the happiness grew oppressive.
Only the dead can endure it in paradise,
and it felt selfish for so long. He felt as if
the still, lemon panels were painted with her eyes.
There’s too much poverty below us. Every leaf
defines its limits. All roots have their histories.
“It’s so still. It’s like Adam and Eve all over,”
Maud whispered. “Before the snake. Without all the sin.”
And their peace was so deep, they sat in the Rover
listening to the bamboos. He switched on the engine
and they bucketed, wobbling over rain-ruts, hurled
on the groaning springs down to the flat, real world.
Chapter XI
I
Pigs were his business. These people were not resigned
to living with garbage, drifting in numbed content
as the filth narrowed the drains. They had not designed
the Attic ideal of the first slave-settlement,
with sea-grapes for olives and black philosophers
with clouds over their elbows. They had not laid out
narrow-gauge pipes for buckets, but none for sewers.
They had not sucked the cane till sugar was played out.
Empires were swinish. These had splendid habits
of cleanliness, compulsively sweeping yards dry
with their palm-brooms. Encouraged to screw like rabbits
by estates who liked labour and, naturally, by
a Church that damned them to hell for contraceptives.
But they waxed their tables, flailed their beaten laundry
on the river-rocks; there were ikons in their lives—
the Virgin, the Virgin Lamp, the steps lined with flowers,
and they learnt quickly, good repairers of engines
and fanatical maids. Helen had kept the house
as if it were her own, and that’s when it all begins:
when the maid turns into the mistress and destroys
her own possibilities. They start to behave
as if they owned you, Maud said. This was the distress
of the pale lemon frock, which Helen claimed Maud gave
her but forgot. He stayed out of it, but that dress
had an empire’s tag on it, mistress to slave.
The price was envy and cunning. The big church, the
middens by cloudy lagoons, kids racing like piglets.
If History saw them as pigs, History was Circe
with her schoolteacher’s wand, with high poles at the fêtes
of saint-day processions past al fresco latrines.
So Plunkett decided that what the place needed
was its true place in history, that he’d spend hours
for Helen’s sake on research, so he proceeded
to the whirr of enormous moths in the still house.
Memory’s engines. The butterfly dress was hers,
at least her namesake’s, in the Battle of the Saints.
II
During this period his life grew increasingly
bookish and slippered, like a don’s. He stayed in. Maud
wondered about his wound. When she took in his tea
he nodded towards the side-table, and this made
her leave him with his ziggurat of books, his charts,
and the balsa fleet he carved with a small scalpel,
while she sipped hers in the arched shade with her orchids.
Dusk darkened the pots, an allamanda’s bell
bronzed in the sky-fire, then melted into night.
Dennis was still at work when she took her tray in.
The desk was dark, except for a green pool of light
cast on its baize by a lamp curved like a heron.
She sat on a chair beside him. He didn’t speak,
and the tea was untouched. One finger traced the line
of some map, and the nose, with its man-o’-war’s beak,
skimmed the white page. She had never felt more alone.
A light rain had washed the stars. They looked very close.
Maud sighed, then went upstairs. She could feel the white sea
losing its white noise slowly, drawing the windows;
she studied the map on one forearm, then briskly
loosened the bridal knot of the mosquito net,
then stretched it to the corners of the tautened pane,
carried the straw basket with the bright spools in it
down to the divan, her needles swift as his pen.
III
She thought: I dreamed of this house with woods around it,
with trees I’d read of, whose flowers I’d never seen.
Part of a barracks, with no noise to surround it
but cicadas chattering like my sewing-machine.
I loved the young teak with bodies clean as birches
in light that freckled the leopard shade of the path,
when martins at dusk with their crisscrossing stitches
would sew the silk sky, or preen around the birdbath.
I saw it when we first came. Unapproachable
cliff on one side, but its ledges a nesting place
for folding herons and gulls, and my teak table
with its lion-claw legs and its varnished surface
spread with fine scalloped linen, white as the sea’s lace,
and ringing crystal, with a fresh wreath of orchids
like Remembrance Day, at my brass candlestick’s base,
in Dennis’s honour mainly, and the place cards
near the bone-china of my huge lily-pad plates.
