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Trinidad Noir

Page 5

by Earl Lovelace

I was so broke all I needed was shades and a cup

  or four shades and four cups in four-cup Port of Spain;

  all the silver I had was the coins on the sea.

  You saw them ministers in The Express,

  guardians of the poor—one hand at their back,

  and one set o’ police only guarding their house,

  and the Scotch pouring in through the back door.

  As for that minister-monster who smuggled the booze,

  that half-Syrian saurian, I got so vex to see

  that face thick with powder, the warts, the stone lids

  like a dinosaur caked with primordial ooze

  by the lightning of flashbulbs sinking in wealth,

  that I said: “Shabine, this is shit, understand!”

  But he get somebody to kick my crutch out his office

  like I was some artist! That bitch was so grand,

  couldn’t get off his high horse and kick me himself.

  I have seen things that would make a slave sick

  in this Trinidad, the Limers’ Republic.

  I couldn’t shake the sea noise out of my head,

  the shell of my ears sang Maria Concepcion,

  so I start salvage diving with a crazy Mick,

  name O’Shaugnessy, and a limey named Head;

  but this Caribbean so choke with the dead

  that when I would melt in emerald water,

  whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent,

  I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea fans,

  dead-men’s-fingers, and then, the dead men.

  I saw that the powdery sand was their bones

  ground white from Senegal to San Salvador,

  so, I panic third dive, and surface for a month

  in the Seamen’s Hostel. Fish broth and sermons.

  When I thought of the woe I had brought my wife,

  when I saw my worries with that other woman,

  I wept under water, salt seeking salt,

  for her beauty had fallen on me like a sword

  cleaving me from my children, flesh of my flesh!

  There was this barge from St. Vincent, but she was too deep

  to float her again. When we drank, the limey

  got tired of my sobbing for Maria Concepcion.

  He said he was getting the bends. Good for him!

  The pain in my heart for Maria Concepcion,

  the hurt I had done to my wife and children,

  was worse than the bends. In the rapturous deep

  there was no cleft rock where my soul could hide

  like the boobies each sunset, no sandbar of light

  where I could rest, like the pelicans know,

  so I got raptures once, and I saw God

  like a harpooned grouper bleeding, and a far

  voice was rumbling, “Shabine, if you leave her,

  if you leave her, I shall give you the morning star.”

  When I left the madhouse I tried other women

  but, once they stripped naked, their spiky cunts

  bristled like sea eggs and I couldn’t dive.

  The chaplain came round. I paid him no mind.

  Where is my rest place, Jesus? Where is my harbor?

  Where is the pillow I will not have to pay for,

  and the window I can look from that frames my life?

  3. Shabine Leaves the Republic

  I had no nation now but the imagination.

  After the white man, the niggers didn’t want me

  when the power swing to their side.

  The first chain my hands and apologize, “History”;

  the next said I wasn’t black enough for their pride.

  Tell me, what power, on these unknown rocks—

  a spray-plane Air Force, the Fire Brigade,

  the Red Cross, the Regiment, two, three police dogs

  that pass before you finish bawling “Parade!”?

  I met History once, but he ain’t recognize me,

  a parchment Creole, with warts

  like an old sea bottle, crawling like a crab

  through the holes of shadow cast by the net

  of a grille balcony; cream linen, cream hat.

  I confront him and shout, “Sir, is Shabine!

  They say I’se your grandson. You remember Grandma,

  your black cook, at all?” The bitch hawk and spat.

  A spit like that worth any number of words.

  But that’s all them bastards have left us: words.

  I no longer believed in the revolution.

  I was losing faith in the love of my woman.

  I had seen that moment Aleksandr Blok

  crystallize in The Twelve. Was between

  the Police Marine Branch and Hotel Venezuelana

  one Sunday at noon. Young men without flags

  using shirts, their chests waiting for holes.

  They kept marching into the mountains, and

  their noise ceased as foam sinks into sand.

  They sank in the bright hills like rain, every one

  with his own nimbus, leaving shirts in the street,

  and the echo of power at the end of the street.

  Propeller-blade fans turn over the Senate;

  the judges, they say, still sweat in carmine,

  on Frederick Street the idlers all marching

  by standing still, the Budget turns a new leaf.

  In the 12:30 movies the projectors best

  not break down, or you go see revolution. Aleksandr Blok

  enters and sits in the third row of pit eating choc-

  olate cone, waiting for a spaghetti West-

  ern with Clint Eastwood and featuring Lee Van Cleef.

  4. The Flight, Passing Blanchisseuse

  Dusk. The Flight passing Blanchisseuse.

  Gulls wheel like from a gun again,

  and foam gone amber that was white,

  lighthouse and star start making friends,

  down every beach the long day ends,

  and there, on that last stretch of sand,

  on a beach bare of all but light,

  dark hands start pulling in the seine

  of the dark sea, deep, deep inland.

