All Streets Lead to the Sea
Roberts Street
Before they had names: the quiet
Before, the ever quickening time
Outward signs of affection spaces
Closing in on yards, bones. Before
The thunder, lightning, crumbs
Wine bars, pews. Sicilian men
Whispering to ladies, before not
Meant for slender nothing. So
Before the trees grew, meaning
Before it was reading writing, signs
Hurting, painted – and now so few.
Ariapita Avenue
Can you sell something for nothing?
The man intent on selling gold for nothing
For nothing is all glimmering and cut open
For nothing at all is a price, after all, and teeth
Too, would do. Peppercorns though are en vogue
And the levels are all exclusive. Who wants to be
Black, when you can be cocoa, steel and hole.
Serpentine Road
The roofs of the houses are so
Hot they are white, make the
Green spaces greener. This pool
Of cool blue water comes
From the tank, burnt to rust. It sees
Everything from behind the grey
Concrete stands where the
Other boys sit. But the two of us
Are where the showers are
The shady, empty locker-rooms:
Places we go to hide all the marks
Of our bodies, and our embodied
Fears. Among wood, written upon
By graffito fingers, our lips. Like
Virginals, we have no legs.
St Catherine’s Steps
It holds up the room. It holds down the room.
It is silence. It is voice.
It dreams, floats. It crawls.
Loud.
It cannot breathe.
It inspires all around it. It is inspired by it, all around it.
It sinks. It has cement legs.
Invisible death. Lightning.
It is monument. The end of time,
When I heard grandmother calling.
Corner Park and Charlotte
Each piece is the cornerstone
Of these square rainy walls
Fallen
Into place like the sky
Pretty brown eyes
White chalk draping blackness.
How it all grows a cathedral of
Up. Boys and girls with soft
Pastel petals, Ms Ramsay’s
Chalky buds. How it all goes
To the bottom of the limestone
Sea, which needs no cornerstone
Embellishment: a few coral bodies
Sunken hulks and buried bones.
How the same sky falls into place
Over a plane’s wings: flying
Produce, grown for a harvest,
To feed the real world.
Eastern Main Road
Do not speak of it, the wet light
Turn the world round, take his body
Into the compound, open the gates
A perpetual movie holds up coffins
Holds up beams, galvanise, concrete
Walls – there are sculptures hidden
Where we film his bloodied body
Fassbinder’s white rain, all the time
St Margaret’s Lane
Act I: Scene One
[Two figures walk slowly along a narrow lane, a large church beside them.]
Green with white and lime, he said.
No, she said, it is the colour of stone:
Black and brick and moss,
One hundred battered graves.
The one hundred haunted graves
Behind the washed out gravel yard
Of our parents’ resting place.
Then, he said, we shall wear it.
The two figures walk slowly along the narrow lane, a large church inside them.
We shall walk here, she said, amid
The invisible tributaries – this is river.
This is desert, he said, of orange sunset.
We cannot stop the night.
Clifford Street
He’s always a few pews ahead
Me kneeling beneath a dead lord
MY SAVIOUR.
I would not watch him then
Not even for the Eucharist
These catholic things
He tells my eyes
MY LOVER.
For years
We walked the garden
Hibiscus, double chaconia
He must never find me
MY CROWN, MY THORN.
Four years
And still I am empty
Each day begins with coffee
And then I read the papers
A MESSAGE.
At breakfast
I read him intently
Follow him as he follows the world
All these years, not one word
MY SELF.
Chacon Street
For those who walk the pavement below, the building is invisible.
Small stores are fronts for a hidden chamber, where a silver
Car, daily, is parked. Invisible are the three floors in this moss-hulk
Where the rooms are knots. Naked men sleep outside by a black
Iron gate concealing mystery, they know. They all know.
Shreds of plastic bags, cardboard, sticks – the apparatuses of their
Deception – will one day revert to the Cathedral, with its fine stone
Pillows. And the men will all rise, walk past the mall
Nobody shops in, past: the empty lots the colour of rum and piss, the old
Colonial Building and Loan Society building, and the madder wall
Oozing puzzling chemistries, and say, ‘This is where joy lives
On the saddest street in the world.’
Christina Gardens I
Of course I was in love with Ms Ramsay
Blew kisses on the back of her blouses
Gave flowers I stole from gardens
Brought cupcakes and presents
To give her my daddy gave me
Always in love with the dark lady
Disappearing at the back of houses
Sweet manners in garden limbs buried
The rutted lessons machetes present
Daddy woke us and told us, watch
Christina Gardens II
That August, we found the megamouth shark
Swimming near the water’s surface, reflecting
The black planet with blood red arms:
Too close to its star.
That August, we found the plane,
That had disappeared at mach 20.
The sea hid things in the shore’s sulcus.
How
I grabbed the hair of the dark lady who looked up
In August, from the rich sea-weed floor
And said, foaming, she was coming to kiss me.
Christina Gardens III
He woke us told us, watch
For she was to eat his heart.
For the house next door was
Burning.
For we would wake with yearning.
For days blasted by ruin.
Middle Street
Read me, at the back of the little shop
With the red room behind the walls
Of words. Shelves crush your shy
Fingers, lighting candles with chairs.
Seat me, next to your nervous tenders.
You are a star, you know. Didn’t you
Know? I need hands, open like books,
To take of it. To read page one and one
And one. And forever end none.
Queen Street
To start where the green hills
Take back what is rightfully theirs
And to end in a wall of glass and
Metal, is to speak enough.
These men with long hair and
Torn chests walk east to west.
The red flags of Jimmy Aboud
Sing requiem hymns. I have
Come here to sit with you. Among believers
Of Belmont taxis, Kenny’s, and the
Fair Chance Racing Service – another
Country, perhaps. Perhaps you never smile,
Always had this white car. But did you
Always know my secrets?
Hart Street
A street with no name
No one remembers names
The name not – important
Names not, existing
No streets there
Andre Bagoo is a Trinidadian poet and writer. His second book of poems, BURN, was published by Shearsman Books and longlisted for the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. His poetry has appeared or is due at Boston Review, Blackbox Manifold, Caribbean Review of Books, Cincinnati Review, Moko, Poetry Review (UK), St Petersburg Review and elsewhere. His third book, Pitch Lake, is forthcoming from Peepal Tree Press in 2017.