Names

 - for Edward Brathwaite
 
I
 
My race began as the sea began,
with no nouns, and with no horizon,
with pebbles under my tongue,
with a different fix on the stars.
 
But now my race is here,
in the sad oil of Levantine eyes,
in the flags of Indian fields.
 
I began with no memory,
I began with no future,
but I looked for that moment
when the mind was halved by a horizon.
 
I have never found that moment
when the mind was halved by a horizon--
for the goldsmith from Benares,
the stone-cutter from Canton,
as a fishline sinks, the horizon
sinks in the memory.
 
Have we melted into a mirror,
leaving our souls behind?
The goldsmith from Benares,
the stone-cutter from Canton,
the bronzesmith from Benin.
 
A sea-eagle screams from the rock,
and my race began like the osprey
with that cry,
that terrible vowel,
that I!
 
Behind us all the sky folded
as history folds over a fishline,
and the foam foreclosed
with nothing in our hands
 
but this stick
to trace our names on the sand
which the sea erased again, to our indifference.
 
II
 
And when they named these bays
bays,
was it nostalgia or irony?
 
In the uncombed forest,
in uncultivated grass
where was there elegance
except in their mockery?
Where were the courts of Castille?
Versailles' colonnades
supplanted by cabbage palms
with Corinthian crests,
belittling diminutives,
then, little Versailles
meant plans for a pigsty,
names for the sour apples
and green grapes
of their exile.
 
Their memory turned acid
but the names held;
Valencia glows
with the lanterns of oranges,
Mayaro's
charred candelabra of coca.
Being men, they could not live
except they first presumed
the right of every thing to be a noun.
The African acquiesced,
repeated, and changed them.
 
Listen, my children say:
moubain:      the hogplum,
cerise:       the wild cherry,
baie-la:      the bay,
with the fresh green voices
they were once themselves
in the way the wind bends
our natural inflections.
 
These palms are greater than Versailles,
for no man made them,
their fallen columns greater than Castille,
no man unmade them
except the worm, who has no helmet,
but was always the emperor,
 
and children, look at these stars
over Valencia's forest!
 
Not Orion,
not Betelgeuse,
tell me, what do they look like?
Answer, you damned little Arabs!
Sir, fireflies caught in molasses.