LIGH

TH

OU

SES

LIGHTHOUSES

POEMS by CECIL GRAY

LILIBEL PUBLICATIONS

Previous books of poems by Cecil Gray

The Woolgatherer (1994)Lilian’s Songs (1996)Leaving the Dark (1998)Plumed Palms (2000)Careenage (2003)Only the Waves (2005)Possession (2009)

Book design by Vaughn Dragland

Cover photograph by Cecil Gray

ISBN 978-0-9681745-6-2

CE

CIL G

RA

Y

NEW & SELECTED POEMS by CECIL GRAY

LILIBEL PUBLICATIONS

LIGHTHOUSES

For my children and grandchildren

and for Irene

First published in Canada 2011

Lilibel PublicationsSuite F3, 296 Mill RoadToronto, Ontario

© Cecil Gray 2011

All rights reserved.No part of this publicationmay be reproduced or transmittedin any form without permission.

ISBN 978-0-9681745-6-2

i

2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Along the Wall4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summer’s Lake5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Puddles6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To This Ease7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Friday Afternoons8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . When Young9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Names

10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Forgiveness11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . July and August12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Old Shoe13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . First and Last Things14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Settled15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Celebration16 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stocking17 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . White Picket Fence18 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Medallions20 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Road21 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rocks22 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Milkman23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . She Would Peer24 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Words25 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Now26 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Stone27 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . La Cour Harpe28 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mark29 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Landing30 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lighthouses

Contents: NEW POEMS

ii

from The Woolgatherer (1994)37 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Only at Osric38 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shoing39 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Caribbean Basin40 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miss Maingot41 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Misses Norman42 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Visit43 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jamaica Journal 196944 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Funeral Service46 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sonny Ramadhim47 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Small Request

from Lilian’s Songs (1996)51 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sundays52 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tenor Pannist 53 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Memorial Park54 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Room55 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matinee56 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schoolmaster58 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Death of a Poet60 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beaten Down61 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen62 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Your Island, Your World64 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Supplicant

from Leaving the Dark (1998)67 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Characters68 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Last Time70 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stories71 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Celluloid72 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shelling Peas74 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leaving the Dark76 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On the Road 78 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marathon Runner

Contents: SELECTED POEMS

iii

from Plumed Palms (2000)81 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Threading the Needle82 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fire84 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Current86 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pushing the Plane87 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Visiting 88 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Let Us Sit Here90 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plumed Palms91 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rug Seller

from Careenage (2003)95 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eureka on Yonge Street96 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Flying Out98 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beyond Reach99 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winter Passes

100 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tea in the Desert 102 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Forts103 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . His World Then104 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plucking Plums106 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tell me, Mama

from Only the Waves (2005)109 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chair110 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oldies111 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Address Book112 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Too Late113 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Last Wish114 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning115 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dolphin116 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Only the Waves117 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gum Arabic118 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And Then

Contents: SELECTED POEMS

iv

from Possession (2009)121 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Echoes122 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Apprentice123 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Messages124 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bugles and Drums125 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . At Play126 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Old Men127 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Childhood128 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meaning129 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . January130 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chicken on Sunday131 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . At the Sea’s Edge132 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Possession 133 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Still Life

Contents: SELECTED POEMS

NEW POEMS

2

ALONG THE WALL

There was a wall that ran along the edgeof the road and above a bowl of space you could fall through if you stood on the ledgeover the drop to the limekiln, a place

whose name meant perilous mystery then.From there the road went up and down the hillin a slow slant, a quiet grey road whenits sunwashed untrodden asphalt lay still

in the day’s deserted hours. You could sometimes follow butterflies as they flappeddown lanes just out of your own neighbourhood,braving strangenesses of a world unmapped.

It is that sunlit emptiness and peacewhen you walked from school and when everyonewas at work that reappears without ceasein videos memory repeats. It shone

like a child’s unvanquished joyousness. Soyou should not complain about occasionsthat bring back the dread you had come to knowon nights you sat alone. Her devotions

took her away and the dim road was throngedwith phantoms, spirits, aliens. You peeredout with wet eyes, blinking away the prongedjabs from the streetlight and the shapes you feared.

But next day the long grey wall made the road safe again, guarding you from jeopardies.Then like a pardoned prisoner you strodepast the shaded continents of the trees.

So it was little to suffer to lether feed her hope. That was the way she knewto keep alive in the choking netof need. She thought angels would bless her pew.

3

But from the bright and bubbly air you wonyour own relief. It was as if the lightchased the ghosts and all the shadows were gone, leaving you to bustle like a bounding kite.

All along the wall a lithe innocentwent bouncing onward, keeping out of mind what the stricken language of her face meant,what your eyes translated, less and less blind.

4

SUMMER’S LAKE

It’s the lake that summer gives us,the lake that becomes the focusof the days’ delights. It takes the hueof the sky, a seasonal blue,and from my balcony a strandof it, miles away, skirts the landthat rims it. Then when I go downwith the celebratory townto its sunbright shores revelry tinkles the air. Along the quaythe folding wrinkles jump and dance,small sailing boats seize their chance, white-winged like angels, to skate roundthe azure rink stippled and throngedwith them, each with its own orbit,a foaming glittering circuit.Above, a cloud-puffs regattainches south in a wide scattersailing slowly on their oceanas if anchored yet in motionwhile here ferries shuttle their wayweaving braided wakes all the dayback and forth to Centre Island.Hopes that had gone dormant expandlike the laughter on the boardwalk,the loud, playful, jubilant talk.And the gulls caw insistentlyand swoop and flap up, rising free.You can’t help feeling festive now,wanting to leap like a boat’s prowfor the light, the sun, but the lakeis what takes away the clawed achegrey days had brought, its stars like wicks of flame, its quick flashes and flicks.Yet, deep in its depths buried bonesof losses ossify to stonesmemory spurns, unwanted remainsof baneful days, discarded painsthrown and sunk where we can forgetthe blinding blizzards of regretwatching ripples that roll and glint, summer striking its catching flint.

5

PUDDLES

Sometimes after rain when the azure ceiling returnedand the sun shone on the smooth puddles of muddywater, they could see the blue sky and the cloudsas in a mirror, promising a change of season.They, who were not used to jewelled paths, could imaginereaching down and lifting out gemstonesthat spangled if the wind ruffled the surface,gathering the gleam and sparkle like the dreamthey secretly carried of another place, unnamed,unlocated, that they would have one day astheir new home, away from tenantries that bulgedand splintered. Meantime, in puddles often wideas ponds, glassy with rainbow hues, sometimes theydiscovered, just a step away, a worldof bright reflections glistening like their wishes.They saw what they wanted to see : the lustreburnishing the dirty brown residue of rain,and the seeming deep flecks like stars promisingidyllic settings and storied adventures.But even as they fancied emancipation’s dawnthey saw the puddles drying up, turning back to mud.

6

TO THIS EASE

Leaning back here on a white-ribbed plastic beach chairyou follow some hotel guests going to and fro,plodding a slow way through the sand under the clearday’s sky, and you wonder to what dice throw you owe

your presence here with them. You could have been that gaunttattered man with the two slices of aloes heis trying to sell, tormented by hunger’s taunt,rehashing the virtues of the plant as the sea

parrots its argument with the shore. You muse onfortune’s choices. You who had designated dreamsdecoys of disappointment repeatedly wonthe timely touches of encouraging sunbeams.

They all come back, accidents that seem to explainyour beach chair, the hotel, the large gin and tonicwhile you keep step with the man trudging on in vain.You have known his humiliation. But the trick

that time sometimes performs on memory, effacingorigins, has left you intact. Like those breakersout there, white-haired too, that continue retracingtheir furrows, you remember need’s marshy acres

sucking you down, the slim track towards firmer groundthat kind fingers showed, the long slow crawl out of muckuntil a light brought a bright morning and you foundthat as sunshine lit you a road nuggets of luck

gleamed in your way. Now you gaze about wonderingwhat can be said of your escape. A child smashesa sandcastle and a young man pounds thunderinginto the surf. The sea yields sparkling splashes

but brings no elation for sellers of aloes.The coconut palms and the casuarina treesseem quizzical in their waving when a gust blowsand finds you here lolling as if born to this ease.

7

FRIDAY AFTERNOONS

On Friday afternoons at two o’clock our class had handicraft, the namefor clearing strands of fibre free of knotsand feeding three-inch lengths on to a framewhere a screwed weight could press them downto join and make the body of a mat.We never saw a whole and finished one,as I remember, perhaps the rest was doneon other days or by hands working elsewhere.Someone somewhere had thought we needed craftsto make us fit for the world and that was whatwe got, a mat-making frame and coconut fibres.There must have been a theory going aroundabout the hands, even about the soul.It reached us there on Friday afternoons.

So that last hour of the week was spent using our fingers tearing out the clotssitting on steps outside of the classroomand we waited five days for it, for the freedomit gave, the laughter, the playful talk.So for us it was quite a happy hourthough we misread the plan prescribing it.

Some of them reappear, the boys I sat withpulling at balled up thickened strands,learning the alphabet of a craft earmarkedas ours. Here they pass again as a distantroll call repeats their names. None had becomemat-weavers. At that we all had failed.The theory disappeared as false claims doand the lessons for menials were booted away leaving only a lifelong memory of faces squealing and giggling , tugging at tangles.

8

WHEN YOUNG

Now that your face is drooping to your chestand young men rush to help you lift up things,now that the vexing aches of age persistin jeering at you and your pace falters,do you still dream, do you still carry hope?Now random threats of pain come like a gunaimed at your head, that snide taunting beforethe trigger’s blow, do you still entertainthe vision of a world without its claws?There was a time you thought that if you raiseda flaming candle up its flare of light would bring ardent followers. But those bagsunder your eyes seem laden with lament.For everything goes on unstopped. Each spinof the earth turns on the same axis. Fixed poles of nature cannot be snapped. How crassyou must have seemed on your soapbox, how greenin knowingness you must have sounded. It wasyouth that had stoked such hope. In your last yearswhen sleep steals bites of your day it is timefor true reckoning. Should you rememberdays you ran a mile uphill without pauseor mourn disenchantment’s taper snuffingout the conceit that fuelled your fervour?Does memory that displaces friends’ names nowimpeach you with vows that you made when young,marking you down as a failure? You were never a god. The world would remain asyou met it. Doze away and be content.

9

NAMES

Guayaguayare, Chacachacare, Couva,Tabaquite are names the Caribs left uswhen the swords silenced them; like Arima,Tunapuna and Chaguaramas. Now few who walk there in the same pure sunlightknow of their naïve predecessors whofirst trod that ground, who gave their trust to menthat came like gods looking for gold, untiltheir own blood soaked the soil at Arouca,Caroni and Carapichaima, where only names now recall that genocide,as if it did not matter, as if wedo not need to remember that slaughter,not care about herded captives wiped out,but drive through Chaguanas seeing nothing.

Once when I walked the beach at Mayarothere was a celebration where, they said,Columbus landed. Were they rejoicing,I asked myself, for the annihilationthat sailed in? To be lifelike some dressedin costumes like those hunting invaders,helmets, feathers, hosiery, breastplates, swords,and enacted their joy coming ashore,as if to mock the exterminatedCaribs. Yet names remain like fixed titlesto the land. And the sun that dried the bloodstill burns a light where the blades were wielded.Celebrants glorifying plunderersthought the natives savages. Books they’d readpraised the murderers, debased the victims.

10

FORGIVENESS

Then there was Aunt Mamie, my grandmother’stwin sister but quite unlike my loved one,bitter, biting the world’s careless elanin her clamped mouth. Remembering bothersme still. She had only disapprovalfor anything I did though I was not yet ten; my mere presence was sinful,sitting straight as a ramrod in one spotwith her doilies and antimaccassars,her porcelain figurines of alienpeople. I was distressed by her censuresbut never knew how I earned them. Brokenpieces of gladness fell from my spiritto her floor, disgrace obscured the wicks of the lamps until I made my exit.I see her now and hear her againspewing sprays of guilt on my innocenceleaving an uncalled-for unincurred stain.I do not recall her burial, what sticksin the mind somewhere is relief, the senseof escape. I was spared more reproval.I wish that I could send her forgiveness,could say I believe her disparagementand corrosive strictures were all well-meant.One day perhaps I will pardon that sin.It’s too soon now. Scars she left are still there.

11

JULY AND AUGUST

Any homeward road served as a sports field,pounded, trampled on and shaken with shouts

far from the schoolyard and eyes of adultswith naggings of caution and restraint. We

ran free, ducking and dodging, defyingthe finger of time as the sun sank down.

We romped on the street, heedless and happy,racing round lamp-posts, till rivers of rain

that filled the roads in July and Augustthwarted us. Then in the moving downflow

we found a diversion that kept us still.It was the rushing brown flood in its game

of twists and turns. It would roll and tumbleover in pleats and plaits, liquid strands

with grooves and creases twirling between themand little mounds rising and flattening,

their quick peaks with tiny flickers like sparksskipping along on the bobbing surface

as it flowed. We gazed at merging wrinklestill the surge slapped and swished down a manhole,

and saw how the current coiled as it plungedon and on grumbling and echoing

into the hidden caverns underground.The interlacing curlicues vanished

like smoke that spires then goes out of sight.We had watched it all, held under a spell

that lasted till we turned and headed for home,having no words for rain’s profferred amends.

12

OLD SHOE

Old shoe, you have been good to meover the years, gone with me farand near, bearing the wear and tearso well it hardly showed. One scarhas left the furrow made when westumbled on stones placed in the way.But you had days of brilliance,days when you shone as if to darea mirror’s envy. Now you staymeekly aside on the off chanceyou’ll go forth again, tread againon far-flung roads, skirting puddles,faithful in sunshine and in rain.Your successors cast you a glancelike thrown alms, a glance of pityand impatience for taking upspace like a toad. It’s so easyto forget. Yet you wear that sheenthat tells of service rendered once,of what repolished scuff marks mean.

13

FIRST AND LAST THINGS

A shore of greyish mud there borderingthe harbour, fishermen’s boats drawn upand tilted over, the briny smell of the seaand the air that went with you up the road,the glassy mud streaked with black arcsof the ships’ oily bilge, floating blobs drifting on,frail scuttling crabs, amazingly these have remainedwhen so much has gone from memory,when time has replaced what the shore shelvedwith today’s buildings. Beginnings leave their mark.It was all a child of three had as his worldbut it bore a name contempt fitted on it because of reeking buzzards at rotting fish.Entrapped on that edge of town anyone bornthere heard strangers snort with mockery and scorn.So shame made the mind draw a curtain round itas if to deny small footprints left in that mud.

