Ocelot (And an Anthology of the Other Things They Tried to Keep Out in the West Indies)

by Sheba Mohammid 

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door...

– “Love after Love,” Derek Walcott

Standalone shattered pieces,

mighty from the bricklayer’s hands

binding together a familiar countenance as ten years later,

an ocelot would be sitting in her

living room with imperfect posture poised to launch

on a velvet settee

but after all satisfied with licking its patterned

fur as it had entered through the back door

by the kitchen where years before

the bride kept her bouquet of imported peonies and tinged dahlias,

set it on the table, forfeiting the toss and instead filling the house with pollen and

the keeping of days

but she should have

known where stiff cocoyea brooms swept, scraping piano tops, scrubbing the

outside out,

pulling down shutters and setting tables with gifted

propriety, washing plates, inviting absent guests; legs folded, elbows at rest,

digging into undulations of fleshy taste of

cocoa pod, thighs beneath

a well-pressed skirt, stretching legs to

whitewashed walls, cooled by spinning fans

saying grace

in the monotony of elegy

or the rhythm of war

that the Arima sun would come

like this, like it always did

beneath window sills,

through louver slits, ventilation blocks and latticework,

unstoppable, shattered shards through the spaces

between, bringing in

fragments of Blanchisseuse: particles of leaves, hibiscus stamens, agouti

fur, julie mango pulp, hummingbird tail,

an atlas of albicant lilies, sections of sapodilla seeds and

flesh, dust to

dust, indistinguishable in

the jouvert of a lacouray

where Sahara blows across Transatlantic passages of time

and haematic embers of Sainted Soufriere ash from

Vincentian volcanoes find their way into a living room long after

the louvers were shut.