READING ‘THE TEMPEST’
Tremor in his hands. He turns obsoleteleaves edged with thunder since the opening scene.What he sees he reads under croton shade,out in the sun. Restless peninsula,dog-eared, melting off into the blue.The blue breaks white as hallucination,more haggard than foam. What he reads he is,in all unlikeness, except in margins.Patiently there his patient, brisk notes skimclean out of reach of spite he despises(malice, another matter, which he likes),that idle country, the cruise ship, curdlesin his eyes, edgewise, blocking Saint Thomasfrom view. The last he had seen of it, dusk,at noon, recoiled from the cinder barracksat rest from working iron into sugar;long, shingled rows of them, glittering redand silent, and in that silence, Daniel,the brown boy, ripening by lamplight, died:remember Daniel, remember Daniel—he remembers Ariel in midday’s cloven dusk,writing by “Fine apparition,” ,adding, on the next page, . Sheer pain.Untarnished and all-circumscribing bright,the pain grips what he sees, his father’s shanty,fallen, shining, like hard rime against day’sviolet’s blues in a mass of green leaves;his father, where he is gone, no one goesto come back. There the green dyes blue white bymisprision, which underlies all he reads.An intimate limit strikes the pagesstill. As breath. Still as the nocturnal poolhis face vanishes and returns againand again into, vanishing and returning,until, irrevocable, he cries out,“I am the island. I alone am it!”Which he repeats, counting each syllable’sweight on the flyleaf. He enters a soundunheard of in paradise: “redemption,”a word he does not write, not knowing it,not more than its ghosting of something loved,less of something forgotten, passed overon airy nothings. Sun strikes the sea blank.He grows dizzy on his coral Shinar.Heat enamels his eyes. What he sees isconditional, all of it survival’svast, charnel sea, from which the ship is gone.An unfulfilled progress. Another looms,pitch-black on the horizon, impatientparhelion, Daniel-Ariel,shining unburned there! He sees what he sees.Then, at one strike at his notes, he shattersnoon; the croton leaves flare coronal redand the sea shimmers tinfoil on his face,haunted with a baffled stare at nothing,nothing never before seen in such stasis,as of the galleon, coming, frozenbetween worlds, half seen, deformedas twilight, fades off into a scoldingself-effacement on the page. He strikes itagain. This time it tears big and opensoblivion. The hacked margin coalescedwithin the text. He concentrates hardfor what is contingent, then looks away,for a word that is not; the clanking heatin his mind, writhing its wordless syntaxtoward some core, less than clear, a mercyburied by the shanty’s bare brilliance,his father’s trumpet tree droops and withstandsthe corrosive green, innervated. Here,triumph is concession. That is the pain,reversed easily, which he bows to see,turning the page, writing
