Ananse With a black snake's un- winking eye thinking thinking through glass through quartz quarries of stony water with a doll's liquid gaze, crystal, his brain green, a green chrysalis storing leaves, memories trunked up in a dark attic, he stumps up the stares of our windows, he stares, stares he squats on the tips of our language black burr of conundrums eye corner of ghosts, ancient his- tories; he spins drum- beats, silver skin webs of sound through the villages; Tacky heard him and L'Ouverture all the hung- ry dumb-bellied chieftains who spat their death into the ground: Goave, Port-au-Prince, Half Moon Fort, villages, dead lobster-pot crews, wire, red sea shells, coconut trees’ hulls, nodding skulls, black iron bells, clogged, no glamour of noon on the man- grove shore. Now the poor hang him up in the ceiling, their brooms cannot reach his hushed corner and he sits with the dust, desert's rainfall of soot, plotting a new fall from heaven threading threading the moon moonlight stories his full mouth agape a black pot grinning grinning round fire that boils in his belly walloboa wood words, eyes, fireflies, sparks, crashing coals' waterfalls, grey ashes aroused, old men's ghosts, cinders, burnt memories' eyes in the hot hut, flesh, curling silver, revealing their shadows of meaning as the god stares down, black beating heart of him breathing breathing consuming our wood and the words of our houses black iron-eye'd eater, the many-eye'd maker, creator, dry stony world-maker, word-breaker, creator . . . In the yard the dog barks at the stranger.