  5. Shabine Encounters the Middle Passage

  Man, I brisk in the galley first thing next dawn,

  brewing li’l coffee; fog coil from the sea

  like the kettle steaming when I put it down

  slow, slow, ’cause I couldn’t believe what I see:

  where the horizon was one silver haze,

  the fog swirl and swell into sails, so close

  that I saw it was sails, my hair grip my skull,

  it was horrors, but it was beautiful.

  We float through a rustling forest of ships

  with sails dry like paper, behind the glass

  I saw men with rusty eyeholes like cannons,

  and whenever their half-naked crews cross the sun,

  right through their tissue, you traced their bones

  like leaves against the sunlight; frigates, barkentines,

  the backward-moving current swept them on,

  and high on their decks I saw great admirals,

  Rodney, Nelson, de Grasse, I heard the hoarse orders

  they gave those Shabines, and that forest

  of masts sail right through the Flight,

  and all you could hear was the ghostly sound

  of waves rustling like grass in a low wind

  and the hissing weeds they trailed from the stern;

  slowly they heaved past from east to west

  like this round world was some cranked water wheel,

  every ship pouring like a wooden bucket

  dredged from the deep; my memory revolve

  on all sailors before me, then the sun

  heat the horizon’s ring and they was mist.

  Next we pass slave ships. Flags of all nations,

  our fathers below deck too deep, I suppose,

&n
bsp; to hear us shouting. So we stop shouting. Who knows

  who his grandfather is, much less his name?

  Tomorrow our landfall will be the Barbados.

  6. The Sailor Sings Back to the Casuarinas

  You see them on the low hills of Barbados

  bracing like windbreaks, needles for hurricanes,

  trailing, like masts, the cirrus of torn sails;

  when I was green like them, I used to think

  those cypresses, leaning against the sea,

  that take the sea noise up into their branches,

  are not real cypresses but casuarinas.

  Now captain just call them Canadian cedars.

  But cedars, cypresses, or casuarinas,

  whoever called them so had a good cause,

  watching their bending bodies wail like women

  after a storm, when some schooner came home

  with news of one more sailor drowned again.

  Once the sound “cypress” used to make more sense

  than the green “casuarinas,” though, to the wind

  whatever grief bent them was all the same,

  since they were trees with nothing else in mind

  but heavenly leaping or to guard a grave;

  but we live like our names and you would have

  to be colonial to know the difference,

  to know the pain of history words contain,

  to love those trees with an inferior love,

  and to believe: “Those casuarinas bend

  like cypresses, their hair hangs down in rain

  like sailors’ wives. They’re classic trees, and we,

  if we live like the names our masters please,

  by careful mimicry might become men.”

  7. The Flight Anchors in Castries Harbor

  When the stars self were young over Castries,

  I loved you alone and I loved the whole world.

  What does it matter that our lives are different?

  Burdened with the loves of our different children?

  When I think of your young face washed by the wind

  and your voice that chuckles in the slap of the sea?

  The lights are out on La Toc promontory,

  except for the hospital. Across at Vigie

  the marina arcs keep vigil. I have kept my own

  promise, to leave you the one thing I own,

  you whom I loved first: my poetry.

  We here for one night. Tomorrow, the Flight will be gone.

  8. Fight with the Crew

  It had one bitch on board, like he had me mark—

  that was the cook, some Vincentian arse

  with a skin like a gommier tree, red peeling bark,

  and wash-out blue eyes; he wouldn’t give me a ease,

  like he feel he was white. Had an exercise book,

  this same one here, that I was using to write

  my poetry, so one day this man snatch it

  from my hand, and start throwing it left and right

  to the rest of the crew, bawling out, “Catch it,”

  and start mincing me like I was some hen

  because of the poems. Some case is for fist,

  some case is for tholing pin, some is for knife—

  this one was for knife. Well, I beg him first,

  but he keep reading, “O my children, my wife,”

  and playing he crying, to make the crew laugh;

  it move like a flying fish, the silver knife

  that catch him right in the plump of his calf,

  and he faint so slowly, and he turn more white

  than he thought he was. I suppose among men

  you need that sort of thing. It ain’t right

  but that’s how it is. There wasn’t much pain,

  just plenty blood, and Vincie and me best friend,

  but none of them go fuck with my poetry again.

  9. Maria Concepcion & the Book of Dreams

  The jet that was screeching over the Flight

  was opening a curtain into the past.

  “Dominica ahead!”

  “It still have Caribs there.”

  “One day go be planes only, no more boat.”

  “Vince, God ain’t make nigger to fly through the air.”

  “Progress, Shabine, that’s what it’s all about.

  Progress leaving all we small islands behind.”