Now time looks back to catch the start of thingsmended nets of fishermen rise up like laundry hungon a drying line hoisted by bamboo polesand little pale crabs scurry to hide in their holes.Now the heart is astonished by frissons of gladnessand thanks when reveries lead it back to that place.Now it knows it was love that mattered, not the town’scrude approval, nor the corbeaux and the offal,the love that still surges for nurturers and that shore.

14

SETTLED

This composite city, so earnest in its diversityit loses its imperial epaulettes and teemswith faces like those that gave you birth, is hometo you now with your smuggled magnum of memoriesjammed away in your backpack, zipped up securelyto make sure its contents stay sealed or the fizzing foamof breakers will cease their sibilance in your mind.It’s a safe precaution. For it still puzzles you,whose pulsebeats keep true time to tempos left behind,that you’ve settled for exile, settled for the whiteteeth of winter, and the loss of all that had linedthe womb that bore you, the absentee you became.And yet, you have no complaints. A festive repastis here before you, like the champagnes friendships serve,and recipes love invents for each day’s menu,and the arts that bring you their kind of nourishment.So delight displaces lament. Till doubt’s dark floodswamps assurance. For that is the nature of exile,that mistrust of certitude. While the city’s lakebelly-dances like liquid glass just for your sakebottled memories are sometimes bumped on and the shakestirs silent losses. There’s always that, isn’t there?What we move with cannot be swaddled in flight’s falseshroud. Whatever seas we cross, whatever armsreceive us, the heart races and thumps wheneverreveries make us grieve for the lands that made us.Is that why in fantasies you walk there again while it’s this city’s regalement you revel in?

15

CELEBRATION

This is Girne, where the Mediterraneanlathers the shore of Cyprus. It is evening,the frisky winds have died down, and a muezzinhas already chanted for the usual prayer. Through half-dark crooked stony lanes between stonehouses we have dawdled down to the harbour.To the east, blurred by the widow’s veil of dusk,the walled fort has lost its outline on the skybut everywhere now bright lights like meteorshang in loops along the chain of open airrestaurants that we head for. We spill chucklesat the touts’ spiels promising the greatest mealsbut we scan the menus on the half-lit boardsand finally choose a table. There we basknot only in the music around, the songsa Turkish singer renders, happy chatterfrom bevies of friends, the night’s Moorish beauty,but more the celebration we silently splurge in year after year, the exultationof just being together, when this heartknows itself to be one of fortune’s chosenand the head for its wine quaffs flagons of joy.Midnight signals in the distance. We beginthe gentle climb back, arms intertwined, weavingthrough a dim cobbled lane up to the hotel.Whatever extra time the stars still allowthat is all the happiness I ask for now.

16

STOCKING

I remember clearly the year I gota Christmas stocking, its all-red nettingstuffed with a rolled colouring book, crayons,a flimsy flute, marbles, a pencil box,a cracker with a jester’s tissue hat that popped out when you burst it, as well asa small repeating pistol firing caps.

Out of nowhere, there it hung like a giftfrom heaven, yuletide’s wondrous miracle.But I knew heaven had no hand in it.Some price that love demanded had been paidout of pain’s account for that happiness.Out of nothing, like clever magicianswho’d learned to live like seasoned hostages,my two loved ones found me joy for Christmas.

The stocking’s pleasures lasted for a while,guarded and cherished. I coloured drawings,tooted on the flute, pitched endless marbles.Playing the jester was just one day’s fun.I can’t tell whom I stood against the wallbut with my gun I shot and shot and shot.

17

WHITE PICKET FENCE

For my children

They got rid of the train tracks and pavedover the bed where the sleepers were laid.But fastened in memory is the little roadand the three small houses facing the railwayline. I will always see in my headthe one with the low white picket fence,its crest low enough to be stepped over,with pointed vees like flat wooden turretsof wooden battlements which assiduouslabour planted to enclose our castleand the square front of grass where small feetpattered. I still hear laughter at duskup and down the sealed one-sided street,the sounds of pursuit and falls, the squeals.Briefly a pair of feet wore ironclamps and the heart wept to see them. Buttime’s repairman did a speedy jobso the house leaned back on its pillarsand listened to the tinkle of giggles,the tingle of keyboard notes, the yawnof the empty road at night, its peace.That was when the brown rocking chair’s markson the porch were deepened, when old stories and legends should have been told. But the present spun its own live talesshowing how delight filled the hours,how contentment felt watching fresh flowersblooming, and love holding their facesin the heart’s glad hands. Down that dead endlife’s joys came to the door and stayed.Then the years in their race made a changeleading us far away from that place.Now that low white picket fence glimmersalong a sequestered road in the mind,a never-fading glow of thanksgivingwhere unmixed happiness was first defined.

18

MEDALLIONS

Tonight, as restless thoughts keep sleep delayedand the day’s argument with the world fades,the moon is white and round over the lake,its arc set to span the country. The airis cold and clear. Midnight has gone, the bladesof my clock’s face move in a new hemisphere,and as the gaze turns south lights still awakeon the far shore twinkle, and the new snowglitters like stars on the roofs. Unheard here,beaded ripples rise and run with a clear swish over stones, there since glaciers madetheir way through. Some high buildings, half shadow,gaunt as cenotaphs stencilled on the glowflaring up from the town, blink with guide lights to pilot planes past projections. The trees’ barebranches too are sheened and speckled. Dreams tradein such jewels. And in its sea’s dark blue the moon steers smoothly west, a floodlit spherepast which only wandering thoughts can go.

The town will wear this garment for a while.Suburbs will glaze their roads all through the hushand quiet of the tinselled night using the glossthey borrow from the moon. Even loose slushwill spangle as it melts all down the aislethat it cuts at the kerb. But then the lossof radiance commences. Walls are shornof the pearly satiny sheen. The yawnthat dawn wakes us with opens the eyes ona city in workaday clothes. Romanceslips away with the moon. The drowsy droneof highways deepens. From a far distancewill come the faint wails of an ambulance.The streets will be reminded of the moanto be assuaged every day by hope,by prayers for relief, of how lightning strikes with its doom-bearing bolts, of the ropean addict weaves as a tightening noose.They will see tired men waking, the chainsthey clang, women with price tags on their wrists,pavement dwellers, trigger fingers on guns;the gangs that leave mothers mourning their sons.

19

Yet when the moon no longer fits a gownof gleaming rayon to adorn the townthere’ll still be glints of jewels each street wears: medallions of courage, sweat and tears.

20

THE ROAD

As the road rose beyond Spaldings high villageKingston seemed like some lost distant world now leftfar behind, for suddenly time’s one-way bridge

crossed me over to the place to be called homefor a month. I felt wrenched, uprooted, bereftof my comrades, of the privilege to roam

the town with its heat, its noise, its dust. The weightmy heart carried kept my tongue silent, and dreaddrove with me uphill to the arch of the gate

where the smell of old buildings housing classrooms,quarters and kitchen, stripped every illusionI had of escape, making them seem like tombs. Then out of them came faces I still see. Underthe infinite stars the clear night air sharpened its icepicks all that month. The cold rotunda

of night kept us all shut in, drawing us near,huddled in one flat or another, sharing laughter, playing card games, drinking someone’s beer.

That warmth was the coat that wrapped me from then on.I was a mere stranger but felt the embracethose who were sons of the country were given.

Then it flared in me, that flowering of carefor those shores, those mountains, those laden valleys,and I followed the tree-fringed winding roads where

they opened the land like a gate to the bays,to villages, and up the mist-mantled heights,doing what gave purpose and worth to my days.

Now that the book is closed, entries accountedfor, only the heart knows what gave it vigour,what it learned up that rising road I mounted.

21

ROCKS

On a cliff of an island some time agoI remember I watched the rolling white crestscoming from the east, feathered platoons in hasteto smash themselves on waiting obdurate rocks. High bursts of spray rose up as waves dashed againstpatient ramparts and fell back flattened.But they roared and charged yet again with angryflouncing mutterings at the foot of the drop.The battles went on, their outcome determined.As it was with my friend, a poet, who foughtdemons he courted and failed, gone from the frayto a new laid grave. I looked along the coastwith its swansdown stole contemplating that loss,thinking of faith we had put in his promise.Small inlets scalloped the land letting spent flowsseethe on fringes of gravel and sand. Quilts offretted froth bubbled and disappeared, like wordsof unwritten poems dissolved in the dramsfor numbing pain. I could see most of that sideof the island to the Atlantic, though hazeshawled the north. In the restive sea tides withdrawand return. But the pen he found in his handdripping with compassion would not write again.Lagging waves laid their wreaths on the sand, flowersthe foam crocheted wilting to nothing, too lateto matter, like the rope we should have thrownwhen loneliness stranded him in its ocean,when we saw him there floundering, anchorless.

22

MILKMAN

Just after dawn each morning you could hearthe throbbing of his jitney at the gate,then the faint clunk of the milk can plonked downoutside the kitchen. He was seldom late.Still new to his country I found it strangein city neighbourhoods. I wondered wherethe cows he kept were grazed, how far from townhe came to bring measures of his labours.He made ends meet, he said to me one day,enough to see his children go to school.He had his health, his hands, his customers.There in his certain face I saw the waythose they called peasants gave the land its will.For some time sounds of his arrivalstarted day’s stirrings, shunted reminders of ordered toil. Unwarned of betrayalhe kept company with the sunrise tillthe days came when the shops began stockingmilk in cartons from abroad. Mornings wentchinkless, and somewhere his cows were sold.We missed the thuds and thumps, the soft knockingcommotion, all the shuffles now absent, dully waiting to hear one subdued soundagain, doing that until we were toldhe was seen begging for odd jobs around. I think he never understood what forcehad burst into his world, what its entry meant,the ruthless change that left him no recourse,although he went on groping for a hold.

23

SHE WOULD PEER

She would peer close at the needle’s punchingstabs through the fabric and watch the stitchesfollow in procession, guiding the clothsmoothly on. Carefully her brown hand urgedthe piece forward, a parent assertingthe right road. She called me her bright starand taught me rules that mattered in the world,prejudices, superstitions and all.She was the fixed sun I orbited around.On that night when I mumbled an answer,engrossed in my homework, the universe seemed the same. Yet, while I twisted through sums,she was being snatched by her angels.Disbelief took charge of my stunned heart then,she had just spoken to me, called my name.Secretly I hoped it was a game, butdespite my begging truth did not spare me.So while my mother and neighbours busiedthemselves I lay beside her on the bedand dreamed of bobbins and shuttles and thread.I walked behind that hearse without a tear,saw her go down a dark and final holebut felt her with me still, alive and near.For she would, I knew, never forsake meeven for the heaven she believed in.And through the hard and easy years her wordskept me on track, her needle jabbing onsetting the course for the life that followed.

24

WORDS

Turn your head to the eyesthat stare without seeing, and watchfor legs where the sheet falls flaton that bed; observe the bandageover a jaw where a whole face was,or push that wheelchair the armlessfigure in it is beholden for; see how one jerks and jabbersin the tremors of helplessness,then follow the nurse as she lifts a body dead from the braced neck down,and pass as you go the flags still flapping.

You who send young men to killthose who keep their lands’ richesor do not follow your waysmock them now with your words.

25

NOW

For Irene

If there were an afterlife I would waitin my new form of ashes till you cameso do not hurry, you will not be late,and we will gild the hours just the same

as we do now. If we could live againI would not change one day we spent beforein sunfilled laughing weather or in rain,years of fortune’s largesse brought to my door.

But this is all there is, this mere flickerwe call life. Though we hear a myth retoldwith ritual strategies and emblems

we have only now in breath’s exchequerand we must turn it into beaten goldand make a ring for setting precious gems.

26

BLACK STONE

I saw a black stone lying in the bedof a stream where the water slid over

it quietly like a page one has read.It was fixed in the flow that flashed silver

as it raced in the light. It was a stonethat was rare in its lustre so the rest

that gleamed as well seemed dull. It had its own natural glitter proven ore possessed.

And I thought of Bertie Barnet, the boywho outshone us all, how his brilliance

made us seem slow dunces, his trusting joyin the currency of intelligence.

We thought he lit his future like a sun.But the silk of his black skin could not shine

outside the classroom nor beyond his one-roomed home. He came on a posted sign

and rails that shut him out. Only memorystill recounts why that future was denied,

the sheer expectedness of his story,one that time’s rolling stream has tried to hide.

But there in the stream’s bed was a black stonethe force had rejected, sealing its fate

in clogged silt. Now that speeches to atonefill the air it is too late, much too late.

27

LA COUR HARPE

I passed it every day on my way to school,the place I heard decent people shunned.As Quarry Street met Observatorythere was a narrow lane that left the road where, dire warnings said, bad people lived.Its very name was used as ridicule.My eyes were always drawn to glimpse what suchruffians looked like, how they differed fromthe rest of us. But I saw nothing strange.The alley was as clogged as other holesabout the town, and seemed dim deep inside.Yet I would feel the onset of disdainand I passed at a good pace as if handswaited to harm me. In my head the namemeant danger. It was known its tenantscould not be trusted. So day after dayI felt embarrassed that that place was there,wanted the lane removed and all its shame,learned more and more to think of it with scorn.Many years later I then understood,when it was rescued and the name was changed,it was poverty that had stained its face,how I had learned myself to daub and smear,to wear a sneer and feel superior. Poor as we were we too besmirched the poor.

28

MARK

Inside the caged area, under a light,I would see him poring over a ledgeror something, while, sprawling on the long tablesof the library’s reading room half asleep mendribbled on newspapers with news of England.I heard another desk clerk once call him Mark.

One night, as I re-read a Daily Mirror,he told me, though twelve, I should borrow a book,read it each night and go on to another.He brought Bulldog Drummond, King Solomon’s Mines, then twenty volumes of The Book of Knowledge,Arthur Mee’s encyclopaedia for children.

That’s how it started, that’s how I was rescued.I found lodes of free ore I knew nothing ofto drill. So I was made richer and richer.As I delved into seams I stored up powerto question the world. And my pan was shiningwith nuggets probing minds had given the world.

