High Yellow

Errol drives me to Treasure Beach It’s an old story, the terrible storm

swerving the dark country roads the ship going down, half the sailors

I think about what you will be, your mix drowned, half swimming the

white, black, Chinese, and your father’s slate waves, spat hard onto shore

Scottish-Englishness. We cross the Black River Smashed crates, bodies

where they shipped cane sugar and molasses choking on the black sand

upstream past a sign One man stands — What is this place? A woman

for Lover’s Leap. The air stinks of sulphur in the trees, one hand raised

Errol drops me at a blue gate. Be safe This is how the Scotsmen came

behind the house, the thin beach why the black people here have red hair

of black sand, the water warm and gray Or the other story, no storm

I am deep before I know it, groundless no wrecked ship. Just the miles

the swell stops the sickness of cane fields and mulatto children named

under a crooked tree, perched on sea rocks McDonald or McArthur for

two fishermen in torn denims, smoking their fathers, who owned them

I dry in the sun. They pass, turn, come close Nothing grows at Lover’s Leap

they have rust afros, gold faces splashed with freckles where two runaways

one ripped with muscle, one with eyes cornered by their master, held hands

like razors. What you want here they say and jumped down into the clouds