"Bleecker Street, Summer" Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, for the eternal idleness of the imagined return, for rare flutes a… - Derek Walcott

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,
for the eternal idleness of the imagined return,
for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom of tangled sheets.

Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

You will love again the stranger who was your
self.
Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Then silence is sawn in half by a dragonfly as eels sign their names along the bottom-sand when the sunrise brightens the river's memory <p> and waves of huge ferns are nodding to the sea's sound. Although the smoke forgets the earth from which is ascends and the nettles guard the holes where the laurels were killed <p> an iguana hears the axes, clouding each lens over its lost name, when the hunched island was called 'Iounalao' 'Where it iguana is from' <p> But, taking its own time, the iguana will scale the rigging of vines in a year, its dewlap fanned, its elbows akimbo, its deliberate tail <p> moving with the island. The slit pods of its eyes ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries, that rose with the Aruacs' smoke till a new race <p> unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees. These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space for a single God where the old gods stood before, <p> The first god was a gommier. The generator began with a whine, and a shark, with sidewise jaw, sent the chips flying like mackrel over water <p> into trembling weeds