As I grew I wanted to stand before Markand acknowledge with meekness what he had done.I canvassed the whole town but never found him,though I heard once of a breakdown. It still stunshow that mindful act has made all the difference.Frequently I wince to think he never knew.

29

LANDING

The town’s millions of lights twinkle belowthe circling of the plane. We strain to followthe streets of home through a seesawing window

that teases as it banks from the missed placeswe’ll soon be entering again, the faceswe’ll soon fix as usual in the spaces

absence kept vacant. We look down, marking howthe lines of headlights run beyond the plane’s prow,pouncing on every landmark craned necks allow.

The city is richly dressed, showing off allits jewels, its necklaces of gems that sprawland glitter, each glint a guiding homing call.

The plane aligns itself now with the runwayand an inner voice secretly breathes hooray,the circling is over. The wings cease to sway

and we flatten out nearer to trodden ground,zooming over buildings like towers but boundfor cosier rooms, for nooks the heart had longed

to fill once more. We glide on the tarmac,down without a bump, and tension’s strings go slack.When seat belt lights go out, all set for the track

we leave our starting blocks and reach up forcabin luggage, fidgeting until the doorfrees the flow of excitement held back in store.

The long corridor shows nothing to explainthe weight of our footsteps leaving the plane,the urge to turn right back and take off again.

30

LIGHTHOUSES

At one time in Trinidad few could rowbeyond the shallows where deep troughs waited.Without the flame of a lifted flambeauyour day for drowning was stamped and dated.

I climbed Toco’s lighthouse when I was eightand watched it warn fishermen of the shorejust as wrinkled Miss Maingot, tall and straight,lit me a way to flee the breakers’ roar.

That route has brought me far away from there,dipping and veering on an ocean’s face,from time to time skirting disaster’s lairto thrive in the harbourage of this place.

Here at Port Credit, at a river’s mouthfeeding Toronto’s lake, as sunset wanesand the small lighthouse blinks, my thoughts turn southfor a while, rousing old throbs in my veins.

In my heart there’s still Jamaica’s harbourand the old lighthouse at Palisadoesthe years when I chopped away in the warbetween rooted serfdom and weeding hoes.

And I see one yet at Atlantic Shoresin Barbados. We walked there, John and I,from his house nearby. There dejection’s clawsclutched him and no one heard his goodbye cry.

Now I watch white boats in this marinalined up in their berths like horses, their prowsall set to sprint out, and up the riverwatch smaller ones cut furrows with their bows.

But the inlet’s silvered crinkles compelcomplete attention. Laminating lightchromes the river. I hear a chapel’s bellending the day. The closing doors of night

31

are dimming the geese feudally weavingwide wakes like gondolas. The lighthouse streaksthe ripples with quick beams. No deceivingreefs lurk here. The mouth of this river speaks

of my ease of mind, not of jutting shores.Through blurring dusk promenaders still strollalong the jetty. Gulls screech without pause,swooping like bombardiers on patrol.

And yet memory repeats the closed chapterswhen I was borne towards rocks by the forcethat made all of us its helpless captors,when the rays of a lantern set my course.

With the last fading vestiges of lighta gleam is left in the air. The channelshines full of needles like minnows in flight.The small Port Credit lighthouse sentries all

as shadows grow more possessive now. The skyturns indigo and stillness settles in. And in me now tides of rapture rise highwith happy notions of more joys to win.

Yet I’m here because a pointing lamp blazeddrawing my hull from the breakers’ onslaught,in its glare sea lanes to sandbanks erased.A beacon named Prince led me to this port.

The years that blew me with their winds to thisare placid now though once my sails were filledwith pressing urgencies, lighthouse business,my own passage no longer imperilled.

I peer through my evening for the silence anchoring at midnight, my eyes jewelledwith thanks for treasuries of remembrance.Soon all such reminiscing will be stilled.

SELECTED POEMS

fromThe Woolgatherer

37

ONLY AN OSRIC

I am only an Osriccome to serve at a duel.I ply my handkerchief with courtly styleand call a hit, a very palpable hit,as if my function had some greater size.Perhaps I overdo it like a fop,mincing with secrets quivering in my feathers.

Called to the ringside, my presence tolerated,tragedy spews stray specks of spittle on me.Yet to be an extra in that scenefulfils some destiny a cruel handhad penned for minor functionaries,foolish but necessary. Later, before the tumultuous applause cracks and diesalready I’m forgotten down the aisles.

But I will play it again. Strut again to be in company of such noble men,suffer the wrath of leading membersof the cast for hogging for a minutecentre-stage. The wine giddied my head.We play our parts, we Osrics of the world,whenever patronage demands. We magnifythe sweep of bonnet, the elegance of bow,to serve as footmen follies of the time.

38

SHOEING

Some Saturdays I went to visit my godfather,the blacksmith. His place wedged the corner

of Maraval and Tragarete. As I rememberit was just a big tent, wide, lowspread.

Through a flap I would enter out of the sunand feel like a swimmer deep at the bottom

of thin, blackish darkness like smoke. Thingswere thick shadows with fuzzy, blurred edges,

except for a vision of Hell in the centrewhere coals in a circle burned salmon-red

in a trough-like box the nose of the bellowswent in. Later, out of the air, they cleared.

My godfather was the colour of brass and laughedlike a god. He always seemed glad I was there

and asked me to pull on the bellows for a shoeto be heated, pounded and shaped for a fitting.

In the fire the metal changed from dark bronzeto bright orange. Tongs held it safe on the anvil

where pieces of sparks jumped off as the hammerinsisted on its hard discipline, then plunged it

in water past all of its hissing. Crouched overGodfather lifted the leg of the horse through his own

so his knees made a vice as he drove home the nailswithout missing. The horse stayed quiet and trusting.

It was the straight hit made by my godfather’s armthe lame horses of buggies and carts counted on.

In the late sun I heard Godfather’s deep laughteras I walked the long road going home. In my pocket

was a dollar or so to get whatever I wanted.But richer than that was a gift no one counted.

39

CARIBBEAN BASIN

Islands described as emerald border this sea where once before piracy was law.This basin that the present predators slit with their fins like periscopes once sawswift rape of gaping children just as greenwith innocence. Their awe they gave as welcome,but when the reek of blood brought cognisanceof guns to make them glutton’s prey their stavesand darts in answer fought the wind like straw.

Yet innocence persists like upturned keelsof boats that will not sink: hearts no less ripefor pickings and invasions open upto messages of iron on the waves;tides bear the doctrine of the sharpened clawin fresh assaults upon benevolence,and television’s magic dupes them with its reelsof El Dorado marked with stars and stripes.

It is the age-old decoy for the poor:the ship of bounty sailing in to shore.Meanwhile they learn to emulate the sharkcruising with avarice at their open doorand turn away from socialistic crap.You can’t eat ideology, the statesman saidand with one swipe wiped Christ off our map.

40

MISS MAINGOT

I put my eye upon this pageand up you come. Dear Miss Maingot,you stand first when thoughts engagein sifting gifts caught in the glowof fading day. The words that nowilluminate a world did so sinceyou taught us sounds with arching browand your lantern lit their sense.

You were so thin, you seemed to walkon stilts. In our eyes, old. Yet undera younger one we feared, who stalkedaround. But that made us fonderof the pleats that fluted your face.From then, fixed lighthouse, your codeflashed signals making the way brighter.It flared the first steps of my road.

Miss, may I speak for those childrenwho fed on your love but forgot a year later? I was sevenyet have hoarded the times ‘old fusspot’hovered and made the earth openits leaves. Oversights cannot blot,keeping their praise unspoken,these paragraphs you still sweeten.

When in your heaven hosannasare heard, listen well for this tokenimperfectly singing thanks from my pen.

41

THE MISSES NORMAN

The Misses Norman lived on Marine Squarejust as you turn from Broadway at the cornerwhere now a granite bank shines like new coins;two short white spinsters that I rememberlike Lord’s Prayers on a rosary that joinsa knotted childhood to their acts of care.

To my young mind it seemed a threatening place.You pierced the wooden gate through its small doorand stepped into a dimness armed with plants,cringed up the half-gloom to the upper floorand called good morning, nervous in your pants.But there you spoke with goodness face to face.

With thanks now rising in me like a lakean image flashes fresh as yesterday:a slippered sister in Edwardian dressshuffling to hear each stanza of distress,bribing the waiting teeth of reefs away.It is a bonding that time cannot break.

The lifeguards of this heaving world are rare,the sinking swimmers thick as August rain.But one whose feet touched safety when that pairof spinsters anchored themselves to painthat was not theirs attempts a line of praisein words like them, as faithful and as plain.

42

THE VISIT

He sought the Faculty door and went in,saw some old faces that he knew and glancedto draw attention. Eyes failed to registerhis presence. No one remembered him.

When in the course of business he had chancedthis way he had expected they would celebratewith ripened laughter and rich anecdotedays when they tried their best to minister

to his mind. I thought I saw him use the binmarked for the litter of illusion, his coatdrawn closer. Then walk as if a blisterburned his heel. And dwindle through the gate.

43

JAMAICA JOURNAL 1969

He stands outside the fencing looking in.

Inside, sunbathers relishing their flesh –some white, some black, and some of other skins –diving and swimming feign not to notice him,fingers of doubt spread wide, gripping holes of mesh.

Some people on the grass are picknicking.

His pants are torn; he does not have a shirt;his face, a mask of sun-flaked grease and dirt,too young to understand his day’s events,dreams mountain-slide of magic dollars and centsto cancel knowledge of the stomach’s pain;eyes learning what will later reach his brain.

In time they’ll be afraid to hear his curseat god’s unholy sunday-school arrangement,put him inside a wire mesh, or worse,and sunbathe in the same sun on his hearse,or perish if his bullet gets them first.

44

FUNERAL SERVICE

The little church was glowingwith mid-morning sun. Lighttook possession of its pointedwindows. But countenancessagged to follow solemn linesenacting sorrow for the dead.The mauve casket was the hub.Tongues of candles splutteredthen burned straight to aimtheir invocations. Friendsspoke with whispering nods like shy adolescents. Gownedclerics ministered the slideof the bright castors carryingthe bier with puffs of incense,threnodies of prayer. Their shrewd words sealed a covenantgiving the dead reward. The promise shone with comfort down the aisle. The rites went on.But I was mourning only for myselfand for a death inside. Demiseof hope needs some other signto ease its burial when the endhas come. There should be ritualsto soften thuds that pound upona coffin closed and lowered when years have had their run.

45

The organ piped a coda shrill and high, a dirgethat activated in my thoughtsa lesson of its own : that somethings do not ripen over timebut burst with instant passionor expire. Nurtured appreciationhas no flame and love that growsfrom tutoring is a dud withoutmuch worth. It was a lessonI had waited for. It cameand brought me burial clothesto wear. The hymn that soothedthrough that long bondinghad pulled the stops to pourinto my ear those words that criedbeside a hidden sepulchre. I turnedand left the church. The bier,the grave, the last delusionplaced within a box.

46

SONNY RAMADHIN

They said you kept a wily secretup your rolled-down sleeve, the Englishmenwho fell before you like a crop of canes.

Three steps and a subtle turn of wristwrought apertures spread-eagling their stumps.They looked behind bewildered, open-mouthed.

Here in these islands we screamed joyous shoutsas every wicket fell. We’d taught our mastershow to play the game. The name of Ramadhin

made pride flush our veins. Then we sent you withyour guile to beat Australia. Our little marveloff to twist the mighty giants by their tails.

At four o’clock one morning, Christmas Day,you had Doug Ring out. We’d won. The umpiresaid no. Oceans away, like you, we wept.

What you sent down for over after overwas not a ball with stitches in red leather.It was an orb investing us with power.

So in our hearts we placed your statue up.How strange that time has caked its bronze with rust,and children playing now trample your dust!

47

A SMALL REQUEST

For Irene

I was roped in a fight to phrase the formsthat drip from stalactites of the heart’s storms

and because like a midwifeat someone’s bedyour hand felt the strifethat burned my forehead

I give you these poemsto keep them safewhere the world cannot treat themlike orphan waifs.

In your hands I entrustfrail nests of words,straw-built and wind-cracked,as brittle as birds’.

We dote fondly on childrenfate makes us bearand adorn them with ribbonsand garlands of care.

Will you be custodianshielding their flawsfrom the sharp eyes of aliensoutside these doors?

When my face is forgottenin death’s deep seaa bubble might wave from my penif you agree.

fromLilian’s Songs

51

SUNDAYS

The thumping sound the poundingof plantains in the wooden mortarmade on Sundays thudded my doorso I opened and saw them at work.

Quiet labour infused an aromainto my sabbath, up from an altaron which pots bubbled the scentsrising now in reminiscence.

Boiling callaloo leaves sent a fragranceon wafts that trailed through the house.Fried plantain and stewed chickenblended with smells of the souse.

I thought of the rites of that mass.The callaloo bush had to be checkedcarefully, ends of leaves deftly plucked,the stems peeled and broken to fingers.

The crab was scalded and cracked. Garlic, onion, a sprig of thyme, a red hot pepperwere added in with the chopped ochroesand, in the ham season, a bit of hamskin.

The morning’s elation chanted its Gloriaup from the bubbling pots. Consecrationsby saintly hands transformed those offertories.No incense ever rose higher in prayer.

In house after house that communionservice was held and it bondedall in the care the women provided.It was that hallowing kept the day sacred.

This Sunday my psalm sings highnotes like bright emeralds in the crownsI would have them wear now. With love’s oil I frystrips of plantain into ambers and browns.

52

TENOR PANNIST

Call him inarticulate and guffawwhen small phrases stick like bones in his throat,if that’s what you need. You flay his pride rawwith the scourge your language wields as you gloatover his chaos of words. He would breakoff if he could, to please you, the padlockthe school squeezed down on his tongue. He would makeclauses so grand even you’d dare not mock.

Now he beats sweet subtle runs with his drum-sticks on the face of his pan. Fluentlyhis wrists weave silvery speeches. They comewith oratory the souls understands. Freeof fetters he masters such eloquence scoffers like you withdraw into silence.

53

MEMORIAL PARK

Like any faithful outpost of the sprawling Empireours too built a bronze replica of British soldiers,bayonet thrust and all, called FOR THE FALLEN likeall the others. A list of island men whose fire

of life was trampled out fills the plaques that gird it.Read the raised letters that denote them but do notask a reason why they cheerfully went to be shot,gassed, bombed and discarded, just left to be gobbets

on foreign ground. We who walk here cannot fathom whythey died for colonisers who called us apes and niggers, or, at best, backward children. Often, heroic volunteersis the description applied; but for them my face stays dry.

