by Kwame Dawes
I
In the shade of the sea grape trees the air is tart
with the sweet and sour of stewed fruit rotting
about his sandaled feet. His skin,
still Boston pale and preserved with Brahman
devotion by the hawkish woman
who smells cancer in each tropical wind,
is caged in shadows. I know those worn eyes,
their feline gleam, mischief riddled;
his upper lip lined with a thin stripe
of tangerine, the curled up nervousness
of a freshly shaved mustache. He is old
and cared for. He accepts mashed food
though he still has teeth - she insists and love
is about atoning for the guilt
of those goatish years in New England.
A prophet's kind of old. Old like casket-
aged genius. Above, a gull surveys
the island, stitches loops thorough the sea and sky -
an even horizon, the bias on which
teeters a landscape, this dark loam of tradition
in which seeds split into tender leaves.
...
VII
I carry the weight of your shadow always,
while I pick through your things for the concordance
of your invented icons for this archipelago.
Any announcement of your passing
is premature. So to find my own strength,
I seek out your splendid weaknesses.
Your last poems are free of the bombast
of any gaudy garments, I can see the knobs
of your knees scarred by the surgeon’s incisions
to siphon water and blood from bone;
I stare at your naked torso – the teats
hairy, the hint of a barreled beauty
beneath the folding skin. I turn away
as from a mirror. I am sipping your blood,
tapping the aged sap of your days while you grow
pale. You are painting on the beach, this is how
the poem began – I am watching you watching
the painting take shape. I have stared long enough
that I can predict your next stroke – your dip
into palette, your grunts, your contemplative
moments, a poised crane waiting for the right
instance to plunge and make crimson ribbons
on a slow moving river. These islands
give delight, sweet water with berries,
the impossible theologies
of reggae, its metaphysics so right
for the inconstant seasons of sun and muscular
storm – you can hear the shape of a landscape
in the groan of the wind against the breadfruit
fronds. I was jealous when at twenty, I found
a slim volume of poems you had written
before you reached sixteen. It has stitched in me
a strange sense of a lie, as if all this
will be revealed to be dust – as if I learned
to pretend one day, and have yet to be found out.
This long poem "Inheritance" by Ghanaian-Jamaican poet Kwame Dawes won the Pushcart Prize in 2001
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