Tableau: Derek Walcott
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Tableau: Derek WalcottA Verse Essay
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
This essay, its ten words for syllables, line by line succumbs to its paragraphic weight, as one by one eight gather over their ninth life, its twelve occasions mythwork like months to a mayfly. Edmund Spenser's house of exile aches. Midway comes the idea that a palm frond's a page, each hem of the sea a quotation mark, the mind (on the mend from itself, mending itself) a New Nation like New York, New London, perhaps New Paltz; peelingly beautiful: an lemon rind quizzing the permanence of its tabletop, like an opened tulip does dirt. The sea is blue, the sea is green, the sea is yellow when the sea is of sea and sun. It erases. The seasons erase. A mirror erases its subject and asks the vanished subject to love itself whole again. Great, skybreaking tutor; allegorist and allegory; what did you begin with painted birds dotting your painted island in curatorial iambics; and then the length, the length, the length, your ambition strong like Spenser, who politicked in Ireland, while courting epic, and caged that woe, that dark exilic woe, in lined bars, lambent?
Rowan Ricardo Phillips, a poet, has published in Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, No: A Journal of the Arts, Seneca Review and other periodicals. He is an assistant professor of English and co-Director of the Poetry Center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
