The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 Read Online Free Page B

rust
    She sought all summer to surpass.
    By such strange, cyclic chemistry
    That dooms and glories all at once
    As green yet aging orange tree,
    The mind enspheres all circumstance.
    No Florida loud with citron leaves
    With crystal falls to heal this age
    Shall calm the darkening fear that grieves
    The loss of visionary rage.
    Or if Time’s fires seem to blight
    The nature ripening into art,
    Not the fierce noon or lampless night
    Can quail the comprehending heart.
    The orange tree, in various light
    Proclaims that fable perfect now
    That her last season’s summer height
    Bends from each overburdened bough.

ISLANDS
    for Margaret
    Merely to name them is the prose
    Of diarists, to make you a name
    For readers who like travellers praise
    Their beds and beaches as the same;
    But islands can only exist
    If we have loved in them. I seek
    As climate seeks its style, to write
    Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight,
    Cold as the curled wave, ordinary
    As a tumbler of island water;
    Yet, like a diarist, thereafter
    I savor their salt-haunted rooms,
    (Your body stirring the creased sea
    Of crumpled sheets), whose mirrors lose
    Our huddled, sleeping images,
    Like words which love had hoped to use
    Erased with the surf’s pages.
    So, like a diarist in sand,
    I mark the peace with which you graced
    Particular islands, descending
    A narrow stair to light the lamps
    Against the night surf’s noises, shielding
    A leaping mantle with one hand,
    Or simply scaling fish for supper,
    Onions, jack-fish, bread, red snapper;
    And on each kiss the harsh sea-taste,
    And how by moonlight you were made
    To study most the surf’s unyielding
    Patience though it seems a waste.

FROM
    The Castaway
    (1965)

THE CASTAWAY
    The starved eye devours the seascape for the morsel
    Of a sail.
    The horizon threads it infinitely.
    Action breeds frenzy. I lie,
    Sailing the ribbed shadow of a palm,
    Afraid lest my own footprints multiply.
    Blowing sand, thin as smoke,
    Bored, shifts its dunes.
    The surf tires of its castles like a child.
    The salt-green vine with yellow trumpet-flower,
    A net, inches across nothing.
    Nothing: the rage with which the sandfly’s head is filled.
    Pleasures of an old man:
    Morning: contemplative evacuation, considering
    The dried leaf, nature’s plan.
    In the sun, the dog’s feces
    Crusts, whitens like coral.
    We end in earth, from earth began.
    In our own entrails, genesis.
    If I listen I can hear the polyp build,
    The silence thwanged by two waves of the sea.
    Cracking a sea-louse, I make thunder split.
    Godlike, annihilating Godhead, art
    And self, I abandon
    Dead metaphors: the almond’s leaflike heart,
    The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut
    Hatching
    Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly and maggot,
    That green wine bottle’s gospel choked with sand,
    Labeled, a wrecked ship,
    Clenched seawood nailed and white as a man’s hand.

THE SWAMP
    Gnawing the highway’s edges, its black mouth
    Hums quietly: “Home, come home…”
    Behind its viscous breath the very word “growth”
    Grows fungi, rot;
    White mottling its root.
    More dreaded
    Than canebrake, quarry, or sun-shocked gully-bed
    Its horrors held Hemingway’s hero rooted
    To sure, clear shallows.
    It begins nothing. Limbo of cracker convicts, Negroes.
    Its black mood
    Each sunset takes a smear of your life’s blood.
    Fearful, original sinuosities! Each mangrove sapling
    Serpentlike, its roots obscene
    As a six-fingered hand,
    Conceals within its clutch the mossbacked toad,
    Toadstools, the potent ginger-lily,
    Petals of blood,
    The speckled vulva of the tiger-orchid;
    Outlandish phalloi
    Haunting the travellers of its one road.
    Deep, deeper than sleep
    Like death,
    Too rich in its decrescence, too close of breath,
    In the fast-filling night, note
    How the last bird drinks darkness with its throat,
    How the wild saplings slip
    Backward to darkness, go black
    With widening amnesia, take the edge
    Of nothing to them