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Notes on Road Town
1.
Does light dance the same way in your eyes as mine?
Do not prolong your flight through the eddying air,
Carthage beckons — as always.
There I imagine,
we should have all been poets,
until avulsed by Rome, winged with rubble,
scribbling notes at the base of magnificent columns.
But the daunting day is relentless, my city
looks a wreck beset by weeping clouds, the sea
will not listen to reason, and the punitive clock
does not compromise its metronomic rhythms.
2.
The rains come again to deluge the ghuts,
the island, briefly, returns to a browning in the sea,
the men go down to their boats through the mangrove’s
mangled roots.
Words bud in the mouth, this is all
a hymn. Look at the children, skittering like birds,
a capon poises himself on an unfinished wall,
even he knows the extent of his dominion,
the acreage of his call, the blueblack of his feather.
The ghut waters thunder in backdrop, the dew
has formed in beads on everything — what remains
of the corrugated roofs, the broken, limping hills.
3.
What is the beautiful, needful thing? The fish lie in rows,
bare and blue in the ice. Their bodies, radiant in the tray
of the fisherman’s pickup, the sun skipping along their scales,
their eyes like saucers of ink. I cannot discern where
the lure lanced, when the water broke into nothing,
into death’s frantic dance. The road rumbles, a crowd
congeals, and the exhausted fisherman,
Guinness in hand, flares a gold-toothed smile
at his congregants.
Their voices, ascending,
rebound off each other like breakers.
4.
The fly hums his impromptu arc,
simple sweat and, you know: what must is must is.
Gifts must break boredom. And the water
washes up alongside our cars, running,
always running, and we fear it
coming inside, breaking things as it does.
The word [the world] and all its attentions,
the scientists are in terror, and still
the water is rising.
The townspeople
concur, we must build our new homes in the air.
5.
Perhaps from a cloud perch, or from a fine
cratered moon, storms can be beautiful things.
Exemplars of asymmetry, of a natural mechanics
[as natural as sound], of how they form a language
their own that both poet and fisherman understand.
When the unmaking is stilled, the land
a negative space, there are still ghosts outside,
unstilled. There are still so many winds still
to come. That blue porcelain will not remain
long above us so plainly, so unremarkable.
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Thank you for all your blessings and your miracles![]()
Still,
We drove past so many stoic villages, the rows of rice fields,
the centuries of molasses still thick in the nose.
At Parika, the boats sit still in the Essequibo’s silt (thick as molasses)
tied to obelisk rods, their bright favours like crude flags
and the receded water, how brown but s...