They went to be targets for bullets feeling as equalto be riddled for England as sons of their masters.They saluted, gladiators in Rome’s amphitheatremarching to death. Mud shrouded them with its pall.

Those who came back were returned to the stocksas before. Imperial jackboots continued to kickthem around. Only their names were embossed herein full recompense, and springs of the overlords’ clocks

were wound up again to tick off more days for the poorto suffer. So what they battled against and fornow seemed both the same. It took Cipriani and Butlerto begin to dislodge the cleat dug into us like a claw

of the falcon in London. Back here all those valiantserfs treated our leaders as traitors assaultingtheir king. Ready archers tautened their bowstringsto punish such upstarts and make them compliant.

None of these names would have died for this island.To enlist in its army for freedom not one faithless handwould have signed. Their countrymen’s choking despairnever mattered. As we pass don’t ask me to act out one tear.

54

ROOM

Sit here now and let just your eyes swivel aroundthis room. Take some time to visit a gagged and bound

heroine. Let your mind catch the flaked enamelplates and cups with tin cans on the split window sill.

Check the frayed flowered oilcloth on the small tableand the bed’s patchwork counterpane she was able

to make from scraps; the two faded photos of popestacked up in passepartout frames. Note the clenched hopes

in her clutching hand working a chaplet. Now comealong crusted cracks in the worn linoleum;

mark the tilting chair, leg in a splint, varnished brown,placed under her Saviour with his face looking down.

Below a hardware store’s calendar with a sceneof white winter Home Sweet Home is glazed in the clean

glass shade of the kerosene lamp. Through darned cretonnecurtains look past the grey-black coal pot to the stones

in the yard all used for bleaching their clothes. Then turnto the ledge where the prayer book dictates its black stern

call to keep her at futile beseechment. Candlesflick quick amens. Look, as she prays her mouth trembles.

55

MATINEE

Saturday mornings for only a pennyTom Mix and Tom Keen rode the screenof the Empire Theatre on St. Vincent Street.All of us went to the kiddies’ matineeand had fun, not knowing reallywhat a bonus we got for the money.

We were shown what Red Indianswere made of. Randolph Scott andJohn Wayne told us. And when onewas shot near a wagon, tomahawk ready for scalping, we gave glad shoutsof victory. That was a prime lesson.

People like my friend, Lee Chong, beingChinese were all Fu Manchus, treacheroussmokers of opium in dens where nowhite man of honour ventured. EvenWarner Oland, great detective, had eyesnot to be trusted. They were Oriental.

And black people like us were good entertainers and boxers, not fitfor anything more than bowing andscraping and shining shoes. Althoughwe knew better who could call Hollywoodstupid? We laughed our heads off at Sambo.

We learnt who were the vile belly dancers and why; Africans lived in huts as savages waiting to be saved byTarzan, and people like Mexicanswere thieves. We regretted that wecouldn’t all be just white Americans.

For a penny we had all that interactionSaturday mornings. Excitement made usshriek. But nobody warned us to screamwhen the projector focussed its beamon the brain. We were blinded by light outside, blinded for good by the screen.

56

SCHOOLMASTER

(i.m. Prince Edgar Ferdinand)

You could see him, 7.30 every morning,with that brisk pace as he raced down almost pitchingalong, heading for the school to open it up

for the day to be let in, like a man gettinghome where all his joys waited to gratify someyearning and in his eager rushing gait was late.

Hat always level just above his ears, jacketjust buttoned to hug the mild mound of his paunch,he barely swung the slim brown briefcase he carried.

For an hour he would mark exercise books, sortthings, while the tide swelled in the yard. At 8.30begin to fill spaces in minds, diligently,

carefully, shovelling and packing trowels ofverities, the fine powder of cement neededto build pillars of knowledge. Boys of eleven

twitched in their stalls. But for him no crisis of statepressed with more weight. He was there changing the face ofthe earth. All other endeavours were lowly chores.

You would have thought his was only a child’s world withchalk boundaries drawn on blackboards that easels propped up; that he knew little of untamed passions

that addle men’s thoughts; and yet swirls of dreams senttheir scents to unbalance him. Draughts of vertigofrom the tower he stood on kept spinning his head.

He saw himself statesman in a monarchy’s courtreplacing an old aristocracy with lordsof intellect. He pictured Plato pruning his

Guardians as his thick fingers corrected the sums,the spelling, parsing. Visions too large for classroomlessons tantalised him. Within explanations

57

of imports and exports, of The Middle Passage,were seeds to be ripened into independence,food of the spirit. That was the task he rushed to

just after dawn. He believed he was chosen to beslave to the future, his people’s gladiator.But to the island he was only a teacher.

So when he had scratched his last mark on a blackboard,blessed the last head, when all he could do had been done,there was just silence. There were no volleys of guns.

Stars at college reunions hardly remember who taught them at ten or twelve, when a foot soldierwho battered doors down for them called for attention.

58

DEATH OF A POET

A poet has diedbut all the newsmongersare silent about it as if nothing has happened.

All of a sudden a lightwas tapered to nothingand the eyes we see bywill find the world dimmer, but the cry that arisescomes from broadcastersshrilly forecasting the votes in a mock election.

We do not yet know our leaders.We do not know wherethe right words are written to follow.Cannot read. Cannot read.

Still, there were those who assembleddown the aisles from the navesof a gothic cathedralbreathing the scents of his verse,the incense that burns from the page,following his lines like reapers,letting his words tremble down like petalsthrough the grief of their voices,plucking at beds of his flowers.

They are the caretakers,the keepers of souls.

For though in factoriesthat promise regalementthe wheels will not stopgrinding all metaphorsto dust in men’s throats,turning to chaffevery grain of wisdom,there will always be gleanersbringing in from the fieldstheir harvests of words.

59

Let us then sit at these tableswith our backs to newscasters.There are plates for a feastprepared by those alchemistsof language. Until the machinestake over the heart of the worldthere might yet be the timefor the spirit to burgeon.

60

BEATEN DOWN

Write something upbeatshe said tersely in the noteof rejection, a small featI thought I could handleand set out bright candlein hand to comb streetsI was sure I could quotesomething from. The lightpitched hard into cornerssurprising drug runnersand muggers. I was rightin the inner city quarterof town. I hastened onto the wide blazing neonavenues, cafes and beyondto suburbs a lot easierto find themes the happy editorwanted. All the Joneses had gonethere to live. But someonehad shut all the gates and fearbarked when I called. Everywherefaint cries pleaded : removethat graffiti sprayed on our doorsin those noose-like lettersspelling threats about vengefulriots to burn our laws;free us now from the fettersof long-promised reprisals,that changeless script of the poor.

Armed with an evening paperI followed the rush to the train.Famine and wars sprayed thatedition, as stagily as television.Upbeat obsessions lurked somewherebut not in the faces I trailed.

Dismayed, crestfallen,I sent a terse note to the magto say I was sorry I failed.

61

STEPHEN

I think of Stephen with the sticking winceof sutured sorrow that has kept its stingunlessened through the thirty years now sincea tightened grimace stretched beneath the grinthat lied and said he understood my going.‘It’s just three years,’ I said, ‘and if you need ......’

Another scrap, like those his life regaled him with from birth. The cheek he turned had burnedwith slaps, and all his simple dreams had failedto even splutter with some heartening light.I’d seen his anchor slip across the stoneshe wanted it to catch on, tugged in fright.

Five years of school had taught him just to reada tabloid and the bible’s doggy bones.Pennies thrown for his labour mocked his creed.A woman wed him and he spoke of home,but nothing changed. He fought his fight alone.The years I knew him sprouted pricking weeds.

If you extract no comfort from this worldyou sink down like a ship and disappearwithout a ripple. The desperate waitfor miracles is drowned by death. I stareacross that sea where Stephen sank and knowhe waited for a line I did not throw.

62

YOUR ISLAND, YOUR WORLD

(i.m. Sam Selvon)

With that loping stoopyou bore down on me like an eagle (as I imagined one)and asked me to writesomething for the SundayGuardian supplement youput out. Me, who thoughtwriters lived on Parnassus(a mountain I’d heard of ).

But youth is impetuous.I went home and scribbledan implausible story thatyou printed. (I still havethe page I clipped out.)And some nights I walkedthe two blocks betweenour houses and triedto tap inside your wordsthe vein feeding your pulse.

You seemed to a blindfumbler a mystic of sorts,one mad enough to think about leaving the islandto write. OpenmouthedI watched you depart.

Then you took the smalllanguage used by the islandfor picong and calypsoesand stretched its vowelsacross the mouth of the world.Placed us, as raw as uncured rum, with every sweet nuancewe used for survival, in pubsand underground stationsof London. Took Brackleyand Moses out of Rose Hilland gave them a stature

63

Micawber once hadin the classrooms thatcensored the tongueour thoughts found ease in.

Yet at home some giggled,still ashamed. Wonderedhow Englishmen took it,your bold spawning of whatthe schools still frowned at.You were half-disowned.Then, as usual, when foreignapproval tendered your fame,when laughter they heardcame from white far-awaycontinents, it was OKto lay claim to your name.

Rest now. Your pen hasdone all of its work. Tigerlives, Urmilla stoops at astandpipe washing awaythe last traces of raceyou sent her to get rid of.Sir Galahad has touched your shoulder with time’sirrevocable knighthood. I never delivered the talesof the place you expected,save a few. See my wreathlike an O in my sorrow.

But then I knew everysquare mile gave you itsstory, each dust pile its gold.All of it was your island, all of it your world.

64

SUPPLICANT

Narrow shoulders humped like a slinking cat,he would come sniffing for butt endsof favour, but his curtsies tripped him flaton his face. Still he faked he joshed with friends.

His grin was his way of tipping his hatasking to enter; just as a cretin’schangeless smile supplicates; and it was thatservile gesture to please we damned like sin.

So not many saw the scab he carried.When he lurked outside the rim of closed ringsplucking the fringe of their chatter, dread hidunder that foolish simpering smirk. Stings

blistered his ear when his name caused a joke.Yet he pretended to join in the jest,sounding congenial clucks as a cloakfor the bleeding that soaked under his vest.

Unwanted, laughed at, he took every slaplike a child caught touching a forbiddenobject. Yet, baffled, he widened the gapmore each time he minced like a simpleton.

None dropped buckets down the wells of his eyesto see how they filled with stones of loneliness.None knew the kind of weight that stupefiesthe mind it straddles tight like a harness

and tugs its ridden victim to whinnyaround for friendship. The shrew he marriedkept a short rein on his halter. Lonelyhe stayed right through; stooped, clumsy, and wounded.

fromLeaving the Dark

67

CHARACTERS

Five-foot Mile-a-Minute trotted down the pitch walk,his small brown paper bags of salted peanutsfitted like building stones into the baskethooked on his skinny forearm teetering with weight.‘Saw nut!’ he called in Chinese, and ‘Saw nut!’ we answered, sometimes serious. ‘Hey, Miler,’we would taunt, ‘what language yuh talk?’

Mahal changed gears and stopped at junctionsfor the crossing traffic, then revved and shuffled on,right hand on the stick, making engine sounds.Traffic cops would sometimes signal himin turn and laugh. ‘Mahal, the madman, passing,’we would say, and drive our real cars on.We blew horns with our voices and had fun.

Craig stood more than half naked in the Squareand fulminated loudly on the stateof politics and crippling malaise the islandsuffered from as chronic as arthritis. ‘Once,a brilliant man,’ some said. ‘How tragic!’ Craigaddressed a senate in his head with his own logic,getting more sanguine with each mocking cheer.

The town called them characters as ifthat kept them off at a safe distance.Miler, it claimed, grew rich keeping his hoardlayered in a basket. Mahal one day drovethrough the wide cemetery’s gate and stalled.Craig went to harangue the angels’ parliamenton all the social errors of an after-life.

But they still walked the mind’s streets here,and revisionists embellished stories to expiateany caustic catcalls that once tainted the airaround them. The town was almost affectionate.Praise for its heroes always sank like water in sand. Yet Mahal, Miler and Craig, all three,were kept quite a while in its memory.

68

THE LAST TIME

The last time we met the three of uslaughed so much the pavements of Londonbegan raising their eyebrows. Youwere going back home and paths,as they say, crossed. Your dress swirledlike a gypsy’s. The sheen of the hoursmust have set us aglow, like vivid flowers,like those in that garden we stopped inon the way down the Embankmentto the Tate. I cheered how you flirtedwith life. Your small book of poemshad just been published in Denmark and you’d just had a whirlwind affairin Oslo. We brought you up to dateon Paris. That day the Thames wasclutching the sun to its bosom. Sightseeingboats making white cones in the waterfrom the Tower to Kew Gardens,the voices of tour guides blaring outof the microphones, were full. At the TateI left both of you and went to see Turner.Then we found our way over to BromptonRoad with tourists in packs hunting downthe Museum, cameras firing like guns.We told you about Peru, Macchu Picchu, andmagical tango dancers in Buenos Aires.When the Japanese ceramic display startedto bore, we walked to the Kensington Market.

69

In that steaming jammed maze everythingesoteric, garish and strange, as well asthe usual tawdry shoddy items for touristscrammed the matchbox stalls. You boughta Rastafarian tam, I remember. All the timea floodlight of happiness lit up your faceand the three of us danced through the daylike connoisseurs of enjoyment. Friendshipscintillated on double-decker buses, onthe black statues of horses and riders,on the pond in St. James’s Park asthe swans sailed their galleons. Afterdinner at “Salieri’s” where the foodset us talking again about Istanbul, we promised you’d see us again for Carnivaland heavily went to the stop for the busto take you to Islington. When we kissedyou goodbye we were struck by how fast the day went, how much we still wantedto say, but left for the next time we met,not knowing yet that that was the last time.

