Four Poems About Jamaica
1. Montego Bay, 10:00 P.M.
A chandelier, a tiara,
a hive of lights. A cruise ship
is leaving, the S.S. Jesus
again, the only ship that comes
here. If I watch the ship go
long enough I become the ship.
So rather than leave I look away --
because the sea is a foreign country
and I love to travel, but not
like a faltering heart
set on fire and pushed out to sea
not like a birthday cake.
2. Jamaicans Posing to Be Photographed
Illiterate Esther watched me
closing a book and asked,
Can you hear from the dead
with that box? God yes.
Today I take pictures.
My subjects are full dress.
My subjects! As the language
I liveby flows through me
it carries so much history
I'm embarrassed, I who believe
in language and distrust
its exact parlor tricks.
Full dress, historical
posture, as if they were running
for office or these were wedding
pictures, since white folks care
about weddings. Somber Ronald,
age three. And Esther, archival,
though the dead don't live in boxes
and nothing keeps in the heat.
3. A Hairpin Turn above Reading, Jamaica
for Russell Banks
Here's where the fire truck fell
beached on its side, off the road.
So when the fire fell into itself
we came down the hill to watch
the fire truck get saved. Only
the rich live this high, with a view
of the bay, and the rich
will be with us forever,
though the pump at the base
of the mountain burns out
and the Socialist party, in power,
is sorry. The rich buy truckloads
of water and hire the poor
to drive them up. Water will go
uphill if money will go down.
Today there's a goat in the bend,
stolid and demure. She'll move
soon: there's nothing to eat in the road.
A cow and two egrets tack
into the shadow of a mango.
It's noon. Above the bay, turkey
buzzards sift the thermals.
At dawn they perch and spread
their wings to dry, like laundry.
My friends and I are the rich,
though the house is rented. We'll fall
away, the goat will loll off the road,
the bad clutch in the van will slur
but we'll make it up, and we do,
heat-steeped, thoughtful, and sleepy.
4. Kingston
No photograph does justice, etc.,
but what does a photograph care
for justice? It wants to be clear,
the way an angel need not mean,
but be, duty enough for an angel.
No angels here. Hovels seen from far
enough away they look picturesque.
The blatant blue sky so cool in pictures
is gritty with heat. The long day stings.
We squint at the lens. Though the lines
in our faces are engraved by the acids
of muscle-habits, not by tears.
Sympathy we have to learn. Here's
a family of three living in a dead car.
The guidebooks warned us away
from this, and so we came,
ungainly, spreading
our understandings of sorrow like wet wings.
We turn and turn, but everywhere is here,
a blurred circle of wing scuffs.
