Surfing the Apocalypse (Poetry of Revealing and the Road to Damascus)

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Dreaming Pancho Villa By Carl Marcum The silence that was neither Spanish nor English was my prayer. —Luis Alberto Urrea 1. Last night I dreamt I was Pancho Villa— ragged, bandoliered, reckless. I dreamt my poetry at the end of a pistol, felt it kick nearly out of my hand. But this morning I awoke again white and assimilated into these cobwebs of my half-self. When did I forget my mother? Sometimes Spanish syllables creak like wobbly shopping cart wheels, I have to lean against accent, fill myself with verbs: necesitar, hablar, poder. 2. Half, medio, milkweed, Carlos Gringo, Carlos Murphy. Part mexicano, part Kentucky hillbilly, I’ve angloed my way through this life— hablando español de conveniencia, nunca pensando en la bendición. 3. I dreamed again last night I was Pancho Villa. Only this time I couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. I could understand what the men were asking me, but to blurt orders in English would have stretched my neck. So I kept quiet, austere. I kept a rifle in my hand. I’ve taken it as a sign. When I was fourteen, I lost my brand-new Timex in the waist-high surf of Pismo Beach. I couldn’t feel it missing from my wrist until I was in my uncle’s Volvo, my shorts still soaking, my lips caked white. The sand in my hair, the sand in my shoes— the very real estate of Madera, where during the revolution, no train or telegraph passed for months. The business lumbering on, turning trees to the fabric of living. After the war, they sent query to Juárez, they needed the hour, the day, the month, the year they hadn’t noticed. 4. I’m awake early, half-dreams of last night’s rain & a dirty porch pull me from the sheets. En la madrugada, a broom is a necessary instrument. The swish of straw against concrete, a whisper, a prayer. Shoulders cantilever, wrists rigid, hands in pliable tension—in this motion there is memory. My great-grandmother swept her porch, the way she did every morning. From the burnished Sonoran dawn, a stranger approached. She watched him, always sweeping. The man was young, in his early thirties maybe, beaten, ragged. His face crusted with blood, filthy. The man appealed to her, “Señora, por favor, ayúdeme,” he said. She stopped sweeping & looked at him. “Me siguen los federales,” he said. She looked on him with pity & brought him into her home. She must have thought of her daughters, she must have thought of consequence. She put the man in a bed, went back outside to sweep. The federales arrived shortly after, five on horseback armed & angry. “Señora,” they asked, “have you seen a stranger this morning?” She stopped sweeping, told them she had not. They asked if anyone was in the house. “No one,” she told them, “only my sick uncle.” They left without incident or investigation. Night fell. She cleaned the man’s wounds, gave him clothes, listened to his stories of revolution. She told him, “Whether the revolution or the government, I lose chickens all the same.” She handed him a plate of arroz con pollo. He rested for two days. She gave him the few centavos she had & he left amidst the desert night. Years later, the man returned to her house—with a gift that no one can remember—to thank her for his life. 5. This time it’s turning tequila sueño, gold spinner gone retrograde illusion. La Sirena—verde-verdad, glinting back-black and skin— across the metallic blue chulo wagon. Mariachi gone mad in the back seat. This is cruising at watch-me- miles-an-hour. “Ese, why don’t you come down to chrome avenue, where it’s all manos y moda? We’ll sit straight-slick, three-reefer- tone-deaf- brass-stick high. Me and you, pendejo. We’ll pick up Hi-Tone, all fingers and hair, that little guitarrista. No te mortifiques, Ride shotgun with me. Pégame un grito.” Chale. I’ve got work to do, homes. 6. 7. I’m dreamsick now. Staying asleep past noon. Desvelado. Headache-fog when I’m awake, even keeping down milk is hard. Images, sounds, curdle thick in my ears, my eyes. Levántate. ¿Qué horas son? I dream Villa’s first murder. The other man on horseback, his jefe’s son. An argument at the crossroads. A girl, Pancho’s sister. Something forced—a point, a pistol. A sharp report, blue-black smoke. Fear, alarm—the smell of guilt, like bad masa, taints tastes, turns on Pancho. Running now, like before but worse. Three days into las montañas. Marcado por vida. 8. In a dream of brown skin, I’m lost in black, black hair, dark nipples, a face I’ve never known. A kiss so difficult I moan. My face wet with her—princess, mujer—irrecoverable. Only impression across sleep-soaked lips, only an ache and a dark, dark scent. 9. 10. Barbed wire fence runs down the axis of a heart. River rides in canyon dreams—a revolution in water. I am a kiss, confessed by tongues that will not pronounce me.

