Art - The Return. (c) Jackie Hinkson

Pilgrim SuiteJohn Robert Lee

1.

who will come to the red gate with the red mail tinbox
its pillars topped with red pyramids
who will walk past the yellow hydrant
and stare through the closed gate
at the thick variety of garden
wrought-iron barricade round the verandah
who will see the green banana leaf
peering over the grey wall
for who might come through the red gate on Pelham Street?


2.

‘If I feel the night
move to disclosures or crescendos,
it’s only because I’m famished
for meaning.’ – Li-Young Lee

persistent lament of wood-doves
who, who has gone, gone forever?

orange wafer of sun settling to horizon’s eclipse

evenings shuddering with unrequited affections

I would love you with ardent hunger
beyond your name, your ancient eyes, sensual lips
tattoo on your left breast
the inexorable news of your dying

in this hour
in which I love you
I am a poem without a theme
without a clear image of you
a line to follow
a procession of remembrances to metaphor
no half-rhyme rhythms to match ambiguity

going past your old house near the Baptist chapel
and Chinese grocery
the blue estate-wall on my left with its crimson border
trees behind it raucous with afternoon parrots
a cock under the avocado tree crowing for some epiphany
wanting a Creole love song from Philip Martelly and Kassav
to make me recall your sensuous hips
incomprehensible smile perfect mouth
your various infidelities
like the turning familiar corner into which I bend my eyes
alert for unwelcome surprises

how can I love you without you

these November days close with apocalyptic cloudbursts over darkening horizons

who, who has gone, gone forever
wood-doves lament persistently.


3.

  ‘for he looked for a city which has foundations.’ – (Hebrews 11:10)

how can the last way out
not be a dirt-track
moving under a canopy of trees
their dark barks turning white
green foliage bowing over your passing
and somewhere in all that good bush
angels stroll, you are sure, fluting like ground-doves
their wings breezing above like casuarinas
near the beach-stone edge of Pigeon Island –
you gave me this Bible-text card
with that dirt-track road
between green trees
and their whitening barks
when we met in the City of Palms
in that city of refuge, city of priests
and beyond my chaste prayers
my chastening desire
you pressed my hand to your lips
and left it there
all these kind years –
I have kept it in my Book of Offices
all your faithful hours
all this becoming, as they say, one flesh
and it is, I think
a true sighting
on that sacred card with its scripture text
of the last road I want to walk with you
the road that goes my love
to the City of Holy
angels fluting like wood-doves
down the last dirt-track of Earth
beside the grace-filled trees
and their whitening barks.


4.

those who know such things
say our spiral galaxy, planets and further quasars,
the space-time continuum on which they curve orbits
are expanding fast, away from themselves
into some blue-black vacuum of solitary, dark matter –

like those cosmological stars
seems we are speeding away from each other
little time for intimacy of love’s spaces
distracted by widening ellipses of the settled familiar
falling off into dark holes of self-centred universes –

there is a Heaven in which we speed towards each other
through infinite expanses of Spirit
dancing to holy nebulae carrying our names,
to enter welcoming celestial bodies
and an everlasting, ever-extending consummation.


5.

strange old rubble wall
coming through the wet window of the airport bus:
different-shaded, different-sized stones
from sidewalk up to some indeterminate,
abstract, unfinished, uneven top,
looks blackened, as though burned,
and then, more even clay bricks finish the wall
which holds rust and red metal doors –
the humans of Port of Spain
walking past it, the traffic lights and pedestrian crossing
might know who the strange wall is and its story,
is it historical artefact, crumbling edifice forgotten by the council
an unknown artisan’s work…
but it raining, the bus moving slowly in traffic
we look at bridges, torrential canals, white mosques,
bars and billboards cruising under drizzle,
the young people singing Chronixx, and
a category 5 hurricane beating up the Atlantic.

This poem is taken from PN Review 257, Volume 47 Number 3, January - February 2021.