  I was at the wheel, Vince sitting next to me

  gaffing. Crisp, bracing day. A high-running sea.

  “Progress is something to ask Caribs about.

  They kill them by millions, some in war,

  some by forced labor dying in the mines

  looking for silver, after that niggers; more

  progress. Until I see definite signs

  that mankind change, Vince, I ain’t want to hear.

  Progress is history’s dirty joke.

  Ask that sad green island getting nearer.”

  Green islands, like mangoes pickled in brine.

  In such fierce salt let my wound be healed,

  me, in my freshness as a seafarer.

  That night, with the sky sparks frosty with fire,

  I ran like a Carib through Dominica,

  my nose holes choked with memory of smoke;

  I heard the screams of my burning children,

  I ate the brains of mushrooms, the fungi

  of devil’s parasols under white, leprous rocks;

  my breakfast was leaf mold in leaking forests,

  with leaves big as maps, and when I heard noise

  of the soldiers’ progress through the thick leaves,

  though my heart was bursting, I get up and ran

  through the blades of balisier sharper than spears;

  with the blood of my race, I ran, boy, I ran

  with moss-footed speed like a painted bird;

  then I fall, but I fall by an icy stream under

  cool fountains of fern, and a screaming parrot

  catch the dry branches and I drowned at last

  in big breakers of smoke; then when that ocean

  of black smoke pass, and the sky turn white,

  there was nothing but Progress, if Progress is

  an iguana as still as a young leaf in sunlight.

  I bawl for Maria, and her Book of Dreams.

  It anchored her sleep, that insomniac’s Bible,

  a soiled orange booklet with a cyclop’s eye

  center, from the Dominican Republic.

  Its coarse pages were black with the usual

  symbols of prophecy, in excited Spanish;

  an open palm upright, sectioned and numbered

  like a butcher chart, delivered the future.

  One night, in a fever, radiantly ill,

  she say, “Bring me the book, the end has come.”

  She said: “I dreamt of whales and a storm,”

  but for that dream, the book had no answer.

  A next night I dreamed of three old women

  featureless as silkworms, stitching my fate,

  and I scream at them to come out my house,

  and I try beating them away with a broom,

  but as they go out, so they crawl back again,

  until I start screaming and crying, my flesh

  raining with sweat, and she ravage the book

  for the dream meaning, and there was nothing;

  my nerves melt like a jellyfish—that was when I broke—

  they found me round the Savannah, screaming:

  All you see me talking to the wind, so you think I mad.

  Well, Shabine has bridled the horses of the sea;

  you see me watching the sun till my eyeballs seared,

  so all you mad people feel Shabine crazy,

  but all you ain’t know my strength, hear? The coconuts

  standing by in their regiments in yellow khaki,

  they waiting for Shabine to take over these islands,

  and all you best dre
ad the day I am healed

  of being a human. All you fate in my hand,

  ministers, businessmen, Shabine have you, friend,

  I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand,

  I who have no weapon but poetry and

  the lances of palms and the sea’s shining shield!

  10. Out of the Depths

  Next day, dark sea. A arse-aching dawn.

  “Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.”

  The slow swell start cresting like some mountain range

  with snow on the top.

  “Ay, Skipper, sky dark!”

  “This ain’t right for August.”

  “This light damn strange,

  this season, sky should be clear as a field.”

  A stingray steeplechase across the sea,

  tail whipping water, the high man-o’-wars

  start reeling inland, quick, quick an archery

  of flying fish miss us! Vince say: “You notice?”

  and a black-mane squall pounce on the sail

  like a dog on a pigeon, and it snap the neck

  of the Flight and shake it from head to tail.

  “Be Jesus, I never see sea get so rough

  so fast! That wind come from God back pocket!”

  “Where Cap’n headin? Like the man gone blind!”

  “If we’s to drong, we go drong, Vince, fock-it!”

  “Shabine, say your prayers, if life leave you any!”

  I have not loved those that I loved enough.

  Worse than the mule kick of Kick-’Em-Jenny

  Channel, rain start to pelt the Flight between

  mountains of water. If I was frighten?

  The tent poles of water spouts bracing the sky

  start wobbling, clouds unstitch at the seams

  and sky water drench us, and I hear myself cry,

  “I’m the drowned sailor in her Book of Dreams.”

  I remembered them ghost ships, I saw me corkscrewing

  to the sea bed of sea worms, fathom pass fathom,

  my jaw clench like a fist, and only one thing

  hold me, trembling, how my family safe home.

  Then a strength like it seize me and the strength said:

  “I from backward people who still fear God.”

  Let Him, in His might, heave Leviathan upward

  by the winch of His will, the beast pouring lace

  from his sea-bottom bed; and that was the faith

  that had fade from a child in the Methodist chapel

  in Chisel Street, Castries, when the whale-bell

 

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