 

Poet Laureate of Hell ​ is what I seek to become, because why swoon and slather over fame in some sparse or even populous city-state saturate and dizzy with mall-to-mall glitz and glitter of deafening “buy-me buy-me”s – jewelers hawking each corner of every artery of the one true church gaggling enough gaudies to glut several thirdworld countries of bloated child-bellies, and circumscribed fully by bumper-to-bumper smog-machines and their get-there-yesterday Armani suits hyped on road rage, mud-thick caffeine and and cellphone drunkenness screeching past garish megaplexes with their latest slasherflicks or fraught with daft and derelict comedy buffoons, silicone-infused floozies and their salivating wilderbeasts up until dark's last orgasmic gasp, as meanwhile throughout day and night snore the heavy-lidded libraries, museums and college auditoriums of Anytown USA, hushed and tomblike as stout and sated cows? Oh why be king or queen of any scuzzy American whoretown with its elective artistic hysterectomy, so overly-bled and sutured, so straining at its own adhesions until the next mad psychosurgery in the richest nation on earth daddied and diddled by such surcease of soul, that Jesus in thorns could descend into all boudoirs waving neon crosses prophecying the beginning of the world, and yet World War III or black gold would be too alluring, all hackneyed parishioners panting for, say, the next Walk-Mart to sprout suddenly in their backyards like Aladdin-mansions to be even vaguely interested in the compulsively obsessed-over kingdom of heaven proffered by some lesser deity? As if it means anything at all to be versed or eloquent within the truculence of a “culture” so reveling in ignorance and greed and lacking in first-hand knowledge with something as simple as a novel insight or idea, too jaded and spoiled to extract its head from its ignominious back hole to recognize just one mote of genius? NO! Give me instead HELL, where all the bright lights lie, like Blake, Byron, Thomas, Pound, Yeats, Sexton, Schwartz, Rilke, Ginsberg, Plath, Dante and all the rest who still blather like quote quote lunatics or at least phonetic fanatics, consigned to the underworld for insistently blasting lucidity and truth straight onto the mid-brain past thick foreheads of intransigent Neanderthal puppeteers and their grinning glass-eyed dummies – al lthose bituminous brain-dead bums ramrodding inane nationalistic and paternalistic bullshit sacks of utter dimwittery down tight throats unflexed yet acquiescent of such blow-hard jobs, territorially manhandling, gunny-sacking and penny-shucking, hiccoughing hosannahs over shiny objects and electronic sheephead detritus, blaring enough iniquity to blot out each and every dancing star but never their hoarse and hoary voices, incessantly yammering and pontificating about anything and everything except what exactly might be meant by an “A”or “B” or “C!” by ©Julie K. Shavin

 

Globus Hystericus By Timothy Donnelly 1 A pity the selfsame vehicle that spirits me away from factories of tedium should likewise serve to drag me backwards into panic, or that panic should erect massive factories of its own, their virulent pollutants havocking loved waterways, frothing all the reed- fringed margins acid pink and gathering in the shell and soft tissues of the snails unknowingly in danger as they inch up stems. Through the bulkhead door I can hear their spirals plunk into the sluggish south- bound current and dissolve therein with such brutal regularity their dying has given rise to the custom of measuring time here in a unit known as the snailsdeath. The snailsdeath refers to the average length of time, about 43 seconds, elapsing between the loss of the first snail to toxic waters and the loss of the next, roughly equivalent to the pause between swallows in a human throat, while the adverb here refers to my person and all its outskirts, beginning on the so-called cellular level extending more of less undaunted all the way down to the vale at the foot of the bed. I often fear I’ll wake to find you waiting there and won’t know how to speak on the subject of my production, or rather my woeful lack thereof, but in your absence, once again, I will begin drafting apologies in a language ineffectual as doves. 2 Daybreak on my marshland: a single egret, blotched, trudges through the froth. I take its photograph from the rooftop observation deck from which I watch day’s delivery trucks advance. I take advantage of the quiet before their arrival to organize my thoughts on the paranormal thusly: (1) If the human psyche has proven spirited enough to produce such a range of material effects upon what we’ll call the closed system of its custodial body, indeed if it’s expected to, and (2) If such effects might be thought to constitute the physical expression of that psyche, an emanation willed into matter in a manner not unlike a brand- new car or cream-filled cake or disposable camera, and (3) If the system of the body can be swapped out for another, maybe an abandoned factory or a vale, then might it not also prove possible for the psyche by aptitude or lather or sheer circumstance to impress its thumbprint on some other system, a production in the basement, or in a video store, as when I find you inching up steps or down a shady aisle or pathway, dragging your long chains behind you most morosely if you ask me, the question is: Did you choose this, or was it imposed on you, but even as I ask your hands move wildly about your throat to indicate you cannot speak. 3 After the memory of the trucks withdrawing heavy with their cargo fans out and fades into late-morning hunger, I relocate in time to the lit bank of vending machines still humming in the staff-room corner for a light meal of cheese curls, orange soda, and what history will come to mourn as the last two cream-filled cakes. Eating in silence, a breeze in the half-light, absently thinking of trying not to think, I imagine the Bethlehem steel smokestacks above me piping nonstop, the sky wide open without any question, steam and dioxides of carbon and sulfur, hands pressed to the wall as I walk down the corridor to stop myself from falling awake again on the floor in embarrassment. If there’s any use of imagination more productive or time less painful it hasn’t tried hard enough to push through to find me wandering the wings of a ghost-run factory as Earth approaches the dark vale cut in the heart of the galaxy. Taking shots of the sunbaked fields of putrefaction visible from the observation deck. Hoping to capture what I can point to as the way it feels. Sensing my hand in what I push away. Watching it dissolve into plumes rising like aerosols, or like ghosts of indigenous peoples, or the lump in the throat to keep me from saying that surviving almost everything has felt like having killed it. 4 (Plunk) Up from the floor with the sun to the sound of dawn’s first sacrifice to the residues of commerce. On autofog, on disbelief: rejuvenation in a boxer brief crashed three miles wide in the waves off Madagascar, cause of great flooding in the Bible and in Gilgamesh. Massive sphere of rock and ice, of all events in history (Plunk) thought to be the lethalmost. A snailsdeath semiquavers from pang to ghost where the habit of ghosts of inhabiting timepieces, of conniving their phantom tendrils through parlor air and into the escapements of some inoperative heirloom clock on a mantel shows not the dead’s ongoing interest in their old adversary (Plunk) time so much as an urge to return to the hard mechanical kind of being. An erotic lounging to reanimate the long-inert pendulum. As I have felt you banging nights in my machine, jostling the salt from a pretzel. This passion for the material realm after death however refuses to be reconciled with a willingness to destroy (Plunk) it while alive. When the last of the human voices told me what I had to do, they rattled off a shopping list of artifacts they wanted thrown down open throats. That left me feeling in on it, chosen, a real fun-time guy albeit somewhat sleep-deprived; detail-oriented, modern, yes, but also dubious, maudlin, bedridden, speechless. 5 Graffiti on the stonework around the service entrance makes the doorway at night look like the mystagogic mouth of a big beast, amphibious, outfitted with fangs, snout, the suggestion of a tongue, throat, and alimentary canal leading to a complex of caves, tunnels, temples . . . There are rooms I won’t enter, at whose threshold I say this is as far as I go, no farther, almost as if I can sense there’s something in there I don’t want to see, or for which to see means having wanted already to forget, unless stepping into the mouth at last, pressed into its damp, the advantage of not knowing is swapped out for the loss of apartness from what you’d held unknown, meaning you don’t come to know it so much as become it, wholly warping into its absorbent fold. I can’t let that happen if it hasn’t already. What draws me on might be thought canine, keen-sighted, but it’s still incapable of divining why the constant hum around or inside me has to choose among being a nocturne of toxic manufacture, the call of what remains of the jungle, or else just another prank on my gullible anatomy. Am I not beset in the utmost basement of industry? Is that basement itself not beset by the broad, black-green, waxy leaves of Mesoamerica? And haven’t I parted those selfsame leaves, discovering me asleep on my own weapon, threat to no one but myself? 6 Asked again what I miss the most about my former life, I remember to pause this time, look left, a little off-camera an entire snailsdeath, an air of sifting the possibilities, I eliminate certain objects and events from the running right off the bat, such as when their great displeasure brought the gods to turn to darkness all that had been light, submerging mountaintops in stormwater, the gods shocked by their own power, and heartsick to watch their once dear people stippling the surf like little fishes. Or when the flaming peccary of a comet struck the earth with much the same effect, waves as high as ziggurats crashing mathematically against our coastlines, scalding plumes of vapor and aerosols tossed into the atmosphere spawning storms to pummel the far side of the earth, approximately 80 percent of all life vanished in a week. Or when we squandered that very earth and shat on it with much the same effect, and more or less on purpose, emitting nonstop gases in the flow of our production, shoveling it in as ancient icecaps melted, what difference could another make now. And so I clear my throat, look directly into the camera, and even though it will make me come off bovine in their eyes, I say that what I miss the most has to be those cream-filled cakes I used to like, but then they prod me with their volts and lead me back to the barn. 7 After the panic grew more of less customary, the pity dissolved into a mobile fogbank, dense, reducing visibility from the rooftop observation deck. Mobile in the sense that it possessed mobility, not in the sense that it actually moved. Because it didn’t. It just stayed there, reducing visibility but not in the sense that it simply diminished it or diminished it partly. Because it didn’t. It pretty much managed to do away with it altogether, as my photography will come to show: field after field of untouched white. After the possibility of change grew funny, threadbare, too embarrassing to be with, I eased into the knowledge that you’d never appear at the foot of the bed, the vale turned into a lifetime’s heap of laundry, and not the gentle tuffets and streambanks of an afterlife it seems we only imagined remembering, that watercolor done in greens and about which I predicted its monotony of fair weather over time might deaden one all over again, unless being changed with death means not only changing past change but past even the wish for it. I worried to aspire towards that condition might actually dull one’s aptitude for change. That I would grow to protect what I wished to keep from change at the cost of perpetuating much that required it. In this sense I had come to resemble the fogbank, at once given to motion but no less motionless than its photograph. The last time I saw myself alive, I drew the curtain back from the bed, stood by my sleeping body. I felt tenderness towards it. I knew how long it had waited, and how little time remained for it to prepare its bundle of grave-goods. When I tried to speak, rather than my voice, my mouth released the tight, distinctive shriek of an aerophone of clay. I wanted to stop the shock of that from taking away from what I felt. I couldn’t quite manage it. Even at this late hour, even here, the purity of a feeling is ruined by the world. 8 The noises from the basement were not auspicious noises. I wanted to live forever. I wanted to live forever and die right then and there. I had heard the tight, distinctive shriek. Here again and now. I no longer have legs. I am sleeping. Long tendrils of tobacco smoke, composed of carbon dioxide, water vapor, ammonia, nitrogen oxide, hydrogen cyanide, and 4,000 other chemical compounds, penetrate the room through the gap beneath the door and through heating vents with confidence. They are the spectral forms of anaconda. The ruler of the underworld smokes cigars. A certain brand. Hand-rolled. He smiles as if there is much to smile about. And there is. He is hollow-eyed, toothless. His hat, infamous: broad-brimmed, embellished with feathers, a live macaw. His cape is depicted, often, as a length of fabric in distinctive black and white chevrons. Otherwise, as here, the full pelt of a jaguar. On a barge of plywood and empty milk cartons he trudges through the froth. He is the lord of black sorcery and lord of percussion. He is patron of commerce. He parts the leaves of Mesoamerica, traveling with a retinue of drunken ax wielders, collection agents. His scribe is a white rabbit. Daughter of moon and of night. Elsewhere, you are having your teeth taken out. There is no music left, but I still feel held captive by the cinema, and in its custom, I believe myself capable of protecting myself by hiding my face in my hands.

 

The Cloud Corporation By Timothy Donnelly 1 The clouds part revealing a mythology of clouds assembled in light of earliest birds, an originary text over water over time, and that without which the clouds part revealing an apology for clouds implicit in the air where the clouds had been recently witnessed rehearsing departure, a heartfelt phrase in the push of the airborne drops and crystals over water over time—how being made to think oneself an obstruction between the observer and the object or objects under surveillance or even desired—or if I am felt to be beside the point then I have wanted that, but to block a path is like not being immaterial enough, or being too much when all they want from you now is your station cleared of its personal effects please and vanish— not that they’d ever just come out and say it when all that darting around of the eyes, all that shaky camouflage of paper could only portend the beginning of the end of your tenure at this organization, and remember a capacity to draw meaning out of such seeming accidence landed one here to begin with, didn’t it. 2 The clouds part revealing an anatomy of clouds viewed from the midst of human speculation, a business project undertaken in a bid to acquire and retain control of the formation and movement of clouds. As late afternoons I have witnessed the distant towers borrow luster from a bourbon sun, in-box empty, surround sound on, all my money made in lieu of conversation—where conversation indicates the presence of desire in the parties to embark on exchange of spirit, hours forzando with heartfelt phrase— made metaphor for it, the face on the clock tower bright as a meteor, as if a torch were held against likelihood to illuminate the time so I could watch the calm silent progress of its hands from the luxury appointments of my office suite, the tumult below or behind me out of mind, had not my whole attention been riveted by the human figure stood upon the tower’s topmost pinnacle, himself surveying the clouds of the future parting in antiquity, a figure not to be mistaken, tranquilly pacing a platform with authority: the chief executive officer of clouds. 3 The clouds part revealing blueprints of the clouds built in glass-front factories carved into cliff-faces which, prior to the factories’ recent construction, provided dorms for clans of hamadryas baboons, a species revered in ancient Egypt as attendants of Thoth, god of wisdom, science, and measurement. Fans conveying clouds through aluminum ducts can be heard from up to a mile away, depending on air temperature, humidity, the absence or presence of any competing sound, its origin and its character. It is no more impossible to grasp the baboon’s full significance in Egyptian religious symbolism than it is to determine why clouds we manufacture provoke in an audience more positive, lasting response than do comparable clouds occurring in nature. Even those who consider natural clouds products of conscious manufacture seem to prefer that a merely human mind lie behind the products they admire. This development may be a form of self-exalting or else another adaptation in order that we find the hum of machinery comforting through darkness. 4 The clouds part revealing there’s no place left to sit myself down except for a single wingback chair backed into a corner to face the window in which the clouds part revealing the insouciance of clouds cavorting over the backs of the people in the field who cut the ripened barley, who gather it in sheaves, who beat grain from the sheaves with wooden flails, who shake it loose from the scaly husk around it, who throw the now threshed grain up into the gently palm-fanned air whose steady current carries off the chaff as the grain falls to the floor, who collect the grain from the floor painstakingly to grind it into flour, who bake the flour into loaves the priest will offer in the sanctuary, its walls washed white like milk. To perform it repeatedly, to perform it each time as if the first, to walk the dim corridor believing that the conference it leads to might change everything, to adhere to a possibility of reward, of betterment, of moving above, with effort, the condition into which one has been born, to whom do I owe the pleasure of the hum to which I have been listening too long. 5 The clouds part revealing the advocates of clouds, believers in people, ideas and things, the workers of the united fields of clouds, supporters of the wars to keep clouds safe, the devotees of heartfelt phrase and belief you can change with water over time. It is the habit of a settled population to give ear to whatever is desirable will come to pass, a caressing confidence—but one unfortunately not borne out by human experience, for most things people desire have been desired ardently for thousands of years and observe—they are no closer to realization today than in Ramses’ time. Nor is there cause to believe they will lose their coyness on some near tomorrow. Attempts to speed them on have been undertaken from the beginning; plans to force them overnight are in copious, antagonistic operation today, and yet they have thoroughly eluded us, and chances are they will continue to elude us until the clouds part in a flash of autonomous, ardent, local brainwork— but when the clouds start to knit back together again, we’ll dismiss the event as a glitch in transmission. 6 The clouds part revealing a congregation of bodies united into one immaterial body, a fictive person around whom the air is blurred with money, force from which much harm will come, to whom my welfare matters nothing. I sense without turning the light from their wings, their eyes; they preen themselves on the fire escape, the windowsill, their pink feet vulnerable—a mistake to think of them that way. If I turn around, the room might not be full of wings capable of acting, in many respects, as a single being, which is to say that I myself may be the source of what I sense, but am no less powerless to change it. Always around me, on my body, in my mouth, I fear them and their love of money, everything I do without thinking to help them make it. And if I am felt to be beside the point, I have wanted that, to live apart from what depends on killing me a little bit to keep itself alive, and yet not happily, with all its needs and comforts met, but fattened so far past that point I am engrossed, and if I picture myself outside of it it isn’t me anymore, but a parasite cast out, inviable. 7 The clouds part revealing the distinction between words without meaning and meaning without words, a phenomenon of nature, the westbound field of low air pressure developing over water over time and warm, saturated air on the sea surface rising steadily replaced by cold air from above, the cycle repeating, the warm moving upward into massive thunderclouds, the cold descending into the eye around which bands of thunderclouds spiral, counter- clockwise, often in the hundreds, the atmospheric pressure dropping even further, making winds accelerate, the clouds revolve, a confusion of energy, an incomprehensible volume of rain—I remember the trick of thinking through infinity, a crowd of eyes against an asphalt wall, my vision of it scrolling left as the crowd thinned out to a spatter and then just black until I fall asleep and then just black again, past marketing, past focus groups, past human resources, past management, past personal effects, their insignificance evident in the eye of the dream and through much of the debriefing I wake into next.

 

The Schooner 'Flight' by Derek Walcott​ 1 Adios, Carenage In idle August, while the sea soft, and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim of this Carribean, I blow out the light by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight. Out in the yard turning gray in the dawn, I stood like a stone and nothing else move but the cold sea rippling like galvanize and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof, till a wind start to interfere with the trees. I pass me dry neighbor sweeping she yard as I went downhill, and I nearly said: "Sweep soft, you witch, 'cause she don't sleep hard," but the bitch look through me like I was dead. A route taxi pull up, park-lights still on. The driver size up my bags with a grin: "This time, Shabine, like you really gone!" I ain't answer the ass, I simply pile in the back seat and watch the sky burn above Laventille pink as the gown in which the woman I left was sleeping, and I look in the rearview and see a man exactly like me, and the man was weeping for the houses, the street, that whole fucking island. Christ have mercy on all sleeping things! >From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road to when I was a dog on these streets; if loving these islands must be my load. out of corruption my soul takes wings, But they had started to poison my soul with their big house, big car, big time bohbohl, coolie, nigger, Syrian and French Creole, so I leave it for them and their carnival - I taking a sea bath, I gone down the road. I know these islands from Monos to Nassau, a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes that they nickname Shabine, the patois for any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw when these slums of empire was paradise. I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation, But Maria Concepcion was all my thought watching the sea heaving up and down as the port side of dories, schooners, and yachts was painted afresh by the strokes of the sun signing her name with every reflection; I knew when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea, sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back, so I smile to myself as the bow rope untied and the Flight swing seaward:"Is no use repeating that the sea have more fish. I ain't want her dressed in the sexless light of a seraph, I want those round brown eyes like a marmoset, and till the day when I can lean back and laugh, those claws that tickled my back on sweating Sunday afternoons, like a crab on wet sand." As I worked, watching the rotting waves come past the bow that scissor the sea like milk, I swear to you all, by my mother's milk, by the stars that shall fly from tonight's furnace, that I loved them, my children, my wife, my home; I loved them as poets love the poetry that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea. You ever look up from some lonely beach and see a far schooner? Well, when I write this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt; I go draw and knot every line as tight as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech my common language go be the wind, my pages the sails of the schooner Flight. But let me tell you how this business begin. 