Derek Walcott: Three Poems

Volcano

Joyce was afraid of thunder,

but lions roared at his funeral

from the Zurich zoo.

Was it Zurich or Trieste?

No matter. These are legends, as much

as the death of Joyce is a legend,

or the strong rumour that Conrad

is dead, and that Victory is ironic.

On the edge of the night-horizon

from this beach house on the cliffs

there are now, till dawn,

two glares from the miles-out-

at-sea derricks; they are like

the glow of the cigar

and the glow of the volcano

at Victory's end.

One could abandon writing

for the slow-burning signals

of the great, to be, instead,

their ideal reader, ruminative,

voracious, making the love of masterpieces

superior to attempting

to repeat or outdo them,

and be the greatest reader in the world.

At least it requires awe,

which has been lost to our time;

so many people have seen everything,

so many people can predict,

so many refuse to enter the silence

of victory, the indolence

that burns at the core,

so many are no more than

erect ash, like the cigar,

so many take thunder for granted.

How common is the lightning,

how lost the leviathans

we no longer look for!

There were giants in those days.

In those days they made good cigars

I must read more carefully.

VI

Midsummer stretches beside me with its cat's yawn.

Trees with dust on their lips, cars melting down

in its furnace. Heat staggers the drifting mongrels.

The capitol has been repainted rose, the rails

round Woodford Square the color of rusting blood.

Casa Rosada, the Argentinian mood,

croons from the balcony. Monotonous lurid bushes

brush the damp clouds with the ideograms of buzzards

over the Chinese groceries. The oven alleys stifle.

In Belmont, mournful tailors peer over old machines,

stitching June and July together seamlessly.

And one waits for midsummer lightning as the armed sentry

in boredom waits for the crack of a rifle.

But I feed on its dust, its ordinariness,

on the faith that fills its exiles with horror,

on the hills at dusk with their dusty orange lights,

even on the pilot light in the reeking harbour

that turns like a police car's. The terror

is local, at least. Like the magnolia's whorish whiff.

All night, the barks of a revolution crying wolf.

The moon shines like a lost button.

The yellow sodium lights on the wharf come on.

In streets, dishes clatter behind dim windows.

The night is companionable, the future as fierce as

tomorrow's sun everywhere. I can understand

Borges's blind love for Buenos Aires,

how a man feels the streets of a city swell in his hand.

ITALIAN ECLOGUES

 [forJoseph Brodsky]

I

On the bright road to Rome, beyond Mantua,

there were reeds of rice, and I heard, in the wind's elation,

the brown dogs of Latin panting alongside the car,

their shadows sliding on the verge in smooth translation,

past fields fenced by poplars, stone farms in character,

nouns from a schoolboy's text, Virgilian, Horatian,

phrases from Ovid passing in a green blur,

heading towards perspectives of noseless busts,

open-mouthed ruins, and roofless corridors

of Caesars whose second mantle is now the dust's,

and this voice that rustles out of the reeds is yours.

To every line there is a time and a season.

You refreshed forms and stanzas; these cropped fields are

your stubble grating my cheeks with departure,

grey irises, your corn-wisps of hair blowing away.

Say you haven't vanished, you're still in Italy.

Yeah. Very still. God. Still as the turning fields

of Lombardy, still as the white wastes of that prison

like pages erased by a regime. Though his landscape heals

the exile you shared with Naso, poetry is still treason

because it is truth. Your poplars spin in the sun.