Reef: Shadow of Green

Mark McMorris

(rubble)

As wordy as the wind, and as stifle as the leaf at noon

the buildings of the town are standing by their word

as I pass them, and double around to the wharf, to

catch fish by the waters. All around me is the

mangle of history that coughed once on the sidewalk—

left, and I have wondered about the colors, behind

the detritus of sea ports, cannon, juridical wigs, murders

and the rum parties—dance hall bodies bumping, and

I’ve been to the yards with kerosene tins boiling bananas

and who was it that said, no relief for the black man?

(air)

The john crows wheel and drift over the green Warika Hills

vulture birds that sometimes land and forage dogs

still graceful from afar, prints on blue sky like cuneiform.

I used to watch them through my father’s binoculars

the wing-stabilizers, five feathers spread as from a hand

articulate nature with her bestial ironies, the birds that love death

wheel and drift, circulate in the heaven, biding their omens.

(stone)

The sweetie man selling chewing gum and stockings

sets up on a bridge—a business to leave to the children?—

that’s his regular spot. And I wave to him one day, passing

through the village in a car, how yu doin’, Star, an he

nothin’ doin’, Boss, you see how Mary get married? I

don’t know any Virgin Mary, but he meant the 10-year-old

now 30 who lived behind the dead-end, at the hillfoot,

with Errol, or Maiah, or Hedley—some name like that,

that means a man who is always looking for work

with his own machete, his own spliff, and maybe a dog,

an artificial leg, a big-belly concubine, a motorcycle.

Mary come and go, sell newspaper, do a little day’s work

washing and ironing, and keep the house clean, go and come.

(wire)

The wind says: I smelled the salt blast of the Palisadoes in my face,

and was glad

to see the airport still striving to be international, all that

time to get landing rights for BOAC and Lufthansa, so a man

can go to Germany and Holland, if him want. Driving in,

things reek like dead jelly-fish and sweat, along a Paradise Boulevard

and I spoke the teller, one morning at Barclays’ Bank,

young lady, what is the hex change rate for 10,000 US?

And she replied: either you is a thief or a capitalist, you know,

is where you a get so much money? You think say me fool?

My brethren you get lost in the Bible, over in Babylon

but I have a Subaru to drive, an import license

for TV dish and camera—digital, audio, telephoto banjo—

a cell-phone, ackee and saltfish, Big Mac, more than I can eat

until one day I went north to visit the Botanical Gardens

that have its gate shut, because everything dead and dry.

I telling you, that’s how it work down here, wid de suffaras.

And you know what? I buy a dictionary to converse:

(speech)

yabba

close yu mout, hear mi

calabash and yarn

     a will full suspend of be leaf

     I be lieve in yu now, hear

           (politician talk)

(light)

No one was there, and nothing to beat it, and not any song

that I can remember will say it better than the birth blood

the 10,000 born in a gulag and that’s nothing in the scheme

so quiet yuself and get wid the pogrom, a so them sey.

And so, as in a tumbler of rum, the face trembles, and the hand

swerves to ward off the light and of course there’s too much

of it down here for a single image to contest, the sky eye—

It does not give out. It does not diminish: words.

callaloo

two ell two oh: sailboat to America

bangle

name for a wrist chain copper

gold

tumblers of a watch, water proof

(iron)

(Leo dunk the watch in a bucket of water

before him buy it to test the guarantee)

Let me spell it out for you: water proof

I back off because the problem is solved.

(wood)

The camera’s eye-lid, a noisy blink: yellow petals flowering

Some sent their daughters to Vassar College in the north

I married one, one yellow tree, one college, one minister

some woke later than the gardner who cut the lawn

and went astray, in the back yard, catching butterfly.

One could still catch butterfly in those days, believe me,

and I caught lizards, a bad cold, a beating, other things.

Went to the wharf to see the skyscraper ships (New York).

Went to university to see the knowledge heads (New York).

No joy.

