Pointe des Chateaux, Guadeloupe, and: The Doctor, and: Pearl and Me

Pointe des Chateaux, Guadeloupe

(for Frantz and Dany Quillen)

Here at the lip of the Atlantic
    where the huge cross rises--
waves are also like islands
    coming forward--
      the bathers' rhythm
with surf lashing the rock's coral
  or volcanic formation.

    Walking along, I consider
other islands, streets;
      an errant sea really,
akin to bringing myself to you
  at a breakneck speed--
throwing myself in,
  a drowning once again--
      I hear you say.

My Indianite's presence
    with tremor of hands, knees,
heart throbbing, and walking
  step by step across the valley;
      ah, those details,
  in my bare-French words,
      or indentured forgetfulness.

The cross looms higher: magnificence
  or watery death. Seas, oceans--
Mariama or the Holy Mary,
    journeys now at a standstill--
      my heritage or this tradition,
the body yet floating, hurling,
      into a larger place.

St. Francois or Moule--
    my coming to a heave and roll
with you at Pointe des Chateaux;
    the tourist yet in me--
bringing us closer together.

    Now pointing to Maria Gallante's
majestic blue or aquamarine, the white surf's
    sail, bare-breasted, beauty at the crest--
my heaving before an entire crowd's
    surge altogether in us--
      always reclaiming
      islands!

(15 December l990)

The Doctor

You, almost drunk,
in these streets;
you, Doctor Tache,
insisting that I know your name;
you who've lived here long
in these narrow, forgotten
      streets of Havana.

And that famous American
(a writer) who once lived here,
too, with whom you ate
and drank
(Hemingway, isn't it?).

The women you both knew;
and you now insist that
this story be told to every tourist
                  who comes to Cuba:
like emblems of the Spanish
past that still haunt me
with your tale
            of lost-and-found.

Pearl and Me

Going to the George Lamming seminar
on the "Conquest of the Indies"
at the University of Miami
(Coral Gables, South Florida),
      and inhaling the Cuban American
air, with los exilios--
      the heat swelters,
Hispanic no less.

Pearl from Washington, D.C.,
originally from Jamaica--
she says,
      who wants to know why
I'm not perspiring.

My veins are made of ice,
I tell her (in jest);
      and I'm still part
of the Americas--
      Canada no less,
protesting
      the U.S. embargo on trade
to Cuba, all front-page news--
    on my return to Ottawa.

(10 July l996)