A city affair

For the St. Lucian poets

Don’t you know I love you but am hopelessat fixing the rain?derek walcott

We meet on the bus stand our affair hidden in shouldering crowds— another Wednesday, memory scouting through old Castries retrieving lost facades, missing bars, gone tailor shops, among sidewalk bazaars, Syrian emporia, pastel food huts and aloof demoiselles.

Full disclosure— no affair, just an aging poet’s fantasy of a shapely muse from Marc or Millet gentle spirit dissing corny flirtations with watchful eyes and dimpled chin.

I guess our island cities age with us— too-familiar corners turn weary with worn paint houses that once welcomed you lean into broken steps grime has grown dirty grey at the head of certain streets we have become old strangers with the stranded shoemaker near Victoria and Chisel.

Alert for bag snatchers and stray bullets pressing against all that life in the anonymous teeming of this culture, what do we love, if we love, and how doubt that we love?

    : brash illiterate glamour, gossip of salons and parlours, incomprehensible jabber of Jamaican Gaza from young pirates’ trays, ’70s chic thickened into retirement and resignation; those around the park who recall what we have forgotten about ourselves—     how doubt that we love the faithful harbour closing in twilight after the cruisers, soft-candle light settling from Mount Pleasant to Morne du Don to The Morne, sudden scattering of fine drizzle, remembrances of yards, rooms, first loves and evenings coming down to town—

And I see I have gone to fictions of memory asking of love now as a man searches the warm ashes of a long marriage to find again, if he can, the first coal, glowing infatuation, and under inquisition to seek out what do we love, if we love, and how doubt that we love?

On quiet Wednesdays, in lanes and streets of old Castries passing through bus stands looking, I suppose, some epiphany— I imagine apocalypse the last muted trumpet coming up under that strange harmony of voices, sound systems, traffic.

And O, I fear, I yearn, I hope, for these I do love, how doubt that I love, beyond my heart’s flooding boulevard—

for these I plead, I pray O Christ Your enrapturing Grace.