POSTCARDS

POEMS
BY
McDonald Dixon

POST CARDS - Paris 1890

Quartier Mont Marte; the tiny village meandering downhill
like a teardrop from the eye of Sacre Coeur, past
Rue Chappe, down hill until it floods drains on Blvd Clergnie,
in Pigalle, under the stationary sails of Moulin Rouge.
Degas chalks in a pirouette on his unfinished ballerina
and Lautrec moans through his syphilitic fevers with a sip
of absinthe from the bar. Giants like Zola
and de Maupassant pander to political sycophants
yearning for dregs of their genius to preserve the arts.

Rodin, in his studio on Rue - I forget where - sweats a slab

of dolomitic limestone, still green, short of a couple
aeons before it turns to marble - contemplating shapes.
It is all happening in this 'city of light.’ C’est la belle époque !
Frills and crinolines ensnare handlebar mustachios,
queuing for favours from dancers at Le Folies Bergère,
one block away from the pack. Too lame to write, I rise
in awe of all this history floating across this 5x7 card
tinted in sepia to preserve the drivelling age.

Manet is seven years dead and Van Gogh goes

by his own hand in that same year; Pissarro
and Cezanne are wearing black armbands in memory
of a movement that died before its master, in the frame
of his first masterpiece. Conscience will not hold lines
firm, they must sag for Apollinaire is only ten and Rimbaud
is too ill at thirty-five to help. Age will spawn its genius
even when time contrives against. A young Matisse toys with its flames,
Picasso alive in Spain, primes to receive the all embracing light.

St. Pierre Martinique 1902

Gray clouds grumble, harnessing rain that clings to
the mountain’s side. A gray cloak, blots out the sun.
Refusing to fall on this “Pearl of the Antilles”
where fetes from dusk till dawn on Rue Monte-au-ciel
flow with lava into Rue Levassor. Water;
the Roxelene is stone. Time translates its tears
in foam.
Rum swells the fires in every crevice: in
the bilge of this town, rejected by the sea,
doomed to repent, or face « la fin de monde » – « fin
de siècle » style, waiting for the vote due in
three days.
In any other season they would have fled,
fly and ash to Fort-de-France, shawled by the day’s
gray mist.

Buried in hell, Syllbaris hears nothing. Not

even the habitual scorpion’s twirl.
Not heat searing flesh; not bone, whitening to
stone. Nothing… the red hot cloud saunters down
the mountain’s slopes. Nothing, life is a sculpture
preserved in stone. The sea ‘live in its earthen
pot simmers.

After the market clock stopped at quarter to

nine, the rains came, the canes grew tall and rum flowed
in the vats. There is a song stuck to the river’s
past, too weak to dislodge its stones, floating on
tongues of grass, it swirls through the blackened limestone
like a dirge that never fades, walking upright
to prop its dead.

Castries 1904
Colliers cling to the harbour's edge, cables
strain against the tide that tugs like the Tyne,
only this place is not Newcastle:
The women’s chants swell my ears as long lines
necklace precariously across the scaffolding;
necks craning under hundredweight panniers
of black anthracite to earn one hay penny
for the quarter mile from slag to ship, or ship
to heap, depends on which phase of the trade
they are paid.

Some relative dying of silicosis

is ignorant of the rage this black dust raves
inside her, instead, believing - true to her faith –
unholy hands have raked an evil trick
spawning the devil's offspring in her lungs.
The people here are marionettes, no eyes,
no face, only their swaying hips timed
to their chants, attunes to life. Dust files past
street lamps on vacant streets, the alchemy
of death creates its living dead.

It’s forty years before the year I was born.

I am at pains to breathe life into this poem,
although the sea is alive with the clarion
of ships, queuing at the pier, to refuel
for the journey back home with cargoes
of indigo and brown sugar. Harrison
liners and tramps at half steam, blackening
their funnels to ape this human misery
exploited on this wharf, by hands that held the whip,
a mere seventy years before, still itching
for moments to inflict the past.

This is our history, boy, on this black and white

tabloid. Remember, it returns
like a recurring decimal with its amphora
of blight to where it all began, at the centre
of my world: April 7th, the year, 1904,
naked and unmasked.

The Isthmus…Panama 1911

Clouds swell over this morsel of land,
malarial shrouds snuff out a sun
struggling to break through the mangrove's shade,
where men sweat like men, fearing the dread
mosquito's bite. Dredgers crank their iron
pistons to strafe the slush, settled for
eons on the swamp’s floor that had swallowed
the best of Balboa's men, digging deep until
two oceans heave to greet each other
in a swirl of blue. A caiman yawns,
weary of its bland diet of leather soles.

My grandfather, Hamlyn Oscar Denney,

pined to leave his wife and their two
offspring safe back home, but could not stop
the urge that swirled like a fever on
the brain when night came and darkness cloaked
the sins that would not show their face by day...
He was an honest sign painter, his box
of tools returned without him - brother
foresters gathered at his lodge for
the requiem - grandma received them
like a soldier's wife, embracing her
country's flag, dry-eyed, without the tears.

NEW YORK…HARLEM 1939

I met Langston Hughes and Claude Mac Kay
arguing about lines from poems
Dunbar wrote when Harlem still had cattle
carts and the Dutch farmed their oats under
a street sign marked one-twenty-fifth, long
after the bar closed, while the bartender
sought relief from Ella on a seventy
eight, scatting the new notes. Roosevelt was
in the White House and the boys flocked down
to the Apollo with new songs on
their lips hoping to grab a label,
or, a week’s engagement at the Cotton Club...

My uncle W. M. D. runs
the numbers for the block, from Riley’s
Flats – what else can a black man find to do
if he doesn’t want to be janitor,
or a Mardi Gras buffoon in front
one of them Manhattan hotels, opening
taxi doors and hefting luggage up
thirty seven floors, cause the lifts never
work when guests check in. Can’t find them
at the Waldorf Astoria, where
the tips are crisp notes, without the sweat
and only chauffeur driven town cars queue for fares...

A chap from Missouri escaped by

his teeth from a lynching. He stole a few
pounds on the weight of some cotton bales
when the boys weren’t looking his way. Saved
by a freight train bound for Chicago, he
barbers on Lennox, by the overpass
and talks all day about the good life
in the grand old confederacy.
‘If it ain’t splitting hairs in this city,
is a journey up river to Sing Sing.
In this year of our lord we still second
class, and the jobs all go to the men.’

‘That was before King and the march, Bull

O’Connor and his dogs, I cannot
forget ‘cause if I shut my eyes it
will all reel back, live in technicolor.
Forget the old black and whites.’ Langston
Hughes and Claude Mac Kay still on about
lines Dunbar wrote across the colour bar…
‘In those days black man couldn’t find time
to memorize, far less to write, then
argue poetry ‘bout years of blight
and strife. Nothing has changed, nothing will,
it’s all about money and bombs, this century.