On Saint John
A poem. "A goat’s bell chuckled through the trees"
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I
A goat’s bell chuckled through the trees beside
the slithering road at Coral Bay. Punctuate
this memory with its music. Brush aside
curtains at the villa window where waves annunciate
the stony shoreline’s consonants, and simple light
brushes palm leaves and warms a bathing lizard’s blood.
Lameshur, L’Esperance, Beverhoudt,
ruined estates with roofs that welcome the sun’s flood
and let pink jasmine braid over their redoubts,
forgetting the hard angles of old Dutch surnames
as bindweed soothes the rafters, and hibiscus flouts
its liberated neon over crumbling frames.
It all goes by in a blur, out the window of a Jeep
while tinny reggae thumps and bay after wild bay
swims into view, churning its blue light. Sheep
dodge the car’s horn lazily, chewing on hay
some lorry dropped into the road. Midwinter,
somewhere else. But time has come unsprung here
like a cheap watch rusted by humidity. Founder
all ambition, to write and to be known, in clear
shallows and the false hope of an unspoiled world.
I needed all its grace, though I had soiled it
by arriving, and as each foam-webbed wave unfurled
I heard it say, “Love of a place incurs no debt.
What you cherish is the bloom, not the old slave shack it climbs,
and the loud, vaulting gulls suspended on warm wind.
Take their beauty freely and be simplified.”
Then its benediction sank into the sand.
II
The shore there stays with me, partly possessed, a half-
memorized line from Lorca or Neruda
where love is praised as if it were the body itself.
Her thigh’s white contour, like a coastline in Bermuda
peppered with sand when she rose from the water.
Her shoulder smelled of the sea’s vintage, and
as her hair dried like palm leaves after rain, to want her
was to covet all the swells and inlets of the island.
The steep roads had a stubborn woman’s temperament,
Cinnamon Bay ruffled with flirting surf
and the mangrove woods looked wild and innocent.
Now obvious metaphors follow, of lust and birth,
the cobalt frigatebirds that twine their flight in pairs,
circling with lover’s cries, crisp white sails scrubbed clean
by sunrise, passion that puts on no airs
and gives illumination briefly like the sheen
of foam that glances crumbling waves. Nothing prepares
us for love’s dispossession, a feeling just like grace
except for its situation, as the quick light flares
on masts and cliffs in Popilleau and that loved place
escapes my knowledge and possession. Fires
sparkle on a beach across the darkening cove,
headlights flicker distantly through trees, phone wires
whistle in the breeze and night fills with the moan of doves.
III
The pebbled road slashes from Coral Bay to Cruz,
a pen stroke trailing ink that barely parts the trees
around which sea and sea grass rattle. February’s
return means calmer surf, the thirsty cattle’s moos
among tin shanties, fewer power outages
and work among the tourists. Now our car slips by
dragging a wobbling trail of electronica
and petrol. Warmth, escape from our America,
its constant twelve inches of snow and messages
to answer still accumulating back at home. We drive
not really through the towns but over them, our plane
of pity and compassion brushing theirs like two
acacia leaves negotiating in the wind. So whose
dark silhouette is lifting something in the main
roadway, his chin set, flanked by goats and gulls?
I sense the swung heft of an unfamiliar burden,
briefly, then the scene dissolves around
a curve of bay trees and flamboyants. He’s real,
above my pity or my need for an ideal.
Now as the green waves fold and run themselves aground
against his island, free him from my grasping ink
and let the coiled road whip us on. The white-rum sun
is darkening and spicing, oleanders fan
as we roll past, ahead wild stars and mast lights blink.
IV
Walcott, Brathwaite, Nichols and Roumain. The palms
reiterate their fanning lines. Tropicbirds
and night herons collect the generous ocean’s alms
along blue coasts, rhyming their shadows’ flourished words
in flight along the smooth sand’s paper. I’ve
grown fat on their eloquent agony, good rum
mixed with cheap white coconut to sooth its slide
down through my gullet, kill the pain. What good will come
from outsiders has been their mastery’s frequent subject,
but the good we gain is obvious: all this.
Smells of frying conch at evening, the fragrant prospect
of squeezed lemon mingling with hot buttered fish,
Roman constellations slipping from their chains
of storied agony and hung in casual splendor
like jar lights from a restaurant’s rafters, taking no pains
to circle the meridian. If I surrender
to delight between ruined rum vats and
slaves’ quarters, then I pick a red hibiscus sewn
in blood and sugar. The forgetfulness of sand
is my illusion, lifted from an image blown
up in an online ad, as if this whole island
were canvas for a white man’s dreams. Gauguin, Cézanne,
myself, who need a splash of color in the frame
next to the noble savage, or for palm to fan
over a still life of a bowl of fruit. Their fame
was wrestled from a snarl of mangroves knotted thick
as creole. Now it’s I who fail to comprehend,
except that beauty has no slaves or citizens,
but opens like a jasmine’s star with no demand
on us but thanks. I see a lark's wild innocence
over the water like a blowing rag of foam:
the grace of something sure, though far from home.
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