Have I put on airs, to think of dinner-candles
and
flags and lances since we slow-marched down the aisle
under crossed swords? Then, my tureen with thick handles
hefted by Helen, her cap white as my napkins
rolled in their crested holders. She’d set it in place,
and step back in shadow that blent with her fine skin’s.
What a loss, that girl! I ladled the fragrant steam
of my stew in thick portions, the dark full of fireflies
that never catch the leaves. It’s as clear as a dream,
but more real. Well, folks lived for centuries
like this with candles and airs on the piano,
the love-songs fading over a firefly sea,
their mouths round as the moon over a black canoe
like the one I smiled at today: In God We Troust.
But then we all trust in Him, and that’s why we know
the peace of a wandering heart when it is housed.
Chapter XII
I
Our house with its bougainvillea trellises,
the front porch gone, was a printery. In its noise
I was led up the cramped stair to its offices.
I saw the small window near which we slept as boys,
how close the roof was. The heat of the galvanize.
A desk in my mother’s room, not that bed, sunlit,
with its rose quilt where we were forbidden to sit.
Pink handbills whirred under their spinning negative
and two girls stacked them from their retractable bed
as fast as my own images were reprinted
as I remembered them in an earlier life
that made the sheets linen, the machines furniture,
her wardrobe her winged, angelic mirror. The hum
of the wheel’s elbow stopped. And there was a figure
framed in the quiet window for whom this was home,
tracing its dust, rubbing thumb and middle finger,
then coming to me, not past, but through the machines,
clear as a film and as perfectly projected
as a wall cut by the jalousies’ slanted lines.
He had done a self-portrait, it was accurate.
In his transparent hand was a book I had read.
“In this pale blue notebook where you found my verses”—
my father smiled—“I appeared to make your life’s choice,
and the calling that you practise both reverses
and honours mine from the moment it blent with yours.
Now that you are twice my age, which is the boy’s,
which the father’s?”
“Sir”—I swallowed—“they are one voice.”
In the printery’s noise, and as we went downstairs
in that now familiar and unfamiliar house,
he said, in an accent of polished weariness,
“I was raised in this obscure Caribbean port,
where my bastard father christened me for his shire:
Warwick. The Bard’s county. But never felt part
of the foreign machinery known as Literature.
I preferred verse to fame, but I wrote with the heart
of an amateur. It’s that Will you inherit.
I died on his birthday, one April. Your mother
sewed her own costume as Portia, then that disease
like Hamlet’s old man’s spread from an infected ear,
I believe the parallel has brought you some peace.
Death imitating Art, eh?”
At the door to the yard,
he said, “I grew grapes here. Small, a little sour,
still, grapes all the same.”
“I remember them,” I said.
“I thought they died before you were born. Are you sure?”
“Yes.” The furred nap like nettles, their globes’ green acid.
“What was Warwick doing, transplanting Warwickshire?”
I saw him patterned in shade, the leaves in his hair,
the vines of the lucent body, the swift’s blown seed.
II
Out on the sidewalk the sunlight drained like the print
of a postcard flecked with its gnawing chemical
in which there was light, but with a sepia tint,
even on Grass Street with our Methodist chapel.
We passed under uprights with fretworks on their eaves,
mansards with similar woodwork, their verandahs
shuttered at both corners by half-cranked jalousies
through which pale cousins peered or a half-cracked aunt, as
if from the madhouse or a convent. Windows
framed their unshifting lives. During the hot, long day
they kept changing posts near which they leant, their elbows
jutting from a ledge, elbows as well known as they
were, or with a white head dipping in a rocker
while the black town walked barefoot and deafening bells
pounded the Angelus; but none saw the walker
in his white suit, their reveries were somewhere else,
they looked on their high-brown life as a souvenir
with a dried Easter palm, its amber sweets, its carts
horse-drawn, rubbing their beads and muttering Veni,
Creator to velvet cushions with embroidered hearts.
