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William Matthews - Four Poems About Jamaica
Work rating: Low

1. Montego Bay, 10:00 P.M.
A chandelier, a tiara, 
a hive of lights. A cruise ship 

is leaving, the S.S. Jesus 
again, the only ship that comes 

here. If I watch the ship go 
long enough I become the ship. 

So rather than leave I look away -- 
because the sea is a foreign country 

and I love to travel, but not 
like a faltering heart 

set on fire and pushed out to sea 
not like a birthday cake. 


2. Jamaicans Posing to Be Photographed
Illiterate Esther watched me 
closing a book and asked, 
Can you hear from the dead 
with that box? God yes. 

Today I take pictures. 
My subjects are full dress. 
My subjects! As the language 
I liveby flows through me 

it carries so much history 
I`m embarrassed, I who believe 
in language and distrust 
its exact parlor tricks. 

Full dress, historical 
posture, as if they were running 
for office or these were wedding 
pictures, since white folks care 

about weddings. Somber Ronald, 
age three. And Esther, archival, 
though the dead don`t live in boxes 
and nothing keeps in the heat. 


3. A Hairpin Turn above Reading, Jamaica
for Russell Banks 

Here`s where the fire truck fell 
beached on its side, off the road. 
So when the fire fell into itself 
we came down the hill to watch 
the fire truck get saved. Only 

the rich live this high, with a view 
of the bay, and the rich 
will be with us forever, 
though the pump at the base 
of the mountain burns out 

and the Socialist party, in power, 
is sorry. The rich buy truckloads 
of water and hire the poor 
to drive them up. Water will go 
uphill if money will go down. 

Today there`s a goat in the bend, 
stolid and demure. She`ll move 
soon: there`s nothing to eat in the road. 
A cow and two egrets tack 
into the shadow of a mango. 

It`s noon. Above the bay, turkey 
buzzards sift the thermals. 
At dawn they perch and spread 
their wings to dry, like laundry. 
My friends and I are the rich, 

though the house is rented. We`ll fall 
away, the goat will loll off the road, 
the bad clutch in the van will slur 
but we`ll make it up, and we do, 
heat-steeped, thoughtful, and sleepy. 


4. Kingston
No photograph does justice, etc., 
but what does a photograph care 
for justice? It wants to be clear, 
the way an angel need not mean, 
but be, duty enough for an angel. 

No angels here. Hovels seen from far 
enough away they look picturesque. 
The blatant blue sky so cool in pictures 
is gritty with heat. The long day stings. 
We squint at the lens. Though the lines 

in our faces are engraved by the acids 
of muscle-habits, not by tears. 
Sympathy we have to learn. Here`s 
a family of three living in a dead car. 
The guidebooks warned us away 

from this, and so we came, 
ungainly, spreading 
our understandings of sorrow like wet wings. 
We turn and turn, but everywhere is here, 
a blurred circle of wing scuffs.
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