2 Raptures of the Deep Smuggled Scotch for O'Hara, big government man, between Cedros and the Main, so the Coast Guard couldn't touch us, and the Spanish pirogues always met us halfway, but a voice kept saying: "Shabine, see this business of playing pirate?" Well, so said, so done! That whole racket crash. And I for a woman, for her laces and silks, Maria Concepcion. Ay, ay! Next thing I hear, some Commission of Enquiry was being organized to conduct a big quiz, with himself as chairman investigating himself. Well, I knew damn well who the suckers would be, not that shark in shark skin, but his pilot fish, khaki-pants red nigger like you or me. What worse, I fighting with Maria Concepcion, plates flying and thing, so I swear: "Not again!" It was mashing up my house and my family. I was so broke all I needed was shades and a cup or four shades and four cups in four-cup Port of Spain; all the silver I had was the coins on the sea. You saw them ministers in The Express, guardians of the poor - one hand at their back, and one set o'police only guarding their house, and the Scotch pouring in through the back door. As for that minister-monster who smuggled the booze, that half-Syrian saurian, I got so vex to see that face thick with powder, the warts, the stone lids like a dinosaur caked with primordial ooze by the lightning of flashbulbs sinking in wealth, that I said: "Shabine, this is shit, understand!" But he get somebody to kick my crutch out his office like I was some artist! That bitch was so grand, couldn't get off his high horse and kick me himself. I have seen things that would make a slave sick in this Trinidad, the Limers' Republic. I couldn't shake the sea noise out of my head, the shell of my ears sang Maria Concepcion, so I start salvage diving with a crazy Mick, name O'Shaugnessy, and a limey named Head; but this Carribean so choke with the dead that when I would melt in emerald water, whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent, I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea fans, dead-men's-fingers, and then, the dead men. I saw that the powdery sand was their bones ground white from Senegal to San Salvador, so, I panic third dive, and surface for a month in the Seamen's Hostel. Fish broth and sermons. When I thought of the woe I had brought my wife, when I saw my worries with that other woman, I wept under water, salt seeking salt, for her beauty had fallen on me like a sword cleaving me from my children, flesh of my flesh! There was this barge from St. Vincent, but she was too deep to float her again. When we drank, the limey got tired of my sobbing for Maria Concepcion. He said he was getting the bends. Good for him! The pain in my heart for Maria Concepcion, the hurt I had done to my wife and children, was worse than the bends. In the rapturous deep there was no cleft rock where my soul could hide like the boobies each sunset, no sandbar of light where I could rest, like the pelicans know, so I got raptures once, and I saw God like a harpooned grouper bleeding, and a far voice was rumbling, "Shabine, if you leave her, if you leave her, I shall give you the morning star." When I left the madhouse I tried other women but, once they stripped naked, their spiky cunts bristled like sea eggs and I couldn't dive. The chaplain came round. I paid him no mind. Where is my rest place, Jesus? Where is my harbor? Where is the pillow I will not have to pay for, and the window I can look from that frames my life? 3 Shabine Leaves the Republic I had no nation now but the imagination. After the white man, the niggers didn't want me when the power swing to their side. The first chain my hands and apologize, "History"; the next said I wasn't black enough for their pride. Tell me, what power, on these unknown rocks - a spray-plane Air Force, the Fire Brigade, the Red Cross, the Regiment, two, three police dogs that pass before you finish bawling "Parade!"? I met History once, but he ain't recognize me, a parchment Creole, with warts like an old sea bottle, crawling like a crab through the holes of shadow cast by the net of a grille balcony ; cream linen, cream hat. I confront him and shout, "Sir, is Shabine! They say I'se your grandson. You remember Grandma, your blck cook, at all?" The bitch hawk and spat. A spit like that worth any number of words. But that's all them bastards have left us: words. I no longer believed in the revolution. I was losing faith in the love of my woman. I had seen that moment Aleksandr Blok crystallize in The Twelve. Was between the Police Marine Branch and Hotel Venezuelana one Sunday at noon. Young men without flags using shirts, their chests waiting for holes. They kept marching into the mountains, and their noise ceased as foam sinks into sand. They sank in the bright hills like rain, every one with his own nimbus, leaving shirts in the streets, and the echo of power at the end of the street. Propeller-blade fans turn over the Senate; the judges, they say, still sweat in carmine, on Frederick Street the idlers all marching by standing still, the Budget turns a new leaf. In the 12.30 movies the projectors best not break down, or you go see revolution. Aleksandr Blok enters and sits in the third row of pit eating choc- olate cone, waiting for a spaghetti West- ern with Clint Eastwood and featuring Lee Van Cleef. 4 The Flight, Passing Blanchisseuse. Dusk. The Flight passing Blanchisseuse. Gulls wheel like from a gun again, and foam gone amber that was white, lighthouse and star start making friends, down every beach the long day ends, and there, on that last stretch of sand, on a beach bare of all but light, dark hands start pulling in the seine of the dark sea, deep, deep inland. 