70

STORIES

For Vernon

I always chuckle at your gentle rebukethat I do not seem to remember every finegrain of sand where our footprints once lefttheir shapes. My memory you see is not as limber

as it used to be. But when helplessly wesaw our ships veer to separate portswe kept good track of their routes. NowI can cast anchor at your door and down

a chute in your larder ribboned stories comelike Christmas presents. Everyone hearsthe laughter only schoolboys should bellowfilling your living room. Re-runs that bore

the uninitiated last for several hours.What is more hallowed, more sacrosanct thantwo old friends on the beach of their liveswatching old waves come in? What floats

on those crests may be hoary with timebut are cornucopia that we salvage. Fortunehas treated us well, considering. Whenthe bottles of wine diminish, the desserts done

justice to, we start again. A name remindsof something recalled many times. It’s justthat that’s what we have now to savour.Our boats are slowly heading to drydocks

for mooring. So every ripple that sparkleswith jewelled memories running to shoreis welcome. Let them spread and make circlesaround us. More of them flash behind the surf ’s roar.

71

CELLULOID

City-sewn, bound to concrete and asphalt,I did not dream rustic romantic fancies looking at the sea like a poet. White waveswere too distant, too scenic. Romance for mewas as fleeting and brittle as celluloid reelsspilling alluring places on a cinema’s screen.Seven times I went to see Now Voyager,enthralled by the desperate love of PaulHenreid and Bette Davis. The world was realonly in the dark of an auditorium. So allof the Queen Anne Lace blooms on breakerscannonading a shore lacked the powerto entrance me. What I dreamed could be seenin the beams a projector relentlessly aimedthrough smoke-filled air. I was Gary Cooper,Claude Rains, Edward G. Robinson, James Stewartin turn. I fought with the Bengal Tigerssubduing India. I shared Errol Flynn’sswordplaying glamour. And with C. AubreySmith extended the British Empire. Soin the true life that I lived I did notwalk past gateways stench-filled with garbage,did not hear any bitter, quarrelling voices coming from hovels, nor have to find standpipes to wash myself under. They were not in those reels.Far away went stained mattresses with lumps like fistsknuckling your back, and the scratching clawsof brown fibre sticking from rips in the ticking.I could forget flour-bag bed sheets, canecutters’ajoupas, hookworm, the scourge of tuberculosisand all the soul’s famine the colonised suffered.Without the sea I was doing quite wellweaving myself into happier dramas, swimminglike Johnny Weismuller, my favourite Tarzan,out of the strong hunters’ net we were trapped in.Not having access to waves that naturewashes over the eyes to sedate the attention,in the magic of celluloid I found my protection.

72

SHELLING PEAS

With the moonlight’s pale whitewash slapped fresh on the road,the night almost noiseless but for our voices,we perched on the stone steps just up from the pavement.

Feeble stripes of lemon light ran down the half-closeddoors behind us. Sounds inside leaked out like whispersspilling. On the slope houses had new silver roofs.

Each of us kept his own given heap of pigeonpea pods piled like a cache close by, and with busyfingers slitting and tearing the seams we would split

open the skins and push the peas, yellow-green pearls,to rise slowly in a white enamel basin.The first ones hit the basin like a kettle drum

until the bottom was covered. Delight splutteredfrom us in low giggly squeaks as the jokes began.Perhaps owls hooted and the Orphanage bugle

across on the hill blew ‘lights out’. The grown-ups talkedtheir new gossip inside, leaving us with the moonto finish the task filling the basin before

bedtime. If you found a seven-pea pod you putit aside for good luck, and you chewed now and thena fat juicy yellow bead with its brief half-sweet

flavour. It was a chance to tell stories aboutsupernatural creatures in forests, of donkeyswith fiery eyes roaming the empty streets late

at night, of stones falling on roofs. You remembered the king, Papa Bois, lagahoo, soucouyant andduennes, who changed skins or waited to lure innocent

children. We squealed and huddled close so the grown-upscalled out to be quiet and forbade us to scareone another spinning frightening fictions. Hushed,

73

we studied the drain’s burning water, like a thickshining wire; saw patches of shadow make headsof monsters that shrank at the touch of the moon. When

only the trash remained for the bin the basinwas nearly full. We were called good little helpersand sent into a forest of dreams. We kicked hard

under the sheets to keep off ghouls on the attack.Soundless throats screamed for help to escapepacks of demons, while the moon just played tag with clouds.

But we did it again the next time they set usthat chore in the moonlight. Maybe it was better,the false terror after, than even the giggles

and laughter. We suffered the torture phantasmswrought as we slept, but awoke from each nightmareenthralled and shivering in warm pods of pleasure.

74

LEAVING THE DARK

When we emerged from the woodswith trees like the elm the cypress the aspenand with birds like falcons ravens and pheasantswe saw our own samaan tree’s branchesgive broad spreading shade to the islandsaw the hills’ pouis yellow and pinkput on their plumes their lenten rosettesin dry march and heard the picoplatsweetly trilling a whistle high in the leavesof morning when we walked from the darkand opened our eyes there were no fierce eagleshere to admire no birches no daffodilsthat dance in a field but before us insteadscarlet ibises glided as delicately as leanlithe dancers in a cave of swamp waterand hummingbirds as swift as meteors shot from flower to flower where heart-shapedanthurium lilies with ivory-tongued pistils held pink and white auricles up to the world

where blue-gray tanagers and yellow oriolesskipped lightly about knowing nothing of robins and cardinals the ones we were taughtmarked the seasons when here the canefieldswe cut were not ours the poems we learnt were not ours the places we loved and yearned forwere elsewhere so royal palms standing like kingshigh and proud in the air lining gravelly avenueskept vigil and waited but did not receiveour thanks the silk-cotton tree the flamboyantthe immortelle were passed by like squattersnot to be honoured in stories we readfor darkness had covered our minds and all our thoughts fled northwards untilwe came out into sunlight and our eyeswere filled with a beauty that then readilypatiently opened its arms and took us back in

when all of the rules had been keptall the whips had been crackedwhen all of the birds and the trees and the flowerswere ignored like strangers when we had taken

75

to heart all the lessons and obeyed every commandment having learnt to spit scornon what might have been called ourspraising the nightingale and the wrenthe oak and the yew and the ashturning away from things too familiarto win our respect and like lost orphaned childrenwe sought our parents in cold far-off countriesand the songs that we sang were only of placesunknown to us the verses we learned to recite with fervour and overdone gestures were of people unknown of dreams that were foreignwe knelt through our night of denialof disowning and of being disownedand pretended to all we were not the peoplewe were happily going on ardently thinkingan apple was better to have than a mangothe avocado was not a real pear

till we found we were faceless and no-onerecognised our islands in our low genuflectionsto snow to Yorkshire pudding to pallidcomplexions gilbert and sullivan maypolescockney and yankee dialects so we knewwe were blind that our eyes should have seenkiskadees before larks the frangipani beforeweeping willows that the unacknowledged samaangave comfort the elm would envywe had come from the dark woods into the sunso we broke every injunction history’s keepershad issued as we looked all around usand jumped up to see how blessed we werehow rich how lucky not europe not africanot india could take from these islandslove and fidelity due our true parents like the nutrient water given us when we kiss coconuts so we let these islands course throughevery thought every action let them soak throughthe good earth we now know that we came from

76

ON THE ROAD

On the road to Sav-la-Mar or throughthe Rio Cobre gorge to Port Antoniothere could be no pause to considerthe question that sometimes aroseand smiled calmly and knowingly in his mind. It was rush, rush, rushwith the tyres hissing when the rainwet the skin of the asphalt. Then,when the sun lit up the leaves andthe road was a shining, twisting ribbon,making up time for the bell. Sandwichesor a slab of bread pudding lay onthe seat in a bag next to the small coffeeflask. Munching them, later, he mightcross-examine himself about wherethe roads led, how far into the futurethey would take what he said. Butthe buffeting wind would dissolvethe query like drops of rain. So for nowonly the sun’s quick flashes catchingthe windscreen mattered. Now the lowroar and screech of the tyres cried outthat loaded with freight every momentattaches it couplings to others to pullthe whole train of change its own way.It made him afraid of the present, yetthe present was all that he had to steerwith, looking for signposts, keepinghands on the wheel, going around blind corners, mounting the long hillsof the island. He drove hard betweenthe season’s plumed sea of canefieldswhere green waves swayed and swishedwith the breeze. The far-off mountainskept him in sight like watchful Maroonswherever he turned. In the rearview mirrorold journeys receded like mileposts withfingers of warning held up. Will pageshe opened today blow about like dryleaves loose on the ground, spinning

77

away like the car wheels? It was truehe wanted to know what it was all worth,but not very often. There were cylinders with pistons that always fired and kept himgoing regardless. Neither rain nor sunshine determined the distance. All he wantedwas the hope a cul-de-sac did not swallow the road he was on. At the endot the trip he would measure the visitand count up the miles he covered. He would darn his faith if it was damaged,fitting a patch with all of the othersaround it.

The air was like a glass justpolished. Its radiance lifted his eyesto the sky’s high patience. Passing vehiclestooted and went on, bringing his thoughtsback to the curves, the crossings, bridgesand roundabouts.

78

MARATHON RUNNER

After his trek over the kinds of terrainfortune mapped out for his journey, with eyes as wide open as possible but still missingmuch of the landscape, the people, he’s come to a clearing where he can stop and look backand see the twists in the path, the places where he should have lingered getting to knowmore of the flora and fauna, more of the hearts of all those who gave him welcome, to listento voices that said words that made him afraid, whispering in intimate undertones sentimentshe feared as if they were tentacles reaching to bind up his freedom deep in an ocean and keephim there like their anchor hooked deep in the mud he had to escape from, the places wherehe gave just passing attention to eyes that spoke of gifts he had to refuse, already having the loadhe was given to carry, trotting out an excuse every time, wanting to push on unencumbered,pretending that no-one was hurt, but ensuring his feet were landing on solid ground so thatthe opiate dreams dose us with did not enter his head, which he had to keep clear, looking ahead,brushing away tender touches of leaves and sprigs but moving blindly on not seeing that feelingswere being uprooted and trampled inside his own efficient machine, keeping them fromlosing control, from attaching themselves and growing on hosts as he passed, not letting themmake the ground slippery along the path where he fled like a runner drugged for a marathon,going on until he awoke too late, too late.

fromPlumed Palms

81

THREADING THE NEEDLE

My grandmother’s arm turned the silver wheelof her sewing machine sometimes so fastthe spokes made one. An unravelling reelshimmied on its spigot as the thread passed

down to the needle’s thrusting eye. The dronealways gave comfort. With a child’s wonderat how it was done I saw one stitch cloneanother in the moving cloth. Thunder

might have rolled its far presence but onlythe deep chirr of her bent toil in that roomentered my memory. Hers was a lonelylabour, unadorned, uncapped with a plume

of honour. She steered the fabric alongthe shuttle, her glasses down on her nosefor zooming. I watched her veined brown hands, strongwith resolve, tirelessly plant rows

in rayon or cotton for bearing buds,however minute, that flowered the daysfor us. She would take limp shapeless yardsand scissor and baste in magical ways

inherent forms and curves. I was called onat times to work the handle or applymy young eyes to threading the needle, oneof the joys that take a whole lifetime to die.

Hymns helped her hemming the end of a dress,her contralto devoted to bringingeternal salvation and gifts that blessher day’s work with the praise in her singing.

It was in that happy job being her aideI most basked in love and noted her sterngrasp of a task. So in seaming I’ve prayedshe would firmly steady my hand and turn.

82

FIRE

The old desks, initials notched like hieroglyphsin them, crackled and cried the day the wooden

school burned. They were still shacked down in their rows,blackened crusts peeled and pimpled in the sodden

remains. And from the scorched and blistered frame whiffsof what had taken place in them, what a hose

had no power to scour, curled from the charredcupboards where memory lay. Some came unbidden,

thoughts we had when school seemed a jailhouse sheriffscontrolled, a place preserved just for childhood’s woes.

Those we waved off in smoke as we plucked from hotembers laughter the yard heard, years that had run

off with the days some called the best ones of life.But out of that scabbed and twisted wreckage what

I reached in to rescue was a bench where friendsonce sat at my side and unbreakable bonds,

we believed, made us one. No musketeers foughtany closer. We three were brothers whose hands

foraged for fun throughout the town. Boyhood’s endsgave life all its purpose. Our glazed eyes saw

a comradeship no axe could gash. But blown sparkssneaked in and swallowed all up in a fire,

consuming its faith like ghee for a pyre.When the last day came to walk out the school’s door

need pointed each one to a separate shore.It’s now hard to believe friends I couldn’t do

without sank unremembered. They’d moved to newhalf-hidden places and all pledges we shared

83

were slowly annulled as if nobody cared.At first faces had lingered. Then, as if none

had ever existed, they blurred and were gone.I poked in the smouldering charcoal in vain.

It was too long ago, that act of arsonwhen the heart’s first vows of loyalty turned ash.

Yet I looked over the razed yard, empty, bare, cupping my ears for voices, trying to hear.

84

CURRENT

It is long past time to abandon childhoodbut the mind insists on its worn reruns.One old feature that has always withstoodwear and tear on its reels shows a quick streamthat giggled and bubbled. It was then knownas the Santa Cruz river, but it ran so shallowthe rich had basins deepened and dammedwith layered stone dykes to shore up the flowfor bathing. I often replay the gift of a dayin one, splashing and sloshing around. Sheenedair comes to mind, flashing like satin. I was justseven but only now can fumble at telling myselfwhat happened. I recall leaves oiled by the sun’sthin unction flickering signals that seemed likea welcome. I remember the sky’s blue patchesplaying a game with the trees, dodging branches,up at the end of a natural kaleidoscope, as the leaves danced and the shapes and patternsof blue came and went as I stared. The waterthat gambolled and leapt over stones as it flowedthrew upwards, then flattened, points of sparkling light, and white bits of doilies that melted likecloud wisps. It twittered in places before exultationsent it riddling through gaps in the dam and overthe boulders. The beige stalks of bamboo outgrewmost of the trees and then bent into their gothic arches. All of my dumb puzzlement about whymy mother was told to let me play in that poolstayed with me like the cool touch of the current.There was only the warning not to stray fromthe edge, to keep my chest up a safe height above.At seven I sensed something different about it.I had no title to haunts the poor were denied.But I beat on the surface scattering up plumesof silvery kindling fountains, thinking a returnto that day would not ever be given. And Istamped every minute with memory’s thumbI heard a semp on a limb deep in the foliagepiping a festival tune to a memorized metre.Its notes played music from a song I was singing

85

Then a drizzle of drops brought a call to come in.I moved in a cocoon away from the bank and scuffeddown the wet path. Dasheen leaves with their broadopen hands to the rain had captured small starsthat glittered like beads in their dark-green palms.I knew I was glistening too, and not just from the sun’schromium-plating blazoning my skin. A livecurrent only pure unexplained joy generateshad switched on its power, lighting me up.

