Controlling the Silver

Island Aubade

Island Aubade One bright morning when my work is over, I will fly away home. —Traditional Jamaican Before day morning, at cockcrow and firstlight, our island is washed by the sea which has been cleaning itself down with foamweed and sponge. Fishermen who toiled all night and caught trash let down their seines again on the off chance. The never-get-weary-yet cast off and their nets will break from abundance. On land, the feeding trees or kotch-hotels of egrets, bird-bush lodges, start to empty of perch occupants flown in pursuit of proverb’s worm. The faithful night watchman will punch the clock and so end dark night’s shift. He earns the right to strike a match, light first fire and issue out a sheer blue smoke scarf to morning. She will catch and tie up her hair with this token, gunman and thief slip and slide home with long bags. And the farmer turns in the sleep that is sweet, a laboring man sleep that, he’ll flex his wrists in practice for machete wielding; and the woman will give suckle to a drowsing infant. In the field, the low of cows in need of milking ministrations. The jalousies of the choir mistress, who sleeps alone, 2 open as she raises a revival hymn over the yard to hail the coming of our Lady of Second Chance, the Mother of Morning who invites all visitors.
Come drink this cup of Blue Mountain coffee stirred with a brown suede stick of cinnamon. Just say no thanks, what you need is bush tea. Pumpkin seeds parched, steeped in enamel pot with kept-secret, fitted lid, so no steam escapes before you raise its doctor-vapor to your face. Thank source, she will insist, for the mysterious way spirit debones from troubled flesh, easing you from sickbed across entrenched ice and tundra up the seven thousand feet peak of Blue Mountains. Startover is where Mother Morning lives. By leaven of struggle-up mantra, return Shulamite to Xamayca. Morning has become my mother, bringer of curing bush tea. She is now mother to the whole island, grandmother to Miles, mountain born, who thought ‘Maw’nin’ was a lady. “Show her to me” said my son, and we pointed him to a rose dawn over our village. Above our house was Blue Mountain Inn, the Queen of England dined there, we did too, till hurricane raised high the roof. She comes bringing frangipani and jasmine commingling in a clay jar of terra cotta, cloth cotta on her head coiled to bear, asking where we want these bride-ivory flowers dew-drenched from wedding nights. Set them on the Singer machine 3 by the door of a concrete-nog cottage where wrote the penkeeper of Enfield. Chalk-white walls scripted with calligraphy of ivy, acid-wash, slate roof porous in parts, board latches to doors and windows gaped wide so as to allow loquacious choirs of gospelling redthroat birds to chorus in the brick floor kitchen, where I stood over a gas stove and stirred, porridge for my boychild, for his dog, cornmeal and beef bones. Stirred, till we arranged ourselves as migrating birds. Emulate the fit fruit that mother of morning brings, mark June plum’s defensive seed, so deep the purple skin concealing the milk-flesh of most private starapple (which Miles consumed only in twos). She always has the same greeting, our lady of second chance morning. Hear her: “my children, come in like the new moon.” If we encounter turn-back northers and land after noon, she will be pleased to fix us second breakfasts of cooked food. Sweet potatoes, medallions struck from yellow yams, unfertilized ground provisions we’ll eat seated under poinciana trees, which drip petals, like scotch bonnet peppers, capsicum benediction on our second breakfast. Don’t shake hands with the wicked, eat greens, abase and abound. After this, no one you’ll meet is a stranger, she’ll say, and give you a mesh fan of flexible ferns. For this Jamaica sunhot is hell on your skin, burnt raw by radium. Going to bathe in the family river cousin, we need to go back to where our people come from. ...