I
To get to the usefulness in a calabash, you must pick the green fruit;

it may be above your reach

but stretch a little.

Hold it carefully, then slowly saw its guts

open. A brown calabash will shatter under the torture

but the green

holds its shape,

endures all violation. Let the rancid emotions spill.
Hollow the halves of the gourd, scrape until it feels

it has nothing left to give: then put it in the sun to dry.

When the sun has baked the shell

into a corpse

brown as Bagotville canals,

it is ready.
Dip it into water: drink. Bathe. This is what a calabash is good for.
Calabashes have been found

offering their zombie services in kitchens,

bedrooms and bathrooms

in holy rites.
Drafted in as wash basins,

holders for herbs and fruit, gourds to wash fellow dead;

vessels for sweat rice, tie foot and other obeahs.
And even in abandoned houses you may find a cracked calabash,

face down but still standing guard,

stone hardened

and filled with nothing more than memory.
II
I once saw a calabash

balance herself on the road,

ignoring cars that flashed past,

sauntering school children.
This calabash wasn’t a young one. Her unclean edges rounded out

like her speech

like her brown, stiff curves. She wasn’t young.
She was tipping to one side, showing

entirely too much

speckled leg and bumsee.

This calabash was coasting. Breezing out.

Indecent blank eyes sliding

down my embarrassment for her.
What happens when a calabash is no longer young?

No longer freshly green;

smelling her own ripe

stink wafting up from

between her legs. No longer tauntly naïve,

when she can no longer taste saltlessness

on her skin?
What happens when a calabash develops a little spice

on her tongue? When she balances herself at the roadside:

Speckled skin and hardened eyes.
III
My great-grandfather’s second wife

was not an obeah woman,

I think.
But when she could not

bend my great-grandfather –

the war hero, the knotty porkknocker, the village overseer –
When she could not bend

this purple-heart old man to her will,

when she could not divide him

from his daughters
(don’t mind that these were Daisy’s daughters,

born from bauxite blast)
When she could not convince him that

his favourite granddaughter – my mother –

was trying to poison him

with fish tea and mettem.
When she could not stop him from

from riding his own bicycle

in his own village

in his old gardening clothes
She took a long-suffering calabash

and used it to perfume rice

with her 70-odd year essence.
If Cousin Ronald hadn’t caught her at it,

Gershom might have boiled down

and become the house boy she wanted.
The sweat rice failed;

after a few tepid years

she packed up back to Barbados.

He never said a word.