86

PUSHING THE PLANE

I watch him pushing the planefar forward and then back again

and again, making the woodcurl off its strips of skin. Good,

smooth motions repeated in a silent fight he must win.

The shavings’ strong aromaagitates thoughts that hammer

in my head wishing him freeto leave wrongs behind and flee

from the twinges that spike himlike splinters, Its face is grim,

the world that he sees. He lets it alone with its kiss of grit.

Chisel and saw and plane pareoff hardwoods as they sculpture

shapes like poems, whittle linesgiving the country designs

his soul unveils. Yet silence is the habit he wears, dense

as the shop’s inch-high sawdust, to hide a heart of distrust.

For there as he shapes the woodhurt runs through him like a flood

he keeps concealed. I am drawntoo to feel pain’s flow and mourn

for horned secret sorrow, thoughI cannot tell him I know.

87

VISITING

I sneak in to your bedsidethinking you asleep, holdinga bunch of sunflowers to fix inthe vase with the old drooping zinnias.Next time I will bring you a rose or some dahlias, a small clutch of petunias,or a pink anthurium lily.

Now I see you’ve wakened to waitlike all other patients for visitors,though for you I am the onlyone who is not too very busyand can bring you my faithat all times I’m allowed,now the chart says in your casenormal visiting hours are no longer in force.

Privilege has come late,after the cells have foreclosedon the years you investedin so many children, giving them eyes to envision the world andwhere to walk as they go.

Still, I switch the old flowers andsilently make you a promise and in silence beg your assuranceif you could just only waitfor March or for AprilI would raid every hillfor the blooms you admire,the yellow and pink pouilike a gift for your birthday.I would bring down a whole treewhen it bursts into glorythough the brown land is thirsty.

I would come here and place itfor your memories to gaze atall through the dry season,all through the last wait.

88

LET US SIT HERE

For Irene

Let us sit here in the serene airof the evening, like a pair of nestlingdoves settling down in a cote,and watch below the studded laid outdark, that sable coat overly bejewelled.The distant high-rise buildings, miniaturemosaics of little shining tiles,the CN tower so high over the town,the faint moon lustre making of the lakea slim indigo band, and just a block awaythe bright yellow gas station full of neonglare, these now we must allow to calm the eye, to soothe it like a salve.

The air is cooler since the summer has gone.Autumn has brought an expectationmore unhurried, much more introspective.We’ll just sit here tonight, monarchsholding court, and sip the far off skylinelike a genial wine. The eye is drawnto wide cones of light from hovering lampsin gently-lit apartments across the road,quiet rooms where ease finds havens. Behind us,we’ve put a long CD of Satie on, andhis hushed languorous notes dreamily go on tiptoe through our thoughts.

At times like this we need nothing else.It is enough to sit and gaze beyondthe shadows, to talk of something trivialor, after bridges of silence, to recallsome deeper observations that the dayhad brought. The city glints with allthe things we share, is veined, netted, justas unphrased sentences soundlessly crossmind to mind and bind two lives as one.Love will compose a lullaby to phraseeach utterance unvoiced and to defineits words as sleep whispers its summons.

89

The tower blinks its signal for the planesand they pass, winking back. We’ll flylike them; like them, take wing. We’ll thinkof stars and fate, those handy answersto why happiness comes. Let us sit hereand feel again the rush of joy that growsout of shy roots the years have strengthened.That is the harvest our dreams must reapall through the hours that we stay asleep.

90

PLUMED PALMS

I have walked under beeches and pines,seen the earth go kaleidoscopic in autumn,watched swans ice-skate in hot summerby weeping willows, and Wordsworth’s daffodilsdance in the breezes of May. The head inclinesto observe studiously, and the duet the hearthears joins the voice of the past with the present.Avenues of plumed palms touching the sky’s distancethough far over an ocean have not gone dimmernor lost any power. At the sight of those formed linesin my mind palpitations of longing start.

I have touched the poplar, the larch, the aspen,often sank to the shins in crisp soft snowdrifts,wearied my eyes on those wheat-covered plains,the prairies, and stood under mistletoe and holly.And for them too I play on my steelpan and dance.Peonies, crocuses and tulips have shown me their beautyunbidden, just like the anthurium that liftsup my spirit whenever it stumbles, and when I glanceat the lilac’s scent-dripping clusters I seepointillist pouis dapple my hills with rosettesof pink and yellow, the season’s sure weather vanes.

I’ve felt fresh roots push down in the acreageonce kept reserved for the flora of childhood.When leaves go crimson, purple, gold, antiphoniesrise in my throat. Wind in an oak’s harbouragecompels my attention, as bamboos that wouldsway and creak in my head like moaning memories.Under the elm’s kindly shelter there’s a welcomethat eases the pain I feel missing the samaan treesI left, their healing shade on the edge of a meadowlike love. But rising above them all are the palms,my inward sentinels with me wherever I go.

91

RUG SELLER

Thinking that within the gates of a locked Vaticanare cardinals to pontificate on beautyin what the mind creates, he begs them do their duty.So though I wink to warn each one’s a charlatan

he still pounds on a wall with his cries to get in,and he tries to proclaim that he has a fine rughe weaved to show them. He implores them not to shrugit off unseen. But his clamour fails to win

entry through the stone defences they build to keeppeople like him away. I shout to warn him notto bruise his fists, that should he enter they will swathim off like a pestering fly. The courtyard’s steep

unleapable rampart mocks him. No one answers, of course, the effrontery of his request. Yet hewaits with his rug hoping some knowing judge will seeit and declare its worth. Had he composed stanzas

he would have known what to expect. A rug maker,he thinks, whose name’s unknown, can still claim attentionbe paid to his patterns. But the design he’s spunremains uninspected as if a housebreaker

brought loot to a palace. With no inside sponsorwhatever he’s done is ignored. Though dogged callsof his loud persistent voice rebound from the wallsof their chambers, he’ll wait all night for an answer.

fromCareenage

95

EUREKA ON YONGE STREET

On Yonge Street secondhand bookstores puff out fine dustlike wakened spirits when you grope on their shelves, as ifghosts rose from poetry and prose coated with rustfrom a junkyard. Once an old volume you touched gushedwith motes from abandoned pages left up a cliffbeyond your arm’s reach where you climbed and pushedto find it. I watched you forage like a diggerfor fossils until, as I waited and wandered along thin musty aisles, gladness, like a trigger,released from its restraints your Greek shout of ‘Eureka!’

I imagined the dust flared and billowed aroundyou. With your find clutched close we re-entered the day,taking again to the street, passing showcaseswhere glassy jewellery glittered, passing Harvey’s and McDonald’s, your mind and ears shut to the soundof reggae from music shops, to blends of coffees from Starbucks cafes. Yonge Street had vanished away.

I did not really feel the excitement that lingeredin you afterwards, how dusty books you fingeredhad energized your steps, but I knew what it meantto you, tripping blindly past Yonge Street’s congestedelectronic boutiques and bar-stool restaurantswith an air of triumph as if you had wrestedsome alchemist’s forgotten secret, holding tightunder your arm pressed pages of words like a gifta child wanted for Christmas found in a snowdriftabandoned. And I knew if the lanes of the nightdarkened with shadows for you as you loped along,you would lurch on and lift them like lanterns for light.

96

FLYING OUT

From the departure lounge you watch the planesroped at their ramps like horses. Variousboxlike vehicles like white beetles fussunder their wings. The lounge is filling upslowly with travellers, each with his freight of thoughts, weight of baggage. Rumbles of talkroll in from corners. You ask yourselfwhere you are going, then you try to caulk the cause of the question and listen forthe boarding announcement while you half-reada page of a book. From the future you pleadjust for a fairly clear sky. The carry-on bagat your feet with more books, paper and pensoffers you solace. In a while there’s movementat the exit counter and all those who need special assistance are invited up. A linequickly lengthens, so you join it and filedown the long tunnel and enter the mouthof the cabin. As usual, passengers bustleto shove large bags into an overhead bin.Then as you settle the seat belt holds you in from running back out, and like a squeezed ragdoll you surrender yourself to its grasp whilethe crew prepare for take-off. But to where?you question again. Is entering nothingwhat’s ahead for you now? In a quick racethe plane rises and climbs but the seat belt signstays on after it gets to cruising altitude.

After the airline food is served you use the time to trace the course a frozen riverfollows below. Its ice touches your facethrough the window; with a sliver of fearit slides through a vein. The mind’s whine,higher in pitch than the plane’s deep hum,rises from mortally bitter knowledgehow fragile and delicate is the pondyou’ve ventured to skate on. The dronetakes the jet onwards. It promises the same straight unslowed progression to the bone

97

left for you to gnaw on. Hopefulness floatson a sea of whims, on waves without lifeboats,and depends on shifting rules of a gamethat twists you to flap like a palm tree’s frond.What lies beyond and where are you going?

98

BEYOND REACH

(i.m. James King)

You did not let me know you were dying,had me expect that years of sharing talkwine and laughter, weighing the long walkwe had taken to where we stood, tottingup credits and debits, were still to come.I did not know of the cancer plyingits business within you, doom’s destructionlike an industry thriving on your cells. The day I saw you swimming far beyondthe breakers while I sat safe on a rockI felt the older one. Yet you knew wellof time’s set limit written on your clock.Oddly, I remembered Frank Collymoredriving three of us round his island, threeof the actors who had come to his shoreto perform Hamlet. How I failed Osric!As you grew older you became more likePolonius in your judicial gait,but wiser, scornful of platitudes, succinctwith discerning broadsides on every trickof charlatans. But it was OberonI thought of as you conjured up musicfrom a score, blind to the secret how lateevery sung note was. I laughed in the sunthat shone on us still, expecting no nightfor a while, reviving boyhood’s stubbornreluctance to leave a field of play. Whydid I not see the dimming of the light?If now like an attendant lord I bowsome may not catch the princely ghost I seeand wonder at my sweep. But this I know:we whom you moved among have been shown howkingliness can be carried, dignitytake form and shape and not be proud. And sowe placed you in a tier above. For mefriendship had no vessel rarer, truer.It will not come my way again. The beachis bare, the swimmer gone beyond reach.

99

WINTER PASSES

The lights at the corner below casting a blue-greenglow on fresh crisp snow, the snow- ploughed road a blackstrip of sticky electric tape, the cars with eyes like sci-fi

alien creatures slooshing by, all make the world of the nighta place the imagination flashes from a vague futuristicstory, like being in a module putting down in a colony

on the moon. The earth is keeping course on its journey.This morning I wondered where the geese went to, howtheir cries have been silenced by that long flight from

the leaden lake. Yet the sun’s cold light freed the spirit,and people, double-coated, went on small neighbourhooderrands, buoyant for a granted day of remission from

warrens, skipping the sludge, watching warily forskid spots. We submit for months to the raw touch of iceon the skin, cope with its sharpness like a court’s sentence

(the dense falling white curtain crossing days at a time, inchingeast) penitent as prisoners waiting for pardon. But todayonly flurries flirted about, landing their flakes on heads

and shoulders. The crunch that boots made grinding the snowdelighted the child in me, still listening, like the crushof candy brittle. Chugging on I gave thanks for a clear

blue sky, the white blinding sun, the wind’s nips onlysmall blades on the face. It was time to count blessings, timeto know that despite anything you have suffered

the desire to live must assert itself. The soulneeds its resurrection. I watched flecks scintillatingwith sunlight where branches of trees wore patchy

sleeves of snow. As in stories, the world was all dazzlementand glitter, there for us to inhabit. If with sharp spikesthe winds barb the days and slither the season’s knife

through the shivers we tie down to our bodies as we walk,the slant the earth moves with leans to new hope.Though long, bitter, whitened with pain, winter passes.

100

TEA IN THE DESERT

If you use the southbound road from Fezto Ouarzazate to the reddesert, you may come upon the tent

of the nomads who made tea for us,the Berber man and his daughters.We’d just pulled aside to take pictures:

grabbling goats sniffing the barrenburnt ground out of habit, as a thinpale scrim weakened the stare of the sun.

Three young girls at the tent’s mouth saw us,three yellow flowers watched at us pauseas if told it was Allah who chose

that place. They waved, and as we waved backcame up with words that asked us to walkto the tent, the guide said, and to take

a rest and visit with them a while.Morocco’s rusty sand raised a hill behind. In the dim tent we could sprawl

on rugs and talk while the three girls boiledwater and made us the tea. They smiled all the time, their faces pleasure-filled,

flicking us quick glances like flaringsunbeams, while their father kept drawingfrom us who and what we were, eyes glowing

with questions. Perhaps if you pass therethe same time next year, they’ll be wherewe were greeted, still ready to share

tea and talk. But nomads like them movewith the seasons, taking a dim caveabout. Only memory’s wishes prove

101

permanent. We went back to the widewaiting desert, full of fresh food for thought, and I knew then that it would

stay like a film I could not forget, its setting reeled up in life’s pocket,safe with a desert’s bejewelled grit.

And yet I was later gnawed by doubt.Were those tent-dwellers on the look outfor the dollars we gave them? To scout

for resting travellers with a showof welcome? I descended to lowsuspicions. Was I too blind to know?

I asked myself. Then lifted my headabove the smirks of the world. That redearth for me tells kindness is not dead.

102

FORTS

Now the old forts have become an inheritance.Repainted guns pocked from old rust soressit on some heights like griots telling a story.They are sold to tourists as historic ruinskept fresh. But the history they spill is not ours,was not made by any of us. As secondhand ownersTourist Boards use them like titles to claima name on time’s map. They look over the oceanlike guardians now of the past, attractionsthat hotels are glad for. Travellers can readwhite-lettered words on blue backgrounds that giveall the facts about when they were built and actionthey fought in. What is not told is what happenedon the ocean-like sugar cane plains they protected,the bombardments of debasement absorbed.

When the old rumours of gold died away andthe prizes were sugar plantations and coffles of Africanslaves obese empires that squatted over the land,their riding crops whacking canecutters like horses,picked on places for cannon to straddle like one-eyedCyclops looking for pillagers that horned in by sea,guarding the swollen billows rising with profit.Now we pretend the old forts were ours, spruce them upas sites that tell our story; not the one, of course, that the tide knows well, the real one written with slaves’ scarletblood in ledgers abroad, their shackled industrybuilding an empire’s great palaces penny by penny.

