Europa

by Derek Walcott

from The Fortunate Traveller (1981)

The full moon is so fierce that I can count the

coconuts' cross-hatched shade on bungalows,

their white walls raging with insomnia.

The stars leak drop by drop on the tin plates

of the sea almonds, and the jeering clouds

are luminously rumpled as the sheets.

The surf, insatiably promiscuous,

groans through the walls; I feel my mind

whiten to moonlight, altering that form

which daylight unambiguously designed,

from a tree to a girl's body bent in foam;

then, treading close, the black hump of a hill,

its nostrils softly snorting, nearing the

naked girl splashing her naked breasts with silver.

Both would have kept their proper distance still,

if the chaste moon hadn't swiftly drawn the drapes

of a dark cloud, coupling their shapes.

She teases with those flashes, yes, but once

you yield to human horniness, you see

through all that moonshine what they really were,

those gods as seed-bulls, gods as rutting swans

an overheated farmhand's literature.

Who ever saw her pale arms hook his horns,

her thighs clamped tight in their deep-plunging ride,

watched, in the hiss of the exhausted foam,

her white flesh constellate to phosphorous

as in salt darkness beast and woman come?

Nothing is there, just as it always was,

but the foam's wedge to the horizon-light,

then, wire-thin, the studded armature,

like drops still quivering on his matted hide,

the hooves and horn-points anagrammed in stars.