In memory of Derron Thomas

 

i

 

Dusk, a pair of goats clambers up the hill,

their soft cries suggesting a body where

there is none, a living creature with a spirit

in a cold cell, lying on newspapers on the former

burdens of unknown men, brittle music

in his ears, and though he must not, hope

is there within the starved hole in his chest,

flaring sunlight and memory: shadows trawl

the sand a child lies half asleep to the surf’s roar,

gravelly like his grandfather clearing his throat

at daybreak before cycling off down the fern

path to his tuber ground, the child shifts

to the grove of unripe sea pears no ant nest

thrives in, and he must speak his presence,

the blood’s weight to this land water scrapes

away, foam reaching for the child, now a log,

brown and dry, suggesting a body where

there is none, he stands unrevealed, the slate

voice of return an urn bobbing in his throat.

 

ii

The exam season

 

By now the pouis of Mona are in full bloom,

the plain crimson and crystal where a slave

plantation tans away in the heat’s coffer,

a broke eldorado a young general once, buckling

his uniform early in the morning, looks out

his window at another mote of the Empire,

does not foresee his subjects, unburdened,

passing underneath the aqueducts near the library

and theatre into exam rooms, poui scent furious

in their gossips cut short when the electric

bell shrieks them to attention, and they consider

“the commonwealth on an even beam,”

the invigilator’s wristwatch ticks the sun

to inch a digit, then another, as they race

a breeze sniping the flambeaux of the trees.

 

iii

 

Four months after the invasion, a new market

is opening where the old one was flattened

by fire, the garbage is elsewhere, even the ribbed

mongrels are absent, they were gone before the army

bulldozed the carapaces of burnt-out cars,

refrigerators and gas cylinders, and made a balm-yard

clearing blood flowed and compounded tribal

rifts into an estuary crabbed with the dead,

and not blood alone, for there is no blood

there in those stalls scoured with lime, salt glinting

off their galvanized shutters, portals that the Man,

the Gorgon, Don of Dons, the President-Minister-Chief,

leapt through to either America or hell,

but that is just flatulence from uptown mouths,

for in the ghetto streets, behind barbed territories,

concrete walls consecrated by bullets, it is something

else when the curfewed moonlight scrapes across

the exploded shell buildings blank windows

gape at tankers asleep like riddled sphinxes

in an oases of splinters, a whole other story,

it’s “him still here, you know,” the stars wink,

meaning, he will always be here, weighing our lives.

 

iv

 

I must not be too surprised at the sudden

rain while writing to you, crisply departed,

for no matter how far I have moved from home,

this always reins me in, the sight of rain

and sunlight together, childhood’s axle-joy

comes back-spinning us fast downhill after

stuffing ourselves with my granny’s cakes

and ginger beer, and you, ever the fleet-foot

playfield king, always ahead, so far ahead,

a cloud has eaten your voice and me your dust,

yes, you weigh heavily on me, friend,

who no longer knows the way to die.

 

v

 

“And there was no more sea,” the Levant

writes in his logbook, undoubtedly

stealing from the Book of Revelation,

everything recedes like a scroll, and I

have forgotten the acacias’ noise

when you walk under them towards

the lonely beach, these things in my head:

“And for the soul if it is to know itself

it is into a soul that it must look” and

“The Aegean flower with corpses,”

October, inconsolable, the asphalt

bordering the sea-grass, warm and silver

in the blazing afternoon so I know

I am alive and you are not, no matter

how sure I am that it is going to be there,

even after a new heaven and a new earth,

once I have crossed the crest by the grove

of sea pears and I sit on a log facing it,

the white shifting curtain, the sea, our sea,

“where I left you thinking I would return,” I weep.