1 poem
from Far District
being reissued Fall 2021
i/ Outer Eden
When nothing existed in the district
and I walked around with knapsack and notebook,
like Adam in the garden, naming things,
a derelict at Half Way Tree Square told me
the sea is our genesis and the horizon, exodus.
I wanted to recant, "There is nothing here,
no visible history." My tongue stoned,
dried-brain, I boarded the sardine-can bus
to school. Packed in that heat, a memory
sparked and died in the murmur of tired bodies.
I limboed between the aqueducts and poui trees
on campus before History, the histrionic
ghost staring at the blackboard, at centuries
chalked in white like the professor's hair,
his liver-spotted hand holding the ruler,
stabbing timelines, then stopping at 1492.
"Before that date, nothing. A less barbaric
term, a civil one in light of the tropic -- I mean
topic -- is an area of darkness. A few primal
inventions; tools fashioned from bones and stones,
but no real industry there, until sugar."
He meant that shit hole east of Portland,
Outer Eden. Back there calendar was useless.
I knew days by studying the sugar-cane cutters:
Monday a trickle, Tuesday a drove,
Wednesday and Thursday, a river swell
that on payday-Friday flooded the town square.
Sunday mornings I knew by two happenings.
First the lashing of Cre-Cre's albino woman
by Cre-Cre before the first cock crowed,
and then before church time, that perennial hog,
Hyacinth, shuffling yard-to-yard, hawking
her dry goods. Today, Friday, if I leave
this lecture and go back, the talks wouldn't
be Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria --
not those nothings -- but how nothing happens there.
And I'd hiss my teeth; stasis in any name is stasis.
That benign parish is the heart's dark interior,
the island's bushed-in mindset, a place
forgotten by the cartographer,
but buried inside me to decompose.
Here I am, planted in this desk
of a nascent history, and it dawned
that the mad, hermeneutic Rasta was wrong;
my beginning was not the sea,
my departure not the horizon:
I am nothing, I am dirt, where no light
can reach. There this monody I unearthed.
ii/ From the Notebook of Nothing
Early on the white marl road I met Cre-Cre,
cut-off khaki gripping his cedar thighs.
Frightened, not of him, but my own scrawny
self forbidden to go river. Suspicious, he asked,
"Boy, your mother chain you to books. You ever go river?"
Just us standing on that dazzling road.
"Out there is just one man with him God,
and though I beat that woman for nothing,
He pass no judgment in me wooden boat."
*
I know rivers the way I know hate.
From the stygian bank silver-swirling,
birthing night blacker than my mother's skin,
I found myself one night at the swamp,
two worn coins for the boater, dumb
like the moon ownself when he pushed off.
We went silent, till deeper we came
to a spot of wailing women, their hair torn.
At this branch of shrieking, I bawled out,
"What wrong with all a you, eh?"
But the hushed boater rounded a bend,
the river changed into lapis lazuli
that soon as I saw it, pain knifed me,
pain in the joints, and I lay stiff on the skiff,
whispering woi woi woi and didn't see
everything brighten to crackling stars.
Then I felt a scorch and cold sweat started
to wash me, and I shivered in heat.
Dark covered me and I slept.
Is like that one time over at Navy Island,
twilight turning on the harbour lights,
I closed my eyes on my back on a raft,
and drifted, spliff smoke carried me
into a gelid dream. I woke centuries
after (or before), in a forest. My limbs
were the leopard's, camouflaged in dry
grass; my name was not nothing,
but a breeze blew the grass, turned the raft
over into the sea. Half drowned,
I scrambled to land. I didn't learn my name.
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica.