out of its fringed case. This was the oar. His saddle
the heaving plank at the stern, a wave’s crest was the
white eagle bonnet; then slowly he fired the oar
and a palm-tree crumpled; then to repeated cracks
from the rifle, more savages, until the shore
was littered with palm spears, bodies: like Aruacs
falling to the muskets of the Conquistador.
II
Seven Seas asked him to rake the leaves in his yard.
The pomme-Arac shed so many the rusted drum
filled quickly, and more were falling as he carried
each pile. Through the teeth of the rake Achille heard them
talk a dead language. He would clean up this whole place.
He cutlassed the banana trash. He gripped a frond
of the rusting coconut, swivelling its base
till it gave, then he dumped the rubbish in a mound
round the smoking drum. The black dog did dog-dances
around him, yapping, crouching, entangling his heel.
Meanwhile, the bonfire rose with crackling branches.
Seven Seas, on his box, called the dog from Achille.
He wanted to ask Seven Seas where trees got names,
watching the ribbed branches blacken with the same stare
of the blind man at the leaves of the leaping flames,
and why our life’s spark is exceeded by a star.
But the light of a star is dead and maybe our
light was the same. Then Achille saw the iguana
in the leaves of the pomme-Arac branches and fear
froze him at the same time it fuelled the banner
of the climbing flame. Then the ridged beast disappeared.
He stepped back from the pomme-Arac’s shade on the grass
diagrammed like the lizard. Then, as if he heard
his thought, Seven Seas said: “Aruac mean the race
that burning there like the leaves and pomme is the word
in patois for ‘apple.’ This used to be their place.”
Maybe he’d heard the iguana with his dog’s ears,
because the dog was barking around the trunk’s base.
He had never heard the dog’s name either. It was
one of those Saturdays that contain centuries,
when the strata of history layered underheel,
which earth sometimes flashes with its mineral signs,
can lie in a quartz shard. Gradually, Achille
found History that morning. Near the hedge, the tines
of the rake in the dead leaves grated on some stone,
so he crouched to uproot the obstruction. He saw
deep marks in the rock that froze his fingers to bone.
The features incised there glared back at his horror
from its disturbed grave. A face that a child will draw:
blank circles for eyes, a straight line down for the nose,
a slit for a mouth, but the expression angrier
as Achille’s palm brushed off centuries of repose.
A thousand archaeologists started screaming
as Achille wrenched out the totem, then hurled it far
over the oleander hedge. It lay dreaming
on one cheek in the spear-grass, but that act of fear
multiplied the lances on his scalp. Stone-faced souls
peered with their lizard eyes through the pomme-Arac tree,
then turned from their bonfire. Instantly, like moles
or mole crickets in the shadow of History,
the artifacts burrowed deeper into their holes.
III
A beach burns their memory. Copper almond leaves
cracking like Caribs in a pepper smoke, the blue
entering God’s eye and nothing raked from their lives
except one elegy from Aruac to Sioux,
the shadow of a frond’s bonnet riding white sand,
while Seven Seas tried to tell Achille the answer
to certain names. The cane’s question shook in his hand
while the pomme-Arac leaves burned. He said he was once
a Ghost Dancer like that smoke. He described the snow
to Achille. He named the impossible mountains
that he had seen when he lived among the Indians.
Sybils sweep the sand of our archipelago.
Chapter XXXII
I
She floated so lightly! One hand, frail as a swift,
gripping the verandah. The cotton halo fanned
from her shrunken crown, and I felt that I could lift
that fledgling, my mother, in the cup of my hand
and settle her somewhere else: away from the aged
women rubbing rosaries in the Marian Home,
but I was resigned like them. I no longer raged
to be bent by its weight, its indifferent process
that drummed in wrist and shank. Time was that fearful friend
they talked to, who sat beside them in empty chairs,
as deaf as they were; who sometimes simply listened.
They were all withdrawn. They’d entered a dimension
where every thought was weightless, every form clouded
by its ephemeral halo. Time’s intention
rather than death was what baffled them; in the deed
of dying there was terror, but what did time mean,
after some friend stopped talking and around her bed
they opened the panels of an unfolding screen?
The frail hair grew lovelier on my mother’s head,
but when my arm rested on her hollow shoulder
it staggered slightly from the solicitous weight.
I was both father and son. I was as old as her
exhausted prayer, as her wisps of memory floated
with a vague patience, telling her body: “Wait,”
when all that brightness had withered like memory’s flower,
like the allamanda’s bells and the pale lilac
bougainvillea vines that had covered our gabled house.
