Excerpts SZEMELVNY from Another Life (by Derek Walcott) Chapter 14 Anna awaking

When the oil green water glows RAGYOG but doesnt catch ELR/ELFOG, only its burnish KIFNYESEDIK, something wakes me early, draws me out breezily to the pebbly shelf of shallows where the water chuckles and the ribbed boats sleep like children buoyed on their creases. I have nothing to do, the burnished kettle is already polished, to see my own blush burn, and the last thing the breeze needs is my exhilaration. I lie to my body with useless chores. The ducks, if they ever slept, waddle knowingly. The pleats of the shallows are neatly creased and decorous and processional, they arrive at our own harbour from the old Hospital across the harbour. When the first canoe, silent, will not wave at me, I understand, we are acknowledging our separate silences, as the one silence, I know that they know my peace as I know theirs. I am amazed that the wind is tirelessly fresh. The wind is older than the world. It is always one thing at a time. Now, it is always girlish. I am happy to see it as a kind of dimpled, impish smiling. When the sleep-smelling house stirs to that hoarse first cough, that childs first cry, that rumbled cavernous questioning of my mother, I come out of the cave like the wind emerging, like a bride, to her first morning. I shall make coffee. The light, like a fiercer dawn, will singe the downy edges of my hair, and the heat will plate my forehead till it shines. Its sweat will share the excitement of my cunning. Mother, I am in love. Harbour I am waking. I know the pain in your budding, nippled limes, I know why you limbs shake, windless pliant trees. I shall grow grey as this light. The first flush will pass. But there will always be morning, and I shall have this fever waken me, whoever I lie to, lying close to, sleeping

like a ribbed boat in the last shallows of night. But even if I love not him but the world, and the wonder of the world in him, of him in the world, and the wonder that he makes the world waken to me, I shall never grow old in him, I shall always be morning to him, and I must walk and be gentle as morning. Without knowing it, like the wind, that cannot see her face, the serene humility of her exultation, that having straightened the silk sea smooth, having noticed that the comical ducks ignore her, that the childish pleats of the shallows are set straight, that everyone, even the old, sleeps in innocence, goes in nothing, naked as I would be, if I had her nakedness, her transparent body. The beds garland my head. I could be happy, just because today is Sunday. No, for more. . Chapter 15 1 Still dreamt of, still missed, especially on raw, rainy mornings, your face shifts into anonymous schoolgirl faces, a punishment, since sometimes you condescended to smile, since at the corners of the smile there is forgiveness. Besieged by sisters, you were a prize of which they were too proud, circled by the thorn thicket of their accusation, what grave deep wrong, what wound have you brought, Anna? The rain season comes with its load. The half-year has traveled far. Its back hurts. It drizzles wearily. It is twenty years since, after another war, the shell cases are where? But in our brassy season, our imitation autumn, your hair puts out its fire, your gaze haunts innumerable photographs, now clear, now indistinct, all that pursuing generality, that vengeful conspiracy with nature, all that sly informing of objects, and behind every line, your laugh

frozen into a lifeless photograph. In that hair I could walk through the wheatfields of Russia, your arms were downed and ripening pears, for you became, in fact, another country, you are Anna of the Wheatfield and the weir, you are Anna of the solid winter rain, Anna of the smoking platform and the cold train, in that war of absence, Anna of the steaming stations, Gone from the marsh edge, From the drizzled shallows, Puckering with gooseflesh, Anna of the first green poems that startingly hardened, of the mellowing breasts now, Anna of the lurching, long flamingoes of the harsh salt lingering in the thimble of the bathers smile, Anna of the darkened house, among the reeking shell cases, lifting my hand and swearing us to her breast, unbearably clear-eyed. You are all Annas, enduring all goodbyes, within the cynical station of your body, Christie, Karenina, big-boned and passive, that I found life within some novels leaves more real than you, already chosen as his doomed heroine. You knew, you knew.