Ancestor bones
Too many to count
Road I walk
With gills
Lidless eyes
George Seferis
With seashell to ear,
An eye for every shell
Happened upon, sought,
Chased, on a balcony
Overlooking a square.
A fountain invites
Young and old to idle
For a cool breeze wet
By that artificial spring,
Seagulls shuffle on tiled
Roofs and wrought lamps,
Poised to swoop for crumbs,
If someone throws some
Thing worthy to stir and flap,
Beaks clawing the ground.
GS, cold sweat flowers
Your shirt, your noose
Handkerchief cannot
Stem rings that widen
At armpits and crotch.
Now you pick up a shell,
Lean your heavy head,
Press shell hard to ear
For the sound of the sea,
For the beat of your blood.
Lorca
Stands by a trench, his chest opens
To the aim of a firing squad.
He has no name when he falls
Among other young men.
His books run from him
To shelter among library shelves,
Where hushed tones and the odd
Chair scrapes on the wooden floor,
And versions of Lorca open gaps
On shelves and fill them back up.
Where the trench of spines
Packed in neat rows calls for
The steady fire of a gaze;
The sure gaze of fire.
Hitchcock’s Vertigo
On their first date, after midnight,
He insisted they climb to the roof,
Up the rusty fire escape lashed
To the west side of a ten-story
Redbrick disused shed
So that they could view the city
As the city never wanted to be seen –
From its dying industrial backend.
Once there, she walked to the edge,
Sat, legs draped over the side. He
Stood, glued to the middle, unable
To budge. She spotted phosphorus
Adrift in the river, picked out by moon,
Scattered so, sky became a current
Steeped with stars dead long ago,
Funeral arrangements pending.
Aime Cesaire
Back to skin as a suit
Stitched by history,
By candle and moon.
Back to skin for a name
For the nameless ones
Who otherwise look
Beautiful, who share
One name for men,
Women and children,
The very old, the baby,
King and commoner,
The dead and unborn.
The same skin sings
As if held between lips,
Or if the tongue twisted,
Folded around air.
The same skin called
For freedom for all names
Walked away from bones,
From flesh, from blood,
Behaving like a kite
Cut from a long string,
Gripped by a black child,
A kite angling across fields.
Calvino
What did you mean by eponymous,
When you described that city on the hill
Modeled after a cloudscape, adrift,
Whose architects wore togas and crowns?
I’ve worn away the heels of countless
Practical shoes trying to find out,
My head tipped to receive the right signal,
Eyes glued to my feet, arms ready to break
My fall, steps without footfall, not gingerly,
Of a conch shell I need two hands to steady
As I pour its air into mine, so gravity whispers,
Much like turning a sock inside out and feeding
My foot into it so that it ends up around my foot
Right side out, no room left for air, fabric
For skin I can peel off and change at will;
Nothing like seeing the city from high up
Through a wine glass that turns the whole place
Upside down and miniaturised to grace
A nimble wrist, not dainty, too many veins,
Not dipped in any pond, and certainly not pale,
A wrist that invites my lips to the point
Where a butterfly appears trapped under skin
That’s raceless, genderless, equal and true.
Our King James
C.L.R. in his rocker holding forth on Shelley
Who put the r in radical as much as the p.
At The Albany I raved with a master drummer,
Ballerina and light technician before a live
Audience of likeminded and polite souls.
Riding home from the all night workshop
In a city polished by sun, I opened the throttle
Of my 250 and sang to a four-stroke engine.
Those years lined up, hook and sinker, without end.
Time was a pulse, an ah, and a hum, picked up
In another’s thighs next to my seashell ears.
I walked on air most days, and slept so sound,
set in threes, out of harm’s way, rattled
Me awake for my shift, on locked Ward Five.
Martin Carter
Peered over the rim of his spectacles.
He knitted his brow.
He threaded his fingers in mock prayer.
The world map
Turned from red to brown to black
And blue, drained of empire.
Across the trench in the shantytown
Children race old tyres with sticks,
Washing sags a line strung from
Pillar to post, a ribbed stray dog
Forages, a child answers to his name
Called from a windowless frame
By a woman who issues a threat
About what would happen if she
Calls again, a cut-tail, a licking,
A curse and a blessing in disguise.
Maybe it was Martin’s eyes, his stare,
That made the map lose its focus.
Mercator changed to Peter’s
As his eyes swiveled from above
The rim of his specs to below.
Sargasso Sea
Antonio
Your sea of lentils
Turned over afterhours at the Lord Jeffrey
A prism at the bottom of a whisky
Rhys peered back at us
Beside her great house in ruins
It would take years for this
Stare down to dissolve
Make peace with broken glass
Smoothed by endless voyages
Their thrown silk of Africans
Forced to keep squid company
Bones returned to sand
Steps erased by waves
Our glasses raised to spirits
Islanded in attic and seabed
For a foolproof burn
Barefoot skip midday sun
Mandela
Made me believe in a salmon’s waterfall climb,
Grizzly claws and jaws dodge, and spawn,
Where so many salmon spawned before.
Made me see the toot in Toots and the Maytals
When I-and-I scene enough for two lifetimes,
And the scales, the weighted scales, fell from my eyes.
Made me taste the just in justice, in coconut water
Offered lukewarm in the green nut, which his cutlass
Cracked in two while he held it, and I scraped jelly
Using a spoon carved by him from th
e husk of the nut;
He touched me and I had no idea until it dawned
On me that his bony forearm draped my shoulders,
Radius and ulna no heavier than scentless orange sun,
A messenger sun, chasing me on my morning run.
Diderot, Two
Did a row or two on Ocean
Drive in my dreams
Barefooted thru
Sand from gold castaway
By evolution
My back to the city
I steered – so it seemed
As I stared at containers,
Their neat stanzas straight
Out of Mandalstam,
Lined up, equidistant,
Offshore, in orderly fashion,
For a pew in the port,
One ship, a destroyer,
Whose grey camouflage
Made the sea change it’s mind
From accommodation
To despair and then some,
And gather all the zinc roofs
Of shacks in nearby Liberty
City into one blinding flash
Raising water in my eye,
Until I looked away,
Marched away, back to
Another day, my back
To the sea, swell, shush,
The sea’s reggae dance,
One step forward,
Two steps backward,
Inna Babylon.
Walter Rodney
Land of many waters
Flow from his pores
Land of seven peoples
Breathe through his skin
Walter at Speaker’s Corner
Sundays practicing
All waters all peoples
Channeled this man
A stick bends in water
But does not break
A people grows as branches
On a tree with miles of roots
Walter not water
I wash my face and head
In your name
Refresh my time with yours
Cut short cut down
But the roots remain
And more trees
Spring up in your corner
More rivers branch out
More people arrive to hear
Faces open as the day
Yours met London
And liked what you saw
And saw what you liked
To take back home Including
groundings with brothers,
Sisters and a party to your name
But bombs stop flesh
While spirits branch out
Airborne and underground
Take root and prosper
Passed from hand to mouth
To heart to flesh and blood
Trans Coda
A boy posted on a boat at sea
This boy is and is not me
As his vessel dips towards
Curved horizons so curves
Rise and back away
Both keep their distance
On a table cleared of hours
Just two parts to the water
Days diving for coins
Nights seeing this zinc ripple
A dozen children in a hammock
Sing in a yellow submarine
Ropes creak and eat into posts
Of a house on stilts floors swept
By a grandmother’s floor-length dress
Fresh bread every morning
A curried air most evenings
Lunchtime empty smell
Mosquitoes scoot for shelter
Rob that child of a prized halo
Yes to the alligator lodged across
Said trench and oops for bare feet
That stepped on what they took
For a log that shifted and reared
Making those feet cycle in air
I woke with all this and tried
All morning to shake it off
My head and still a part of me says
No I do believe what I remember
Yes I do not remember what I believe.
Yeats, Eliot, Pound
I roll up long sleeves
Dare to eat a kumquat
Tell myself, convert
Eyes to bifocals
Store other I in a briefcase
Limbo lower
Palms swing chariots
Stilts hoisted blueward
Brushes rinse sun
Catch rain
Bring beach sound
Marrow for my bones
Yesterday, I sent you
On an errand.
Eyes thrown over shoulders
For any trace of your return.
Tomorrow, promise me
You will not do the same
Thing before today runs out.
Handful of water I try to grab
But come up hands empty
Every time. Light I swipe my hat
To fill, only to pillow air.
Should I wait for the current
To smooth broken glass
On the beach or take a chance
And sprint, b-line, for the water?
He rolled. We shared a smoke
And a private joke. One about
Snake and mongoose. Both sly.
We went back and forth
In a calypso, he took up where
I trailed off in a singsong
That as we smoked grew
Raucous, tickled deep,
We must have seemed (to that group
Of clubbers dressed too sparse
For the climate and who hushed as
They sauntered past) a couple
Of giggling old queens.
DW
Channel Derek thus –
The bivalves of my heart
Jump for joy at the sight
Of lemurs crossing a jungle parapet
Baked with dew as they hold
Limbs, joined for upright balance
Weighed by light that scales
This jungle in a steeplechase
Without end, if the annals
Crafted by the ancients hold water
Rising from lemur instep
As if exhaled by a tired earth
Too long in a giving frame
Too much with hope that takers
Learn from breathing in
And might seek to even out
Things some, hand-in-hand,
Back scratch for back scratch,
Just as that light operates its trowel
So that what the earth gives
We gratefully receive and return
With interest in our children.
KB
Mike up Kamau so –
Bow to gods behind
Bulletproof glass
Sun breaks stones
Dashed at skin
Peeled from flesh
Shaken off bone,
Bow to oil tankers
Parked offshore
Beside bank account,
That part seawater
Erase international datelines
Pull umbilical chords from
Newborn countries
Till they snap
Back strap IMF
World Bank debt
Think oil tanker
Snap-chat or Instgram
Cut vocal chords
Now how, bowwow?
Uniformed guards trail me
At boutique malls
I breathe shallow
Square my shoulders
Against their hunch
Align my spine
With history lived below
Deck as much as above
The now in, now out, navel
Ready for cotton bud
Wielded by love.
About the Author
Fred D’Aguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents. He grew up in Guyana, returning to England in his teens. He trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the
University of Kent, Canterbury. He was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge University and has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is also the author of four novels, the first of which, The Longest Memory (Pantheon, 1994), won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. His plays include High Life (1987) and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death (1991), which was performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London. Mr Reasonable was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2015.
Fred D’Aguiar was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge University from 1989-90 and has taught in the United States since 1992, where he has been Visiting Writer at Amherst, Massachusetts (1992-4), Assistant Professor of English at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine (1994-5), and Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Miami. He was Professor of English and Gloria D. Smith Professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Tech State University. In 2015 he became a Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at UCLA.
By the Same Author
Fred D’Aguiar’s poetry books include
Mama Dot (1985)
Airy Hall (1989; winner of the Guyana Poetry Prize)
British Subjects (1993)
Bill of Rights (1998; shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize)
An English Sampler: New and Selected Poems (2001)