They, like her natural memory, would not come back.
Her days were dim as dusk. There were no more hours.
From her cupped sleep, she wavered with recognition.
I would bring my face closer to hers and catch the
scent of her age.
“Who am I? Mama, I’m your son.”
“My son.” She nodded.
“You have two, and a daughter.
And a lot of grandchildren,” I shouted. “A lot to
remember.”
“A lot.” She nodded, as she fought her
memory. “Sometimes I ask myself who I am.”
We looked at the hills together, at roofs that I knew
in childhood. “Their names are Derek, Roddy, and Pam.”
“I have to go back to the States again.”
“Well, we
can’t be together all the time,” she said, “I know.”
“There is too much absence,” I said. Then a blessed
lucidity broke through a cloud. She smiled. “I know
who you are. You are my son.”
“Warwick’s son,” she said.
“Nature’s gentleman.” His vine-leaves haloed her now.
II
I left her on the verandah with her white hair,
to buckets clanging in the African twilight
where two girls at the standpipe collected water,
and children with bat-like cries seemed trapped behind bright
galvanized fences, and down the thickening road
as bulbs came on behind curtains, the shadows crossed
me, signing their black language. I felt transported,
past shops smelling of cod to a place I had lost
in the open book of the street, and could not fi
nd.
It was another country, whose excitable
gestures I knew but could not connect with my mind,
like my mother’s amnesia; untranslatable
answers accompanied these actual spirits
who had forgotten me as much as I, too, had
forgotten a continent in the narrow streets.
Now, in night’s unsettling noises, what I heard
enclosed my skin with an older darkness. I stood
in a village whose fires flickered in my head
with tongues of a speech I no longer understood,
but where my flesh did not need to be translated;
then I heard patois again, as my ears unclogged.
The bay was black in starlight. The reek of the beach
was rimmed with a white noise. The beam of the lighthouse
revolved over trees and skipped what it couldn’t reach.
The fronds were threshing over the lit bungalows,
and a breaker arched with a sound like tearing cloth
ripped down the stitched seam, a sound Mama made sewing
when, in disgust, she’d rip the stitches with her mouth.
As I closed the door I felt the surf-noise going
far out back to sea, from each window, one by one,
and yet, inside the rooms was this haze of motion,
above the taut sheet still fragrant from the iron,
and I watched, enlarged by the lamp, a stuttering moth.
III
The moth’s swift shadow rippled on an emerald
lagoon that clearly showed the submerged geography
of the reef’s lilac shelf, where a lateen sail held
for Gros Îlet village like a hooked butterfly
on its flowering branch: a canoe, nearing the island.
Soundless, enormous breakers foamed across the pane,
then broke into blinding glare. Achille raised his hand
from the drumming rudder, then watched our minnow plane
melt into cloud-coral over the horned island.
BOOK FOUR
Chapter XXXIII
I
With the stunned summer going, with the barrel-organ
oaks, the fiddles of gnats, with the surrendering groan
of a carousel by Long Island Sound, the lake with a moon
adrift there in daylight like an unstrung balloon,
with the cold in your palm like a statue’s on
your girlfriend’s knee, from the wooden croak of a loon
from the summer-theatre, the picnic tents of New London,
by the tidal rock-pools, from the broiled prawn
of faces in salad landscapes, to the folding accordion
of fin-de-siècle wave swells, the circuses came down
along the coast of my new empire; the carousels stiffen,
and pegs are pulled from grass that is going brown
in the early cold. They live by an unceasing
self-deceit in an eternal republic, by the vernal sin
in the blue distance, as summer widens its increasing
pardon. Clouds unbutton their bodices,
and butterflies sail in their yellow odysseys,
and shadows everywhere wear the same size.
But the horizon is closer as the awnings fold
and the flags and guywires are pulled down, and the field
is left to its broad scar. Now the bleachers are too cold
except for stubborn lovers who think that the night
will say its stars for the first time. It is late
for us to measure our footfall. And the dark slate
Sound that is scratched with chalk lines, the lighthouses
squinting in the fog, the slowly buttoned blouses
make us walk slowly, Mayakovsky’s clouds in trousers.
From the provincial edge of an atlas, from the hem
of a frayed empire, a man stops. Not for another anthem
trembling over the water—he has learnt three of them—
but for that faint sidereal drone interrupted by the air
gusting over black water, or so that he can hear
the surf in the pores of wet sand wince and pucker.