Agouti is an animal and

today is the hero’s birthday

a statue erect: Bob Marley at the Arena

gouging the population

a South American movie

I found the log book, a translator.

* * * *

The log-book opens: “America is conquered.

We have seen no savages in months—no trace.

The gods have left for more habitable spots.

Send reinforcements: seven armadas, grazia.

I leave these heirlooms to my replacement.

rotting wood, methane gas, pulped star-apples

the conchs carelessly dead

(Our wives—were we ever married, were we?)

Someone kept a catalogue of the landfall.

(tongue)

The undressed jungle at the water’s edge—

green leaf like a naked belly.

(Our wives—were we ever married?)

The starfish with her pimply arms as

rigid as a tongue on my neck.

The sea urchin washed up from the sea bed—

her prickly sex.

The wounded skin of driftwood—

seamed by water and

left out to dry by a careless hurricane.

The tide-suck in the stomach as

the moon seduces the ocean away

from her lover on the black land, my land.

(Our wives—)

(blood)

list pinned to the zinc wall of the rum shop

sea-gull   canoe   man-eaters   wild-pig

              (no one)

marlin    callaloo    google-eyed fish    frangipani

                (wood word)

* * * *

A single tree—what name the tree have, yellow poui

the blossoms never matter to me at all, the name lost

in heaven and everything spoil, mash up: even the wave-dem

(on sea-wall)

some do the mashin’ dem call the police

some go to jail, others to seed, some to all that trouble

a graceful body that love the deep places

white flowers to amuse a girl

                     (no one to see)

(voyage)

I was coming back from Portland and took a mountain road that cut diagonal across the island, and at some points the wall of bush opened onto the valley meadows, with a pond and maybe a great house, and the spectacle caused me to stop and pick out the cows, not too many of them, and measure the acres by stretching my arms all the way out. You never see such a green. More driving very slow and out of no where a town and a roundabout, shops, bars, electric lamp posts, trucks. Pass and leave behind.

The glimpse of the valley meadows, the empty beautiful land—still I was glad to see them, though I saw no one in six hours on any field much less a man planting anything to eat—and thought back to the old use it or lose it, to the Queen’s permission, and a planter in rum, with bad breath on top of a housekeeper: tumbling down the hill and I couldn’t stop the tumble, till I got back into the Mercedes and went on.

(our wives—)

mosquito: untuned violin

coconut:

woman’s hair like surf: sea’s navel

that’s how lovely she is

* * * *

“We forgot how to read and cipher.

The admiral would not leave his stateroom.

The admiral—nothing more than an old shawl.

He wrote letters, exonerations, mea culpas

send reinforcements, send something

                              (a sail! a sail!)

The wind says:

You are not ready for this much death—you need mops,

furnaces, landfill dumps, sea trenches to hold civilizations.

You are not equipped: for example, Mexico, San Domingo.

What do you know about a man who shits in his pants?

                    (error—a stray)

* * * *

“Each day we collected specimens. Of what?

The botanist said: there is money in shells,

the flowers are strong aphrodisiacs.

The sky, the jungle, the sea—all hostile, choking.

No one. We make do with the Indians.

          (—were we ever married?)

(time)

Amerindian graveyard: speech (skull) fragments

                 (cause of madness)

parrot, a tough meat

                    utterance at climate level

* * * *

—as in the photo of two dogs fighting—

—as in the mirror I carry in my pocket—

* * * *

“The soul grows desperate: the aromas

of salt and rotting wood, the proximity

of Sun’s plump face, or the crocodiles

that navigate the rivers like gondolas …

The thunder of surf has made me mad—.

My lords, make of these islands what you will.

                    (the yellowing heart

(leaf)

The curve surprises, with a loaded bus

over the edge of a precipice, and green

wetness on either side—am in it again

with confidence in the machine to touch

where the poui blazes and blue stretches

like an embrace, to cull out the accents.

                    (reef: shadow of green)

—The wind kissed the chest, the surf dilated with the sand-crab,

the night was a gentle breath that stirred the almond’s arms.