As iron bells ruled the town, and the poui flowers fell.
III
It was one. We passed the brown phantoms in white-drill
suits, some with pith-helmets whom the Angelus sent
back to work after lunch, suits rippled by the grille
of shade made by the long-stemmed pillars as we went
past them, the asphalt so hot that it was empty.
Heat waves rippled over it and one or two cars
pumped their bulb-horns and waved as they rattled by.
Then we came to a green square cut in smaller squares.
And the light from a bluer postcard filled its sky,
and it seemed, from his steps, that water sprang in plumes
from the curled, iron-green fountain at its centre,
a paradise I had to believe to enter.
But I did not ask him about the other life,
because the white shadow I had made from my mind
was vague in its origin and thin as belief,
unsinged as an Easter lily, fresh as the wind,
its whisper as soft as a pavement-scratching leaf.
Chapter XIII
I
“I grew up where alleys ended in a harbour
and Infinity wasn’t the name of our street;
where the town anarchist was the corner barber
with his own flagpole and revolving Speaker’s seat.
There were rusted mirrors in which we would look back
on the world’s events. There, toga’d in a pinned sheet,
the curled hairs fell like commas. On their varnished rack,
The World’s Great Classics read backwards in his mirrors
where he doubled as my chamberlain. I was known
for quoting from them as he was for his scissors.
I bequeath you that clean sheet and an empty throne.”
We’d arrived at that corner where the barber-pole
angled from the sidewalk, and the photographer,
who’d taken his portrait, and, as some think, his soul,
leant from a small window and scissored his own hair
in a mime, suggesting a trim was overdue
to my father, who laughed and said “Wait” with one hand.
Then the barber mimed a shave with his mouth askew,
and left the window to wait by his wooden door
framed with dead portraits, and he seemed to understand
something in the life opposite not seen before.
“The rock he lived on was nothing. Not a nation
or a people,” my father said, and, in his eyes,
this was a curse. When he raged, his indignation
jabbed the air with his scissors, a swift catching flies,
as he pumped the throne serenely round to his view.
He gestured like Shylock: “Hath not a Jew eyes?”
making his man a negative. An Adventist,
he’s stuck on one glass that photograph of Garvey’s
with the braided tricorne and gold-fringed epaulettes,
and that is his other Messiah. His paradise
is a phantom Africa. Elephants. Trumpets.
And when I quote Shylock silver brims in his eyes.
II
“Walk me down to the wharf.”
At the corner of Bridge
Street, we saw the liner as white as a mirage,
its hull bright as paper, preening with privilege.
“Measure the days you have left. Do just that labour
which marries your heart to your right hand: simplify
your life to one emblem, a sail leaving harbour
and a sail coming in. All corruption will cry
to be taken aboard. Fame is that white liner
at the end of your street, a city to itself,
taller than the Fire Station, and much finer,
with its brass-ringed portholes, mounting shelf after shelf,
than anything Castries could ever hope to build.”
The immaculate hull insulted the tin roofs
beneath it, its pursers were milk, even the bilge
bubbling from its stern in quietly muttering troughs
and its humming engines spewed expensive garbage
where boys balanced on logs or, riding old tires,
shouted up past the hull to tourists on the rails
to throw down coins, as cameras caught their black cries,
then jackknife or swan-dive—their somersaulting tails
like fishes flipped backwards—as the coins grew in size
in the wobbling depth; then, when they surfaced, fights
for possession, their heads butting like porpoises,
till, like a city leaving a city, the lights
blazed in its moving rooms, and the liner would glide
over its own phosphorus, and wash hit the wharves
long after stewards had set the service inside
the swaying chandeliered salons, and the black waves
settle down to their level. The stars would renew
their studded diagrams over Achille’s canoe.
From here, in his boyhood, he had seen women climb
like ants up a white flower-pot, baskets of coal