5 Shabine Encounters the Middle Passage Man, I brisk in the galley first thing next dawn, brewing li'l coffee; fog coil from the sea like the kettle steaming when I put it down slow, slow, 'cause I couldn't believe what I see: where the horizon was one silver haze, the fog swirl and swell into sails, so close that I saw it was sails, my hair grip my skull, it was horrors, but it was beautiful. We float through a rustling forest of ships with sails dry like paper, behind the glass I saw men with rusty eyeholes like cannons, and whenever their half-naked crews cross the sun, right through their tissue, you traced their bones like leaves against the sunlight; frigates, barkentines, the backward-moving current swept them on, and high on their decks I saw great admirals, Rodney, Nelson, de Grasse, I heard the hoarse orders they gave those Shabines, and that forest of masts sail right through the Flight, and all you could hear was the ghostly sound of waves rustling like grass in a low wind and the hissing weds they trail from the stern; slowly they heaved past from east to west like this round world was some cranked water wheel, every ship pouring like a wooden bucket dredged from the deep; my memory revolve on all sailors before me, then the sun heat the horizon's ring and they was mist. Next we pass slave ships. Flags of all nations, our fathers below deck too deep, I suppose, to hear us shouting. So we stop shouting. Who knows who his grandfather is, much less his name? Tomorrow our landfall will be the Barbados. 6 The Sailor Sings Back to the Casuarinas You see them on the low hills of Barbados bracing like windbreaks, needles for hurricanes, trailing, like masts, the cirrus of torn sails; when I was green like them, I used to think those cypresses, leaning against the sea, that take the sea noise up into their branches, are not real cypresses but casuarinas. Now captain just call them Canadian cedars. But cedars, cypresses, or casuarinas, whoever called them so had a good cause, watching their bending bodies wail like women after a storm, when some schooner came home with news of one more sailor drowned again. Once the sound "cypress" used to make more sense than the green "casuarinas", though, to the wind whatever grief bent them was all the same, since they were trees with nothing else in mind but heavenly leaping or to guard a grave; but we live like our names and you would have to be colonial to know the difference, to know the pain of history words contain, to love those trees with an inferior love, and to believe: "Those casuarinas bend like cypresses, their hair hangs down in rain like sailors' wives. They're classic trees, and we, if we live like the names our masters please, by careful mimicry might become men." 7 The Flight Anchors in Castries Harbor When the stars self were young over Castries, I loved you alone and I loved the whole world. What does it matter that our lives are different? Burdened with the loves of our different children? When I think of your young face washed by the wind and your voice that chuckles in the slap of the sea? The lights are out on La Toc promontory, except for the hospital. Across at Vigie the marina arcs keep vigil. I have kept my own promise, to leave you the one thing I own, you whom I loved first: my poetry. We here for one night. Tomorrow, the Flight will be gone. 8 Fight with the Crew It had one bitch on board, like he had me mark - that was the cook, some Vincentian arse with a skin like a gommier tree, red peeling bark, and wash-out blue eyes; he wouldn't give me a ease, like he feel he was white. Had an exercise book, this same one here, that I was using to write my poetry, so one day this man snatch it from my hand, and start throwing it left and right to the rest of the crew,bawling out, "Catch it," and start mincing me like I was some hen because of the poems. Some case is for fist, some case is for tholing pin, some is for knife - this one was for knife. Well, I beg him first, but he kept reading, "O my children, my wife," and playing he crying, to make the crew laugh; it move like a flying fish, the silver knife that catch him right in the plump of his calf, and he faint so slowly, and he turn more white than he thought he was. I suppose among men you need that sort of thing. It ain't right but that's how it is. There wasn't much pain, just plenty blood, and Vincie and me best friend, but none of them go fuck with my poetry again. 9 Maria Concepcion & the Book of Dreams The jet that was screeching over the Flight was opening a curtain into the past. "Dominica ahead!" "It still have Caribs there." "One day go be planes only, no more boat." "Vince, God ain't made nigger to fly through the air." "Progress, Shabine, that's what it's all about. Progress leaving all we small islands behind." I was at the wheel, Vince sitting next to me gaffing. Crisp, bracing day. A high-running sea. "Progress is something to ask Caribs about. They kill them by millions, some in war, some by forced labor dying in the mines looking for silver, after that niggers; more progress. Until I see definite signs that mankind change, Vince, I ain't want to hear. Progress is history's dirty joke. Ask that sad green island getting nearer." Green islands, like mangoes pickled in brine. In such fierce salt let my wound be healed, me, in my freshness as a seafarer. That night, with the sky sparks frosty with fire, I ran like a Carib through Dominica, my nose holes choked with memory of smoke; I heard the screams of my burning children, I ate the brains of mushrooms, the fungi of devil's parasols under white, leprous rocks; my breakfast was leaf mold in leaking forests, with leaves big as maps, and when I heard noise of the soldiers' progress through the thick leaves, though my heart was bursting, I get up and ran through the blades of balisier sharper than spears: with the blood of my race, I ran, boy, I ran with moss-footed speed like a painted bird; then I fall, but I fall by an icy stream under cool fountains of fern, and a screaming parrot catch the dry branches and I drowned at last in big breakers of smoke; then when that ocean of black smoke pass, and the sky turn white, there was nothing but Progress, if Progress is an iguana as still as a young leaf in sunlight. I bawl for Maria, and her Book of Dreams. It anchored her sleep, that insomniac's Bible, a soiled orange booklet with a cyclop's eye center, from the Dominican Republic. Its coarse pages were black with the usual symbols