340 PART THREE
a black dog panting for entrails near a pirogue
on sand so white it blinded, a sea so blue
it stained your hand,cobalt from the harbor of St. Thomas.
Once in Paris with the city’s river, cafés, and boulevards, Walcott ’s keen eye,
within Pissarro’s, filters them all through homegrown vision, images of the sea
around their islands: “along the Seine / an oceanic surging in the trees,” “The
surge of summer lifted the park trees / like breakers cresting.” Even Prussia’s
crushing 1870 invasion of France, seen through Walcott ’s alter ego, roils with
nature ’s tropical palette: “Staccato chrysanthemums, like bursts of gunfire,”
“tubes of red like disembodied entrails, / and the gamboge pus of wounds.”
Gamboge, a yellow-orange pigment, turns up elsewhere—a Caribbean memory
of “gamboge cliffs”—along with leaf-yellow, laburnum-yellow, gold, orange,
ocher, and most often saffron, whenever bright or deep earth coloring enters
Walcott ’s poem, as in his oils and watercolors interleaving this book.
Beneath its quest through time and place, every page in Tiepolo’s Hound finds
the artist bringing land and sea alive to us: “brush-point cypresses,” “the impasto
indigo bay,” “wriggles for tree trunks, charred twigs for figures,” “light that
can gladden / the mind like the flash of a hound ’s thigh in Veronese.” Think of
Elizabeth Bishop’s “Poem” on a small painting, giving us
some tiny cows,
two brushstrokes each...
a wild iris, white and yellow,
fresh-squiggled from the tube.Scanning a canvas, we accept such tricks unconsciously. For Walcott they mate
with a writer’s touch. “Studying his paysages,” he says of Pissarro, “you feel the
fevered bliss that shook John Clare / and Edward Thomas.” In memory or exile
itmustcome down to the mind ’s eye, “brushstroke and word.” Possessing the
painter’s imagination, the poet points it back home: “the same sun is yours...
the same silvering birches of approaching rain, / if this pen were a brush.”
Pissarro’s betrayal and loss, “what it means / to leave the fading Eden where
you were,” embitters Walcott ’s own quest “back to the original, where one
stroke caught / the bright vermilion of the white hound ’s thigh.” He summons
the whole “Antillean isthmus,” the strip of islands bridging New World to Old.
“The ochre shallows of the lagoon reflect / the setting empire of an enormous
sky.” Colonial destiny troubles “the world around me,”
Dusk burrows into the roots from the egret ’s scream
as it launches itself across the brightened water;