Portland Parish/ The Blue Mountains

                                                 (from Negro Mountain)



 

She said,



Get your bearings.



No shape in my gap, not



now. From now



on, it goes



without



saying. If



this is allied to “the negro



character” it’s far



from original—I’d only get



to where we came out of the mountains and



hit the sea. And view



the old coast too, from



the road, the route described



by its indentations—“One bay



after another”—until the road turned inland



again. Civilization’s



tattered



in such. Far



be it from me. One’s



close to nothing.



Something,



though, to the coast—



“My affection



hath an unknowne bottome, like the Bay



of Portugall,” some-



one else had been made



to say.

Credit

Copyright © 2020 by C. S. Giscombe. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 27, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“The poem references the two-lane—the A4—that traces the northeast shore of Jamaica and connects Port Antonio with Orange Bay, Hope Bay, St. Margaret’s Bay, and Buff Bay (the town my grandfather left suddenly one afternoon more than 100 years ago). I have a complicated relationship to the coast and to Portland and the Blue Mountains—I have ‘returned’ (and have been generously received) on more than one occasion but at the same time I’m a foreigner in those towns and amidst the graves of my family on the hillsides above them. The poem attempts to trace that complication, or suggest its existence.”

C. S. Giscombe