from The Prodigal: 10

Derek Walcott

I

The ground dove stuttered for a few steps then flew

up from his path to settle in the sun-browned

branches that were now barely twigs; in drought it coos

with its relentless valve, a tiring sound,

not like the sweet exchanges of turtles in the Song

of Solomon, or the flutes of Venus in frescoes

though all the mounds in the dove-calling drought

the hills and gulches all briary and ochre

and the small dervishes that swivelled in the dust

were like an umber study for a fresco

of The Prodigal Son, this scorched, barren acre.

He had the smell of cities in his clothes,

the steam and soot of trains of Fascist stations

and their resounding vaults, he had the memory of rain

carried in his head, the rain on Pescara's beach

with the pastel hotels, and instead of the doves

the air-show with the jets soaring and swooping

over the Fair, the smell off that beach

came back on the rock-road where the turtle lifted

its mating music into the dry acacias,

and mixed with the smell off the galloping sea-flock,

each odour distinct, of sheep trampling their pens

as if their fear had caught the wolf-scent.

The rock-brown dove had fluttered from that fear

that what he loved and knew once as a boy

would panic and forget him from the change

of character that the grunting swine could smell.

A sow and her litter. Acknowledged prodigal.

Grey sunrise through a sky of frosted glass,

the great trees sodden, the paths below them pooled,

the headlands veiled and muslin-thin, no birds,

and pale green combers cresting through the drizzle;

a change of climate, the clouding of the self

in a sudden culture but one more confident

in its glazed equestrian statues in wet parks,

its railway stations echoing like the combers

in the ground-shaken caves under the cliff;

gathering, cresting then dissolving shallows

as light steps quietly into the house.

Light that inaudibly fits in the house

as a book on a bookshelf with its spines of tombs

and names, mouths slightly parted, eager to speak

wherever their station now. Every library

is a cemetery in sunlight. Sometimes, a shaft . . .

Across the dry hillock, leaves chasing dead leaves

in resurrecting gusts, or in the ochre quiet

leaves too many to rake on the road's margins,

too loaded to lift themselves, they lapsed singly

or in a yellow chute from the cedar, burnt branches;

lyres of desiccation choked the dry gutters

everywhere in the country, La Feuillée, Monchy,

by the caked track to Saltibus, over D'ennery.

Drought. Song of the wireless harp of the frangipani

that still makes a tangled music out of silence.

II

Now to cherish the depredations of April

even on the threshold of March, its sunlit eve—

the gommier maudit unshouldering its leaves,

barrow after loaded barrow, the leaves fading, yellow,

burnt grass and the tigerish shadows on the hillside,

and the azure a trowelled blue, and blue hill-smoke,

parched shortcuts and rust, cattle anchored in shadows

and groaning like winches, the didactic drought

against the hot sea that teaches what? Thirst

for the grace that springs in grooves of oblivious dust.

A fine haze screens the headland, the drizzle drifts.

Is every noun: breakwater, headland, haze,

seen through a gauze of English, a bright scrim,

a mesh in which light now defines the wires

and not its natural language? Were your life and work

simply a good translation? Would headland,

haze and the spray-wracked breakwater

pronounce their own names differently?

And have I looked at life, in other words,

through some inoperable cataract?

"What language do you speak in your own country?"

Every noun has its echo, a noun is a noise,

as every stone in the expanding sunlight

finds an exact translation in its shadow,

and it may be that you were halved by language

as definitively as the meridian

of Greenwich or by Pope Alexander's line,

but what makes this, if this is all it is,

more than just bearable, in fact, exultation

is the stone that is looked at, and the manchineels,

bitter, poisonous yellow berries, treacherous apples

that look like Eden's on the tree of knowledge

when the first noun was picked and named and eaten

and the shadow of knowledge defined every edge

originating language and then difference,

and subtlety, the snake and contradiction

and the sudden Babel of the manchineel.

III

The blank page grows a visionary wood.

A parallel section, no, in fact a whole province

of far, of foreign, of self-translating leaves

stands on the place where it has always stood

the right-hand margin of the page

loud, soft but voluble in their original language,

an orchestrating lexicon, veined manuscripts

going far back in time and deep in roots

and echoing in the tunnel of the right ear

with echoes: oak-echo, beech-echo, linden-echo,

and beech and birds a half-ancestral forest

whose metre was an ocean's and whose break,

parting declared the white-lined conjugation

of combers' centuries. This ocean, English and this forest weald,

this clattering natterer "burn," this distance, mist,

kept its high columns marching as my pen moves

towards that gap of light that comes upon

the bright salt arc of a bare unprinted beach

or where the piper leaves a print, its claws,

dim, imperceptible as an ancient rune—

that is the landscape, that, the stand of forest

made up of all these leaves and lines that

still rasp with delight with rhyme and incantation

pages of shade turning into translation.

And my left hand another vegetation

but not their opposite or their enemy,

palms and wild fern and praising them, the sea,

sea-almond, grape and vine and agave

that the wind's finger folded carefully

drawing its thumb to mark the dog-eared wave

across the dry hill, leaves chasing leaves

in a shiny, scurrying wind, and, in the brown quiet,

leaves, unraked, tiling the road's margins,

so loaded they don't lift, they lapse singly, yellow,

or chute from the cedars. Lyres of desiccation

in March's autumn, filling the dry gutters,

everywhere in the country, La Feuillée, Monchy,

except for the wireless harp of the frangipani

that still makes its music out of extreme stillness.

In my own botanic origins, frangere panem

to break bread, flower-flour in its white lilies,

except that in rare blossom I now remember

the flower is pink. It doesn't matter.

Since whatever hue it is, its wafer it serves that need,

petal on the sky's open palate at early mass

every morning but here most on this Sunday

with its Lenten drought, the heart-coloured flowers then

the caterpillars determinedly devour,

on a Sunday when a sadness still eats at the parallel

petals of my beaten heart, and the white pews of the sea,

the waves coming in aisles, my longing

for the communion of breakfast, the leafless,

flower-less but crusted bark of the frangipani,

frangere panem, the pain that I break and eat

flower and flour, pain and pain,

bright Easter coming, like the seas white communion.

IV

In the country of the ochre afternoon

it is always still and hot, the dry leaves stirring

infrequently sometimes with the rattling pods

of what they call "women's tongues," in

the afternoon country the far hills are very quiet

and heat-hazed, but mostly in the middle

of the country of the afternoon I see the brown heat

of the skin of my first love, so still, so perfect,

so unaltered, and I see how she walked

with her sunburnt hands against the still sea-almonds,

to a remembered cove, where she stood on the small dock—

that was when I thought we were immortal

and that love would be folded doves and folded oars

and water lapping against eroding stone

in the ochre country of the afternoon.