USA

If
(for Derek Walcott)

If, over coffee and the papers one Sunday morning,
you should find these words in some anthology
lying idly on the table where Pitons scratch the sky
please do not dismiss them as a starry eyed
disciple's gratitude: your 'high concern'
weeps in their grapplings with metaphor.

As I sit on a hotel terrace looking at the sea,
the white breakfast tables arranged like islands
and fickle October tossing ripe almond leaves;
no freighter distracts me from uncertainty,
only the fishing pirogue banking in salt waves
and the wind kicking froth across its cobalt page.

And as I double back toward the city,
your words gathering around me like prayer
their meaning leaking through the grid of my life;
I am grateful for each line in memory,
and their gift in timeless legacy.

Back in my studio as the humming bird
hovers between dusk and seamless night,
the cactus on my desk blooms from a prickled ear.
Soon, I shall rise and rewind the audio tape
letting your Odyssey sweeten the diminishing world.

Dusk Eyes

There is something oddly spiritual about aging sight,
I mused, as I walked around the dam alone,
looking toward the aqueduct through dusk-
dim light and imagining a beast’s rough husk.

The guard sitting on the wall smiles as I pass,
‘you moving easy today, not you usual pace’
I answer him with the look of joyful pain,
for I had left my partner in her darkened room

like the rice and peas bush hiding in pangola grass,
the trees and cloud in the water’s tinted glass
where a cow’s limp body doubles like a fist:
Perhaps the end had come while quenching thirst.

Toward the west, the splinter moon hangs backwards
like a third eye between the arched brows of hills
and as I sip the last of bottled water and mourn
having neither pen nor page with which to burn

this passion, this hour, I turn the bend where the tree
like a crucifix is bare and lashed by nameless vines.
I cross the countless broken wings outlasting mirth,
choked by the sorrow of unutterable truth.

Dark Days
(for jbg)

She tells me the days seem endless to her,
that they are beasts come to slay her dreams,
the nights have neither moon nor stars,
that the mountains are battened beyond their bars.

There are times she cannot bear the light
and stays gathered in sheets, waiting for the fear
to pass, like a wall dusk’s shadows from its face.
I think of Walcott’s ‘Season of Phantasmal Peace’,

‘something brighter than pity for the wingless ones’,
and wonder what separates darkness from the sentence.
All ends there, I tell her: morning buries the waning moon,
as the ocean the salmon after their spawn.

Often when I call on the guardian of our soul,
the One to whom, I’m told, I owe my earthly voice,
only an indiscernible echo returns,
like the mimicry where sorrow yearns.

Is it a blessing to be shackled to the muse?
Even my own dark weighs me down
Words that once flirted with death
tear at me now from her sodden earth.

Sonnet
The Novice

Tonight, I make my way from his sanctum sanctorum,
freer than I’d been in recent days, still the chatter
as I imagine a milky pool and Narcissus staring
through cataracts at the wrinkled skin, the water
clotting his veins. Had I enshrined the splinter
of remembrance in stanzas of contrived grief,
reveled too long in the stark white verses of winter,
idling in the glassy stares of disbelief?
Black bars imprison songs stripped of their notes
like the last of the sun the hunched shoulders of earth
and the liveried master of a curious youth remotes
to the hermit’s cell, obscuring secular truth.
Yet, passion burgeoning like a fig’s split flesh divines
my tongue as words the soul where hunger imagines.

Vincent

This poem is not about the boy who grew
with the Royal Palms on Titchfield hill, who knew
the smell of fish gut lacing the salt breeze
as the boats stuttered ashore on dying waves.
It is not about a town that stirs gentility
with the treachery of an unknowable sea.

This poem is not about the man, a country
with its full moon in the centre of thinning grey
rising like a hedge over a narrow margin
and eyes that looked out on their happy grief;
nor earth, as he dragged his feet
to the place he’d come to know,
as chains shuffle their sorrow.

Behind the market, a woman stabs at ice
as if it were the man she’d left asleep with the stale
night on his breath. The scales splatter her face.
‘You want any fresh snapper today?’ A soprano tilts
In the breeze, then flattens, like the eyes for sale.

No, this poem is not about you, Vincent
for I disliked you without reason, and that was all.
Perhaps, it was insidious as the scent
of your cologne unsettling the solitude, a call
from the garden where conditions grew.
I tried to ignore you but you muttered like the river
riding hot stones on that day in red July.

This poem is about her, ashes stored in an urn,
a purple fish in a bowl that dances when I sing,
the garden of love she watered with conditions,
bitter lees left in a cup,
locked drawers, splayed now like someone’s obsession,
and humility—the sea that suffered me up.

© All Copyright, Gwyneth Barber Wood.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.