Petroglyphs and pictographs: after Ron Savory (1933-2019)—In Memoriam

“...artefacts air-brushed from memory, teasing

holograms in glass globules, daring translation:

What can I make for you of those old bones, those scratched pebbles?”  Lee

i. earth: catacomb

earth-stones speak from Mazaruni galleries of petroglyphs and pictographs

murmur scratched names, carved mysteries, ancient runes of Rupunini

and lost El Dorado, hum through incised furrows

of weathers, planting seasons, favourite pets

engraved hieratic embraces

excavate for today tablets of living faith

from shell-mounds and various inundations—

our inheritance: these elemental artefacts

ordinary sketches that always were embedded

in diurnal monotony of domesticities.

ii. fire: ikon

the scissor-tails carry fables of fire at their throats

as they always have, cruising edges of oceans

half-believing rumours of primordial Roraima

impossible Falls off a distant Potaro

a foolish boy with gulls’ wings gone too near the sun—

the man who circles seabirds with the palette of his gaze

sees them through canopies of his abandoned forests

hears their clamour over rivers of surfing casuarina windbreaks

marvels they are not savannah vultures

etches them coal-black ikons across the coral of the island of his love.

iii. water: bark

his craft, he would tell you, was the simple bark of the spectral Arawak

navigating terrible silence under contentious macaws, toucans, squirrel

                                                           monkeys

of great Essequibo, his own boatman, alone

north-pointed past savannahs and forests

marking psychedelic light pouring through soaring canopies 

into great vines, large leaves, pods 

the turning grace of herons in the swamps—

and it carried him to the collage of Atlantic surf

Caribbean vernacular, small-mountain ferns, seabirds

ancestral stones, familiar mythologies, the horned island of his rest.

iv. air: heron

no migratory bird, apparently, like the egret

that heron, that cowbird, world traveller

like Guyanese and other Caribbean children

colouring the diaspora, New York, London, Dubai

up the islands, through the airways

down the Corentyne to Suriname

across the border to Brazil—

and we here, Ron, with you gone

further than all those territories of man’s confusions

probing neglected friendships, sketchy conversations, awkward love.