The Sunday Poem: Impression: A Sunrise

The ocean:
From the blue of apples
To the blue of the craters of the moon.
Water tasted at the rocks that shaped
The jetty, and left behind
A lick of algae, blurring boundaries, gently jostling
The land. We tossed a few hooked lines in, but mostly
Watched the sun rise, the size of our eyes,
The flavor of pineapple.
With it rose the colors on the bay bottom:
(We had no names for them)
Orange daggers chasing seaweed,
Fish with silver wires in their backs.
It was hot; we fell past ten feet of rocks
For hours, tweaked a friendly barracuda’s nose,
Gulped in water as we splashed —
The better to breathe by.
                                     My head had wind blowing
Through it, and I could feel the worldspin
Dizzying me around. We floated
Back to our bicycles, never walking
A straight line, bowing to crabs,
To dry ourselves off dancing the dawn.
We wove our indirect way, in those days
Before water and sky and land were worlds apart
And we the namers and enforcers of names.

This is, of course, another one of the poems based on paintings, like “Guernica” was. The painting in question is Monet’s “Impression: Sunrise”.

The setting for the poem is early mornings in Barbados, sometimes on a weekend, sometimes even before school. My brother and I and our friend Renée Brathwaite (a guy, despite the spelling of his name) would ride our bikes in the dark to a battered stone jetty facing into the Caribbean. There we would fish, and sometimes swim. There really was a barracuda living in the holes hidden deep in the jetty; we stayed away from him. The jump was fairly high, but the water below was deep enough that you could cannonball safely. The water was pretty cold, so mostly we fished and never caught a damn thing.

What it gave me, anyway, was a momentary feeling of synaesthesia, and a feeling I have often had when living by the beach: a sort of blank openheaded feeling, like the air is literally rushing through your head and you are content to exist only in the moment. Starting out with “the blue of apples” will either make perfect sense, or no sense at all, depending on whether you still have that sense of wonder about the natural world or not: I’ve found that most readers actually accept the phrase wuthout even thinking about it, for some reason.

Years later, when wrestling with graduate-school sorts of dilemmas about genres and conventions and boundaries and labels, I took a poem I had written years before called “Barbados, 1988” and refashioned it into one of the “painting poems,” which all dealt with those issues. (Besides “Guernica,” I also tackled Picasso’s “Girl in the Mirror,” and Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” and Hokusai’s Fuji prints).

If “Guernica” was about how all art is propaganda and mind control, this poem is about how all labels and languages are forms of mind control too, and about how we grow into our boxes and into our modes of thinking and into our prejudices about things as basic as whether or not the land and the ocean are two separate worlds or not.