of prophecy, in excited Spanish: an open palm upright, sectioned and numbered like a butcher chart, delivered the future. One night, in a fever, radiantly ill, she say, "Bring me the book, the end has come." She said, "I dreamt of whales and a storm," but for that dream, the book had no answer. A next night I dreamed of three old women featureless as silkworms, stitching my fate, and I scream at them to come out of my house, and I try beating them away with a broom, but as they go out, so they crawl back again, until I start screaming and crying, my flesh raining with sweat, and she ravage the book for the dream meaning, and there was nothing; my nerves melt like a jellyfish - that was when I broke - they found me round the Savannah, screaming: All you see me talking to the wind, so you think I mad. Well, Shabine has bridled the horses of the sea; you see me watching the sun till my eyeballs seared, so all you mad people feel Shabine crazy, but all you ain't know my strength, hear? The coconuts standing by in their regiments in yellow khaki, they waiting for Shabine to take over these islands, and all you best dread the day I am healed of being a human. All you fate in my hand, ministers, businessmen, Shabine have you, friend, I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand, I who have no weapon but poetry and the lances of palms and the sea's shining shield! 10 Out of the Depths Next day, dark sea. A arse-aching dawn. "Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind." The slow swell start cresting like some mountain range with snow on the top. "Ay, skipper, sky dark!" "This ain't right for August." "This light damn strange, this season, sky should be clear as a field." A stingray steeplechase across the sea, tail whipping water, the high man-o'-wars start reeling inland, quick, quick an archery of flying fish miss us! Vince say: "You notice?" and a black-mane squall pounce on the sail like a dog on a pigeon, and it snap the neck of the Flight and shake it from head to tail. "Be Jesus, I never see sea get so rough so fast! That wind come from God back pocket!" "Where Cap'n headin? Like the man gone blind!" "If we's to drong, we go drong, Vince, fock-it!" "Shabine, say your prayers, if life leave you any!" I have not loved those that I loved enough. Worse than the mule kick of Kick-'Em-Jenny Channel, rain start to pelt the Flight between mountains of water. If I was frighten? The tent poles of water spouts bracing the sky start wobbling, clouds unstitch at the seams and sky water drench us, and I hear myself cry, "I'm the drowned sailor in her Book of Dreams." I remembered those ghost ships, I saw me corkscrewing to the sea bed of sae worms, fathom past fathom, my jaw clench like a fist, and only one thing hold me, trembling, how my family safe home. Then a strength like it seize me and the strength said: "I from backward people who still fear God." Let Him, in His might, heave Leviathan upward by the winch of His will, the beast pouring lace from his sea-bottom bed; and that was the faith that had fade from a child in the Methodist chapel in Chisel Street, Castries, when the whale-bell sang service and, in hard pews ribbed like the whale, proud with despair, we sang how our race survive the sea's maw, our history, our peril, and now I was ready for whatever death will. But if that storm had strength, was in Cap'n face, beard beading with spray, tears salting his eyes, crucify to his post, that nigger hold fast to that wheel, man, like the cross held Jesus, and the wounds of his eyes like they crying for us, and I feeding him white rum, while every crest with Leviathan-lash made the Flight quail like two criminal. Whole night, with no rest, till red-eyed like dawn, we watch our travail subsiding, subside, and there was no more storm. And the noon sea get calm as Thy Kingdom come. 11 After the Storm There's a fresh light that follows a storm while the whole sea still havoc; in its bright wake I saw the veiled face of Maria Concepcion marrying the ocean, then drifting away in the widening lace of her bridal train with white gulls her bridesmaids, till she was gone. I wanted nothing after that day. Across my own face, like the face of the sun, a light rain was falling, wih the sea calm. Fall gently, rain, on the sea's upturned face like a girl showering; make these islands fresh as Shabine once knew them! Let every trace, every hot road, smell like clothes she just press and sprinkle with drizzle. I finish dream; whatever the rain wash and the sun iron: the white clouds, the sea and sky wih one seam, is clothes enough for my nakedness. Though my Flight never pass the incoming tide of this inland sea beyond the loud reefs of the final Bahamas, I am satisfied if my hand gave voice to one people's grief. Open the map. More islands there, man, than peas on a tin plate, all different size, one thousand in the Bahamas alone, from mountains to low scrub with coral keys, and from this bowsprit, I bless every town, the blue smell of smoke in hills behind them, and the one small road winding down them like twine to the roofs below; I have only one theme: The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart - the flight to a target whose aim we'll never know, vain search for an island that heals with its harbor and a guiltless horizon, where the almond's shadow doesn't injure the sand. There are so many islands! As many islands as the stars at night like falling fruit around the schooner Flight. But things must fall, and so it always was, on one hand Venus, on the other Mars; fall, and are one, just as this earth is one island in archipelagoes of stars. My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last. I stop talking now. I work, then I read, cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast. I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars. Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam as the deck turn white and the moon open a cloud like a door, and the light over me is a road in white moonlight taking me home. Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.

 

Love After Love by Derek Walcott​ The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.