103

HIS WORLD THEN

In those days Port of Spain was a slow-moving place.The trams clanged heavily like school bells that weariedthe arm of the ringer. At a calm unspurred pacethe cars weaved through the town. In one boy’s unhurriedeyes the town’s tempo was perfect. Leaving the centrehe found the streets emptier, filled up with sunlightonly. It was rare for a stranger to enterthose enclaves. The boy’s own knowledge of them was slight.He knew loaded lorries left the wharves with flouror Irish potatoes or rice in jute bags tieddown with ropes. He could hum the chimes of the hourdrifting from the college, catch pings of a fast rideby some cyclist. Then at three when school desks released their day’s captives he would cross over the concrete riverbed and look down from the bridge feeling pleasedto be out. Every afternoon he would repeatthe same route home, leisurely, absorbed in the shapesof shadows, fingers riffling railings, eyeing cracksin the pavement bringing back his class and the mapsthey learned. He looked up a lane to a hill with shacksthat seemed ready to teeter down. He mocked the honksof cars going by ‘Borpen! Borpen!’ and laughed. The Chinese shopalways smelled of saltfish and olive oil. He stoodsometimes watching the shopkeeper expertly chopa penny’s fat pork or salt beef on a slab of wood.

At that casual rate like the slow traffic, the town became his. Each day his practised eyes increased the rangeof his understanding. Learning noun after nounof his world then, he thought its verbs would never change.

104

PLUCKING PLUMS

Now it’s autumn I remember the plum tree,remembering how in the dry season we

were blamed for its bareness, for making its leaveslose their hold on its branches because, like thieves,

we plucked early plums, some hard as a green stoneand no real prize. Long before their green had grown

into yellow we vied in ripping them fromtheir stems. Under attack the tree would become

gaunt, skeletal, leafless, grey. Stan and I wouldclimb while Ed poked at the low ones where he stood

below us with a stick. Like locusts we strippedthe clustered stems clean, just as if hunger whipped

us to do it. It was prestige in control,so at every fruit-bearing season the goal

was to show how much we could reap from the tree,we three, before disapproval could decree

that we stop. When it was only a jigsawof twigs against the sky we would climb no more.

Now here under maples, poplars and larchesthat bend over us their polychrome arches

the wet leaves of autumn are dropped to the groundin soft slow swirls. Splatches of colour twirl round

and spin away, signs of extinction to comewith time’s harvesting. But each day is a plum

for me now. Every dusk the sun paints the skywith Turner’s blazing brush. An indigo dye

lingers later well into the night. I pluckeach one and bite in, concerned whether my luck

105

will bring a tree bearing leaves again. Hungernow prods my haste, an appetite the anger

of age sharpens. I am anxious to savourtimely fruit before the season is over.

106

TELL ME, MAMA

Tell me, Mama, if what I’ve done has pleased you.I remember your frown when I once came thirdin my class. Those grandiose expectations must have come from some fairy tale you heardin your own childhood. You forgot we were black,having no money for books or lessons thelighter-skinned paid for. But you thought I was slackif I didn’t outshine them all. By the known rulesI should not even have placed in that race. With lucksomeone like me would only have mastered the toolsof a mason or joiner. Honourable trades,but not respected enough, you said. You who knewonly the buttoned-up back doors of the rich. Your braidscome back to me now, those emblems you wove with pridein nature’s bounties. Your silent love, its dreamsundiminished, flowering in faith as I grew,speaks from your framed face still. I have stayedon course as much as I could, tried my best to fulfilwhatever you thought I promised. And when the hillseemed too high, too steep, I could see your frownlike a question. But it’s all I have now to offer, paidwith my own silent love. So I tender those years as a truerecord of endeavour you asked for to wear as your crown,the filled up scroll of a life for which you had prayed.

fromOnly the Waves

109

CHAIR

The circling curves of the bentwood rocker still draw the heart’s genuflections where it is stored nowwith all the sparseness of the room, shining dark brownand silken smooth for a child’s sliding hand to glideon. The trellised cane seat and back were pale yellowand too large for a small boy. So when the chair rockedsmall pangs of panic sweet as a roller-coaster’sshot thrill after thrill through him. Though times when the seatwas frayed and a large hole opened under the weightof his grandmother he could not manage to keep his bottom from sinking, ending up hunchbacked.

She would sit in it heavy with troubles the dayscame loaded with, going forward and back with smootheven changes, telling him what had to be faced. But the chair was her cradle of solace. As sheironed the floor with its tread and gazed to the groundthe motion that always consoles, the lullaby the body responds to, sedated the pricklesof pain, with its easy remedy for ailmentswithout any cure. But so strong was the powerthe chair had, all it has left in his memoryis varnished and polished to gleam like a relicfrom that room of love. No injuries could tarnishthat. He was cossetted in its tenderness then.In his picture the chair is repaired. It’s glossyand curved everywhere. His finger slips on its glass.

110

OLDIES

His harmonica is heard no more now. Fromthe patio where he sat early evenings silence now comes. Once, through the half-light of duskwe could listen for ‘Old Man River’, ‘Stardust’,‘As Time Goes By’ or ‘Some Enchanted Evening’.Through the flowered hedges between our yardshis music muted the dissatisfactionsthe day might have brought and tranquillized us allwith old hit tunes in the glamour of twilight.But he moved from the lane and plays for us now only in memories we mull over with drinksin hand. Perhaps, we say, some neighbours somewherelisten for ‘Unforgettable’, ‘Paper Moon’,‘Mona Lisa’, ‘Body And Soul’, ‘September’.Perhaps somewhere else the days’ detritus driftsharmlessly into extinction when it hearshow he weaves webs of worn dreams to replace it.But still, here, sometimes as night begins to snatchthe hope bright dawn brought, as the sky surrendersits palette of tangerine and crimson, weimagine a harmonica reaching outto divert thoughts from falterings or failure.It is a trivial thing to remember.Yet who knows who was turned away from despair,who from one assuaging moment took heart to persevere because troubles seemed smaller?In those fraught years dusk had no better sponsor.

111

ADDRESS BOOK

My address book keeps swelling with piecesof paper I stuff into it. I jotnew names and places on scraps close at handand insert them between the right indexedpages so it gets fatter and fatterand the rubber band holding it stretches to breaking point. Not that I’m making lotsof new friends, let me quickly make clear. No,my predicament stems from time’s randomoptions. I should overhaul the entriesexpanding the covers, scratching out thoseno longer of use, now ensconced beyondthe far reach of letters and postcards, pasttelephone connections and cyberspace messages. But then I dread doing thatbecause I’m very reluctant to facethe true cost. If I do, all the leaves leftwould be made up of recent additions,fresh names to whom I’m just a new-foundacquaintance. Those thrown away will carryall the years of my life, all of the daysI shared with pleasures and sorrows, profound,I think, at times; anyway rich with glee. I bemoan them being forgotten so fastthey leave no wakes, like prize-winning fictions. When time first parted us we filled pageswith overseas numbers and streets, made dowith what distance allowed, made sure Christmasgreetings were punctual. That anxious phaseis ending. When I flick through now the soundthe leaves make is of a wind through the trees, and I hear speckled fruit thudding the ground.

112

TOO LATE

When the geese begin, as if pursued,a pointed course to the south,heading like spearheads out of a hardening sky;when the winds’ sharp teeth begin to gnawon the bones and the trees stand nude,there are eyes that veer with a wordless cryto follow the birds,drawn as a river that must flow to its mouth,seeking lanes back to a sun-white shorethey’d known with discontent before.Once, they saw in a dream a good life waitingfor those allowed northwards,and to get it they bore being treated as flawedin nature, stoned with a name, shunned,shot at sometimes, their innocence gored.But they are old now, watching their sonswinning some seats at the table, celebratingthe desegregation they earned.Yet when the birds form their squadronsand set out for southern stations eyes are turnedto track them, grafting lost landscapes on the sky’s wide screen,uneasy with their present discontent, the debtthey paid, wondering what their nagging fictions mean.They know, though, it’s too late for fresh dreamy regret, for pretending there’s a way out of time’s sewn net.

113

A LAST WISH

Some people keep a bible at their bedside.I, a Nobel laureate’s words, the poetry that cups the islands like an altar’s chalicereverentially raised. I take little sipslike brandy so as not to be greedyand because I could get giddyon great gulps. As sleep comes I see againall the sunwashed terrain of a far landscape,its places and people, on the screen of a page,clearer and truer, in lines that lift them upto the world’s sideways gaze. Some grappling ironfrom that poet’s phrases reaches a sea-bedof subconscious memory, salvaging sunkenimages. They make me sometimes find myselfre-mapping shores with sextants of definingmetaphors, with my guide’s unerring vision.How I rejoice to be of these islands! IfI were someone foreign and aliento the small everyday truths of their lives,what an unknowing loss I would have sufferedreading the words alchemizing their stories!None of that magic would’ve been as potent.A brief contact with that verse is all it takesto gratify my heart, wherever it springs from, sentlike a capsuled star-trekking probe into space.It’s the gift not the giver that matters.And so I have a small request to submitfor the consideration of whoeverin those last moments is there when this bodyis too weary of my deluded tiltingat windmills and is going back to the earth,back to its eternal life as molecules,that in clear voice, lest my ears are too tiredof listening to the world’s repetitiousexcuses, you read me some lines faithfully, with care for the meter that came from the heart,like the dipping pirogues of their fishermen.Bring me blue woodsmoke, those ochre roads,black backs bent wet with history, casuarinasand schooners, small village churches, sea almonds,oleanders, green canefields like oceans, all repeatednouns of love. Let me be blessed once more to seeas my eyes turn the light of that poetry.

114

LEARNING

He turns his eyes from the sky’s blue through the tallwindow. But his thoughts drift from desks where they sitand float up where reveries and daydreams call.The teacher’s at the board drawing a graph. Allthe eyes in the room swivel like robots to it.

Into his head as he counts yellow blooms straypast the door, and ground doves repeating amenshop about imprinting sad notes on the day.From his heart’s small pleasures, force-feeding their pensabstractions, the teacher directs him away.

He thinks though of a cool bright stream where the earhears music and light skips a rope in its flowbut a warning voice shouts he has to stay clearof distractions; success will shun those who throwchances away, money’s not silvery air.

When drawn to life’s wealth someone’s imaginationoffered in crafted words, sighting a purposein it, he is steered to the computationof banknotes, cautioned to follow the compassthat charts sandbars of a real situation.

Yet he senses, through bandaged eyes, that outsidewhere someone waters a garden, where seashellspimple the shore, something of his life has diedsince he sat in the classroom. He hears no knells for its loss, only mastodons in their stride.

115

DOLPHIN

We were obsessed by jellyfish we sawbobbing around the pier like floating whitetennis balls with dangling blurry threads. Fouror five sometimes passed dancing with the leapsof the ripples. An image of them sleepswith lost keepsakes; wakes only when a kitein its season bobs a course through the air.And something else slumbers in a closed drawer.Down by that St. Vincent Street jetty lateSunday afternoons we watched Sam diveand dive from a ship’s stern. Held in a stateresembling awe we saw his gleaming blackbody jackknife again and again downinto the harbour’s oily green water.Under our eyes a pride came alivein his grinning face. Each time he came backup out of the sea hushed cheers put a crownon his starred head, even though he plunged straightamong what we could see were coloniesof muck and bilge that drifted here and there.It did not matter to Sam nor to usthat was where he had to show his prowess, not in a laundered pool, shining and clear.There was no springboard then for detaineeslike Sam to re-define their status infull-paged passports of praise. That’s how it was.But jellyfish doing their quiet breaststrokes humbly, tirelessly, let him sharethe languid playground they found at the quay.Some said Sam was a stray waif, a mere guest,as if orphaned grace was mere forgery.Yet each time he slid smoothly down intothe opaque sea and rose again we sawa net fall from a dolphin breaking free.

116

ONLY THE WAVES

There are roads that wind northwards through valleystwisting sharply away from the chain of small townsand villages like knots on a string running eastfrom the capital, roads climbing towards the ridgesof the range, then, getting worn into lean threadbaretracks, dying somewhere under the peaks. At first thoughthey twine past hunkered houses holding the hillsidesfor balance, the green behind close and leafy.Nervously on like a child’s thin zigzag handwritingthey scrawl a way upwards flanked by jumbled orchardswith golden oranges and green tear-shaped mangoes, up past cacao trees, trunks mottled, hanging podsrust-coloured, mustard and oyster-white, through cassiasin yellow and gold, giant fiery immortelles, pouis in pinkand lemon, blood-red poincianas, crimson frangipani,all the tints of the faces enriching the island.Intelligences enter the mind in close-ups:old Carib mahoganies and African bronzes,hues of sienna from India, smooth gamboge and saffronsof China, Mediterranean blends and Saxonmarbles, all learning footways of history to thinand leave silent, out of the eye’s uphill visionlike forested hillsides’ fading tracks fine as threads. Here the old divided routes that a subject pastset down to be used are slowly being overgrown.Paths that survive and drop fall into Blanchisseuse,into Matelot and into Grande Riviere where even nowthere is peace, that fringe of the sea like Eden.When gunmen are mimicking films from abroadI think of trails of escape, climbing beyond a cloudand finding those bays where only the waves explode.

117

GUM ARABIC

I cannot remember what it was used for, gum arabic,but it was as familiar in those years as namesof things I was sent to fetch, like an oil lamp’s wick.

I have long ago forgotten what he was called,the man we paid the rent to, in a dimhouse that seemed to me so hostile, shawled

in secrecy like a witch churning a cauldronof spite. Nor can I tell you what plantsthrived in freedom on the sloped vacant lot nearby

where I saw butterflies in a pleased bobbing dancehop flower to flower. Perhaps I never knew.What I’m sure of is the flare of happiness

felt when certain frayed images fill the viewof the wandering mind and in them there’s sunlightglossing the hard yellow clay where runnels for rain

cut their way to the road, where a home-made kitewould rise and ride in the breeze on a string.With them come faces creased with love’s wariness,

love that taught impoverished children to sing.It’s lucky when in the day’s residual saltwe find intermingled another kind of grain.

Things that are lost to recall I’ve grieved overand groped for in times of memory’s desertion,but I’ve reaped recompense like a kindly favour

in reminders of games of marbles, fists in the dust,of spinning tops whipped humming along the street’s as-phalt,of the holes in an old bucket eaten by rust

that we sealed with flour like welders with lead.Let it hold that for a moment before it starts to shedcups of saved reflections once poured in my head.

