‘For Sigrid’
‘For Sigrid’ from ‘The Bounty’ by Derek Walcott.
The sea should have settled him, but its noise is no help. I am talking about a man whose doors invite a sail to cross a kitchen-sill at sunrise, to whom the reek of kelp drying in the sunlit wind on the chattering shoal or the veils of a drizzle hazing a narrow cave are a phantom passion; who hears in the feathering lances of grass a soundless siege, who, when a bird skips a wave, feels an arrow shoot from his heart and his wrist dances. He sees the full moon in daylight, the sky’s waning rose, the gray wind, his nurse trawling her shawl of white lace; whose wounds were sprinkled with salt but who turns over their horrors with each crinkling carapace. I am talking about small odysseys that, with the rhythm of a galley, launch his waking house in the thinning indigo hour, as he mutters thanks over the answer of a freckled, forgiving back in creased linen, its salt neck and damp hair, and, rising from cover, to the soundless pad of a leopard or a mewing kitten, unscrews the coffee-jar and measures two and a half spoons, and pauses, paralyzed by a sail crossing blue windows, then dresses in the half-dark, dawn-drawn by the full moon’s magnet, until her light-heaving back is a widow’s. She drags the tides and she hauls the heart by hawsers stronger than any devotion, and she creates monsters that have pulled god-settled heroes from their houses and shawled women watching the fading of the stars.
