'The Sea is History':
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that gray vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.
First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, likea light at the end of a tunnel
the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:
Exodus. . . .
'A City's Death by Fire':
After that hot gospeller has levelled all but the churched sky,
I wrote the tale by tallow of a city's death by fire;
Under a candle's eye, that smoked in tears, I
Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire. . . .
'Midsummer, Tobago':
Broad sun-stoned beaches.
White heat.
A green river.
A bridge,
scorched yellow palms
from the summer-sleeping house
drowsing through August. . . .
'To Return to the Trees':
for John Figueroa
Senex, a oak.
Senex, this old sea-almond
unwincing in spray
in this geriatric grove
on the sea-road to Cumana.
To return to the trees,
to decline like this tree,
this burly oak,
of Boanerges Ben Jonson!
Or, am I lying
like this felled almond
when I write I look forward to age
a gnarled poet
bearded with the whirlwind,
his meters like thunder? . . .