118

AND THEN

And then the day came when he embraced Jamaicafor the last time as the plane rose from the airportand the mountains were blurred from its windows,his eyes unable to focus, his mind to reason.It was about noon and light turned the town’s roofsto water, asphalt streets to liquid wire. It was time, he thought. He was going home.But he lied. He’d just left the house where the toolthat he was had been edged, where the long years’ toilhad filled his goblets with joy, nurtured his will. As if for a last flypast the plane took a courseover the island, its ridges and valleys, rivers and small towns, roads twisting between themlike veins, and memories ascended from sunfilled places below, days he’d gone to them with a lightto offer his help, crisscrossing the islandfrom classroom to classroom. He leaned his head backand felt how aflame he stayed, like a candle.Above the drone of the plane he thought he heard voices calling him back, affirming a needhis hand should ease. But he repeated his wishto return to his island of birth. Somethingmade him believe he owed it that. The bleached fringeof the coast slid backwards and the dark oceandyed in deep blue tossed white filigrees about.Under him the Caribbean embosomedthe islands he loved. Their teardrop shapes went bybraided round by the currents’ lacy garlands.His thoughts drifted again to why he was thereand what they really mattered, changes he sought.Each island was green with canefields and forests,and hotels he could not see claimed the beaches.He shook himself back when the descent startedand looked down as familiar places rose up.The fields rushed like wind beneath as he landed.And then his bewildered suffering began.

fromPossession

121

ECHOES

For my children

I should have read you stories on my knee,fed you a children’s treasury of myths,ogres and witches, giants and fairies,pouring in teaspoons of virtue’s victories.I missed my chance for that, falsely busy.Yet I believe the light that lit my facetold everything, burnished pages with tales. So I watched you run on beaches of islandswe lived in, ramble on mountain retreats,your squeals of innocence happy and free;with love’s eyes I thought your grace unequalledwhen you swam, saw your dives perfect and straight as pelicans’ into splashless circles.Together we searched far away cities, streaking down autobahns, cutting valleys,finding the campsites before dusk closed in,pitching tents like gypsies, mapping countries.

Yes, we had our share of kindnessesgrowing years can provide, savoured flavoursfamily rituals left on taste buds,quaffed mugs of laughter, tightened bonds of love.I keep it all to gloat on in my den,memory’s rare gems fortune placed in my purse.Yet now I wish for a missing emerald:I should have read you stories with a hugand hand in hand traversed a fabled world we would have stowed and visited again.

But that perhaps is greed. I’ve had more thanthe bounties I could seize. And I still heartheir echoes coming back, celebratoryrefrains from scores of your ripening years when you taught me songs to sing in my heart.Those tunes embolden me like a braggartto shed regret about unread stories.Let reminiscences sound their trumpets.For, as my road’s closed end daily draws nearsweet chimes of those years ring out loud and clear.

122

APPRENTICE

She would bite off the very end of the threadand hold the needle up into the lightand poke and poke before she got it right.

And then the thread was drawn to equal endswhich she rolled together sometimes in a knot.I watched and learned and in good time even got

the chance to do it myself, leaving apprenticeshipfor a master’s status. Now I think I see her againa long lifetime later watch me jabbing in vain

over and over missing the eye of the needle I aim for.Then I remember when she failed to pierce it she placed the thread’s end on her tongue for the spit

to bind it, so I dip down for these frayed strands to stick.Anxiously I take another stab as if one was for practice.I miss again but I keep punching, still an apprentice.

123

MESSAGES

You would have seen him before he let goif you had turned. He just wanted to seizea line to hold on to, far from the ledge.But it could not be helped, you were busy,could not be expected to pause mid-stridewith your goals just coming in sight. He tappedon the glass of your glance on the off-chancesome ray of stray attention might be benthis way. Still, it never came. Inch by inchthe edge closed in on his feet, offeringhim peace and freedom, where he’ll no longerneed a stretched hand, a word of compassion.Then he teetered, grasping the air for hope’s last minute repeal. You had drawn the drapes.So when he left, booting his bags behind,and flailed through nothing your curtains stayed closed,as they always were even when you seemedto be looking outwards, scanning the view,taking in frantic fevered messages.

124

BUGLES AND DRUMS

I can still hear the lights-out bugleat eight o’clock coming from the orphanageon the opposite hill. It came to my windowpunctually, bringing its signing-off messageacross the gap of dark shadows between, clearmartial notes of its command reaching every earon our hill. And I remember well howit made me sad, how the night went lonelieras I stared out where lights were dimmed nowand I thought of the orphans with no real loveto enfold them, no special arms to fall intofor cuddling hugs, only the rules of the day.

Later sometimes, on moonlit nights, I would heara faint distant drumming, rhythms of Africa,east of the Belmont hill, a mile further away,and I knew in a yard somewhere a ring ofShango’s followers were singing and dancing,flouting the rules of a hostile power,hidden like felons from the law’s iron glovesince beliefs had to come from Europe’s scripture.For that was when we all jumped to the reveilleblown by far off buglers and to be Africanwas an offence. But the dreams of a small boy then never recalled bugles or drums. Theirthemes were of school and play. Yet, like everyone,he learned there were things to be sufferedto live, things that had to be secretly coveredas if no one recognised them, no one remembered.

125

AT PLAY

In the late afternoon sun in the playground’s tumult of voices they slither down the slides

raucously shouting and laughing, jumping onmoving carousels like a group of cheetahs.

Squeaks come through the chatter when little triumphsare suddenly won, and the babble increases.

Everyone of them wants the light to leave themmore time for the fun they have here together.

I follow them as they stand in a circleholding hands, hands of various shades of skin.

I watch them, so ingenuously linked, so innocent in their readiness for friendship,

and I feel tingles of hope coming alive,then more from their unrepressed delight playing

their game. Here now on this orange-lit playgroundI see the quick candid bonding they seize on

like a shared oneness. It is what attracts themall, though soon it will be time to go home,

to separate encampments and tribal flags,and soon they’ll learn they must pull their hands away

from those of a different hue. But that daystill tiptoes in silence round games they play.

126

OLD MEN

I used to think, when I was young, old mensitting on park benches dreaming at ten

in the morning were characters fit fora play. I wanted to ask what they saw

through their watery-eyed stares that the brain repeated as reels of pleasure or pain.

They would smile sometimes to themselves as ifsome discovered insight came with a whiff

of scented memory. I would watch them gaze,gnawing on the gristle left of their days, tasting stale flavours of lives they had led.In a page of a play they sat unread

as I now settle in the script time penned,using mementos remembered to blend

past and present. I peer for passing looksto see how they assess me in their books

of youthful chapters. The slouched charactertheir fictions make me some ancient actor

would be asked to do. That does not matter.There’s no ego left for them to shatter. Now everyone is tired of my themesI must preempt a park bench for my dreams.

127

CHILDHOOD

There was a time I thought that Santa Clauswas real, and though we had no chimneyhe would bring my fervent wish for Christmas.I put great faith in fairy godmothers,depended on magic and miracles.That was the time I thought that angels flew,that Eve and Adam sinned and I was borninnocent but doomed. Threatened with tormentfor missing a mass I learnt that heavenlet you in if you believed one doctrineand no other. Belief was first, your deedstook second place. Unbelievers bellowedin the flames of hell where sinners were burntforever. I was a child and was fencedin by the ropes of myths that kept out reason.Then I was rescued. (But that’s anotherstory and happened to just a few.)The point is how should I feel now aboutthe people killed day by day by one sector another in the name of their creed, some myth of mankind’s childhood? Do I spendmy days like a cynic without concern?While I await an answer, everywherechildren are made to pledge their service tosome dogma’s claims, getting prepared to jeerat what is called error in some otherscripture. Twin flags of death and war are sewnon childhood’s rompers. Some dated folktaleis knitted over their eyes like a veil.

128

MEANING

He lugs his bag of what his life had been,making his way among the lively legson Yonge Street; thinks, perhaps, their days beginas once his mornings did. His pace though lagsbehind the rushing throng. He doesn’t mind,content to mingle still within the dinof endeavour’s tumult. I’ve heard some partsof his story, parts he plucks from their pegsfrom time to time. I’ve had glimpses of goalsattained, marks of distinction won, plauditslike popping champagne. I heard too of shoalsthat had to be crossed, a home that definedwhat love was, the kind of labour that startsthe tides of self-worth rising. Broken bitsof his tale had been brought up on my screenwhere the useful years sped on and the spindecanted him from a world where the polesto navigate by were minds and hearts.Then time used rigid rules to intervene.I see him scan the bustle with a smilelike one who’s vaguely affected by itshectic missions. His own feats fill a fileshelved away where guarding dust might allowyou to read it. It lists piloting roleshe played, and reasons why he stole the scene.Tasks once incised their imprint on his brow.They mean nothing here, they mean nothing now.

129

JANUARY

(i.m. Jimmy King)

Every January on this Barbados beach wethink we see you approaching, your short white pants making

you look like a bwana, and a feeling of pleasuresweeps in like a wave of fine heady champagne breaking

over the day. We re-focus again and againwith the lens of elation, assured we are taking

you in the frame. Brief illusion always catches us.But, since it’s all we have now, we’re glad for its faking.

130

CHICKEN ON SUNDAY

It would have been more merciful with a cleaver,I suppose, but they had no cleaver, no bladefor swifter death. And so with a closed handover its eyes and head the hen was swunglike the crank of a motor engine and its neckwas wrung in a twist of fleshy rope while it stillkicked and fluttered. I would turn away,angry at the cruelty of that act of murder,though I thought it had to be done, the day had comewhen my hen had to feed us. Though perhaps it was justfor the show of it, to let it be known we had chickenthat Sunday. So the meal stained my plate with questions,doubts. I didn’t think then of other killings donefor some to go on feasting, and read later of virginsplaced on altars. It was just that my hen trusted meand used to pick corn from my palm. Then we killed it.An early lesson in betrayal and survival.

But I must have got used to it, that stab of guiltthat became less piercing when wings struggled and died.Later on, facing plates my palate found alluringI doubted more and more the agony suffered,considered it inherent in benefits we prizedthat feathers be ripped out and necks snapped.So that in later years it became easy to bearthe demolition of innocents in their bedsby missiles and bombs and not shed a tear.

131

AT THE SEA’S EDGE

To stand at the sea’s edge as the seceding sunturns saffron though the waves still swell without rest,as the crests that unceasingly bloom into whiteseem to spark in a flare of lessening light,makes you think of the horizon as a line that historyhas drawn with its delicate scalpel, severingnot merely epochs and their obsessive fashions,not just counties of family wars, but alsothe dispossessed, the cheated, from dreams of happiness,all who go weaponless to greet interlopers.Today Iraq, yesterday all of Africa, and before thatthe lands and the people of what’s called America.At the shoreline as day drifts from its mooringsyou watch the low sun leave a page of that storyand your sorrow deepens as dusk pursues the light.

The air’s now suffused with twilight’s in-betweenlustre and peaceful vagueness. The tinge above wanesto violet where rose-hued streaks of cirrus hover,the horizon’s drawn string loses its tautnessand the eye looks inward. What’s the point of knowingthat there will always be Alexanders and Caesars, a Rhodes,a Hitler? Empires that cling like leeches?A star pinpricks the nearly indigo dome andin the dense dimness the shore’s foaming fringe finds some light to dive in with a whitened whoosh.It revolves with us through infinity where changedoes not travel. Yet change is what they hope for,those who like convicts hammered and welded and lathed,those who have seen harvests they tilled taken away,ones stepped on like roaches by imperial boots.

The sea is now covered by darkness but a cruise ship,a far city of lights, follows a line to some port.Night birds flit about like thoughts unanswered.Somewhere predators are still busy at work.

132

POSSESSION

He has come back after two decades to repaintthe faded colours of murals on his mind’s wall.He has come to the bay he once knew as a placethey had hoped would be theirs, its beach of gleaming sand,the diamonds the stream elatedly channels down,the teasing tickles of ripples wooing the shore,such homegrown pleasures all theirs, come independence.He remembers the pictures that were clearly drawnof freedom. Now he walks along where the sea grapesroot in sand that the tides cannot reach, coveringpart of the beige skirting under the green mountains.What he observes is a pitched camp of thatched roundels,volleyball sand courts, beach chairs, water sports kiosks.Water skiers slice the smooth teal water, sail boatsfill their cheeks and slide around in oval patterns.

There were days when he came here with only the sunin possession and small havens of shade from someproud palm trees, not fun-seekers dropped by the planeload.They say that brings blessings, he thinks, jobs and dollars.He smiles at oiled bodies getting copper-coloured,the idling languorous yachts spanning the bay,a fawning craft vendor, servers with wagging tailsspeaking American looking for tips. The newlandlords with their safes elsewhere turned history’s pagesbackwards, proprietors now of dreams of freedomwhile the surf seethes, losing itself in a lather.

A late schooner breaks the line of the horizon,caught in the setting sun. He waits for it to shrink,watching the ebbing tide slap at sea shells that stillplayfully turn over, watching the displaced heirsto the land gathering nothing, the white hotelscommanding the shore selling access to the surf.He sees the land he longed for now offered for sale.Nothing belongs to the dreamers, keyless trustees.He leaves the question of gullible betrayaland slowly measures his way up past the sea grapes.Back on the road he finds he cannot look upto the mountains, and he hunches against the chill.

133

STILL LIFE

If I could go back and observe things againI would draw in moments like a fisherman,and wrap them in phrases like strands of a seine.I would watch water making folds slithering,eddying down a drain, follow flights of birdssurf-boarding on invisible waves, listento the wind muttering to itself forced tomake a sudden diversion around the house.I would turn away from the books that explainall about such things and attend to the realglints and gleams of the day’s geography. Withmy catch of pristine perceptions in my creelI would start again stabbing at blank pageswith transcriptions. If the lines still slip awaylike eels I would angle once more with my hookof hope, avidly pursuing wily words,driven by an old naive self-assessmentthough my pen’s real arthritis cramps my fist,the fist that I had not used when I should havekeeping a journal, collecting imagesinfused with feeling. But of what avail nowis wringing the hands over unsaved moments,over arid attempts at true translations?What is lost is lost, like any chance of framing,with lines of a poem, still lifes, portraits, landscapes.