II
Back in a Brookline of brick and leaf-shaded lanes
I lived like a Japanese soldier in World War
II, on white rice and spare ribs, and, just for a change,
spare ribs and white rice, until the Chinese waiter
setting my corner-table muttered my order,
halfheartedly flashing the bedragonned menu.
Like a Jap soldier on his Pacific island
who prefers solitude to the hope of rescue,
I could blend with the decor of its bamboo grove
and read my paper in peace. I knew they all knew
about my abandonment in the war of love:
the busboys, the couples, their eyes turned from the smell
of failure, while my own eyes had turned Japanese
looking for a letter, for its rescuing sail,
till I grew tired, like wounded Philoctetes,
the hermit who did not know the war was over,
or refused to believe it. The late summer light
squared the carpet, moved from the floor to the sofa,
moved from the sofa, which turned to a hill at night.
But even at night the heat stayed in the concrete
pavements while the fan whirred its steel blades like a palm’s,
as I brushed imaginary sand off from my feet,
turned off the light, and pillowed her waist with my arms,
then tossed on my back. The fan turned, rustling the sheet.
I reached from my raft and reconnected the phone.
In its clicking oarlocks, it idled, my one oar.
But castaways make friends with the sea; living alone
they learn to survive on fistfuls of rainwater
and windfall sardines. But a house which is unblest
by familiar voices, startled by the clatter
of cutlery in a sink with absence for its guest,
as it drifts, its rooms intact, in doldrum summer,
is less a mystery than the Marie Celeste.
Hot concrete pavements, storefronts with watery glass,
in supermarkets her back steering a basket,
same hair, same shoulders, same compact, cynical ass
rounding the aisle, afraid of things I might ask it.
Her wrist yanking the trolley cord and the trolley
gliding with its bell to a stop, as she gets off
to her fixed appointments. Down some chic side-alley
with its bakery and boutiques, the dead-end of love—
all taken in stride as the car picks up slowly
and passes her confident hair, gathering speed,
past faces frowning at the sunlight as she,
walking backwards with the crowd, begins to recede
with shapes on a wharf; or her elbow in the shade
of a florist’s awning, that, as I grew closer
to the sprinkled shelves, disappeared like a lizard,
while I stood there, in the aisles of Vallombrosa,
drugged by the perfume of flowers I didn’t need.
Then, back to the sunstruck pavement, where passers-by
avoided my dewy gaze with a cautious nod,
when they were the busy, transparent ones, not I.
I had nowhere to go but home. Yet I was lost.
Like them I could jiggle keys in purse or pocket.
Like them I fiddled with the door, hoping a ghost
would rise from her chair and help me to unlock it.
III
House of umbrage, house of fear,
house of multiplying air
House of memories that grow
like shadows out of Allan Poe
House where marriages go bust,
house of t
elephone and lust
House of caves, behind whose door
a wave is crouching with its roar
House of toothbrush, house of sin,
of branches scratching, “Let me in!”
House whose rooms echo with rain,
of wrinkled clouds with Onan’s stain
House that creaks, age fifty-seven,
wooden earth and plaster heaven
House of channelled CableVision
whose dragonned carpets sneer derision
Unlucky house that I uncurse
by rites of genuflecting verse
House I unhouse, house that can harden
as cold as stones in the lost garden
House where I look down the scorched street
but feel its ice ascend my feet
I do not live in you, I bear
my house inside me, everywhere
until your winters grow more kind
by the dancing firelight of mind
where knobs of brass do not exist,
whose doors dissolve with tenderness
House that lets in, at last, those fears
that are its guests, to sit on chairs
feasts on their human faces, and
takes pity simply by the hand
shows her her room, and feels the hum
of wood and brick becoming home.
Chapter XXXIV
I
The Crow horseman pointed his lance at the contrail
high over the Dakotas, over Colorado’s
palomino mountains; shapes so edged with detail
I mistook them for lakes. Under the crumbling floes
of a gliding Arctic were dams large as our cities,
and the icy contrails scratched on the Plexiglas
hung like white comets left by their seraphic skis.
Clouds whitened the Crow horseman and I let him pass
into the page, and I saw the white waggons move
across it, with printed ruts, then the railroad track
and the arrowing interstate, as a lost love
narrowed from epic to epigram. Our contracts
were torn like the clouds, like treaties with the Indians,
but with mutual treachery. Through the window,
the breakers burst like the spray on Pacific pines,
and Manifest Destiny was behind me now.
My face frozen in the ice-cream paradiso
of the American dream, like the Sioux in the snow.
II
The wandering smoke below me was like Achille’s
hallucination. Lances, the shattering silver
of cavalry fording a stream, as oxen-wheels