Omeros (33 page)

He hummed in the silence. The song of the chanterelle,

the river griot, the Sioux shaman. Asphalt

rippled its wires, like a harp. The street was still.

Seven Seas sighed. What was the original fault?

“Plunkett promise me a pig next Christmas. He’ll heal

in time, too.”

                        “We shall all heal.”

                                                          The incurable

wound of time pierced them down the long, sharp-shadowed street.

A thudding wave. The sunlight setting a table.

And the distant drone of a comet. The sibyl

snored. Seven Seas sat there as if carved in marble.

His beard white, his hands on the cane, very still.

A swift squeaked like a hinge, then shot from the windowsill.

III

I followed a sea-swift to both sides of this text;

her hyphen stitched its seam, like the interlocking

basins of a globe in which one half fits the next

into an equator, both shores neatly clicking

into a globe; except that its meridian

was not North and South but East and West. One, the New

World, made exactly like the Old, halves of one brain,

or the beat of both hands rowing that bear the two

vessels of the heart with balance, weight, and design.

Her wing-beat carries these islands to Africa,

she sewed the Atlantic rift with a needle’s line,

the rift in the soul. Now, as vision grows weaker,

it glimpses the straightened X of the soaring swift,

like a cedar’s branches widening in sunrise,

in oars that are crossed and settled in calm water,

since the place held all I needed of paradise,

with no other sign but a lizard’s signature,

and no other laurel but the
laurier-cannelle’s.

Chapter LXIV

I

I sang of quiet Achille, Afolabe’s son,

who never ascended in an elevator,

who had no passport, since the horizon needs none,

never begged nor borrowed, was nobody’s waiter,

whose end, when it comes, will be a death by water

(which is not for this book, which will remain unknown

and unread by him). I sang the only slaughter

that brought him delight, and that from necessity—

of fish, sang the channels of his back in the sun.

I sang our wide country, the Caribbean Sea.

Who hated shoes, whose soles were as cracked as a stone,

who was gentle with ropes, who had one suit alone,

whom no man dared insult and who insulted no one,

whose grin was a white breaker cresting, but whose frown

was a growing thunderhead, whose fist of iron

would do me a greater honour if it held on

to my casket’s oarlocks than mine lifting his own

when both anchors are lowered in the one island,

but now the idyll dies, the goblet is broken,

and rainwater trickles down the brown cheek of a jar

from the clay of Choiseul. So much left unspoken

by my chirping nib! And my earth-door lies ajar.

I lie wrapped in a flour-sack sail. The clods thud

on my rope-lowered canoe. Rasping shovels scrape

a dry rain of dirt on its hold, but turn your head

when the sea-almond rattles or the rust-leaved grape

from the shells of my unpharaonic pyramid

towards paper shredded by the wind and scattered

like white gulls that separate their names from the foam

and nod to a fisherman with his khaki dog

that skitters from the wave-crash, then frown at his form

for one swift second. In its earth-trough, my pirogue

with its brass-handled oarlocks is sailing. Not from

but with them, with Hector, with Maud in the rhythm

of her beds trowelled over, with a swirling log

lifting its mossed head from the swell; let the deep hymn

of the Caribbean continue my epilogue;

may waves remove their shawls as my mourners walk home

to their rusted villages, good shoes in one hand,

passing a boy who walked through the ignorant foam,

and saw a sail going out or else coming in,

and watched asterisks of rain puckering the sand.

II

You can see Helen at the Halcyon. She is dressed

in the national costume: white, low-cut bodice,

with frilled lace at the collar, just a cleft of a breast

for the customers when she places their orders

on the shields of the tables. They can guess the rest

under the madras skirt with its golden borders

and the flirtatious knot of the madras head-tie.

She pauses between the tables, holding a tray

over her stomach to hide the wave-rounded sigh

of her pregnancy. There is something too remote

about her stillness. Women study her beauty,

but turn their faces away if their eyes should meet,

like an ebony carving. But if she should swerve

that silhouette hammered out of the sea’s metal

like a profile on a shield, its sinuous neck

longing like a palm’s, you might recall that battle

for which they named an island or the heaving wreck

of the
Ville de Paris
in her foam-frilled bodice,

or just think, “What a fine local woman!” and her

head will turn when you snap your fingers, the slow eyes

approaching you with the leisure of a panther

through white tables with palm-green iron umbrellas,

past children wading with water-wings in the pool;

and Africa strides, not alabaster Hellas,

and half the world lies open to show its black pearl.

She waits for your order and you lower your eyes

away from hers that have never carried the spoil

of Troy, that never betrayed horned Menelaus

or netted Agamemnon in their irises.

But the name Helen had gripped my wrist in its vise

to plunge it into the foaming page. For three years,

phantom hearer, I kept wandering to a voice

hoarse as winter’s echo in the throat of a vase!

Like Philoctete’s wound, this language carries its cure,

its radiant affliction; reluctantly now,

like Achille’s, my craft slips the chain of its anchor,

moored to its cross as I leave it; its nodding prow

lettered as simply, ribbed in our native timber,

riding these last worried lines; its rhythm agrees

that all it forgot a swift made it remember

since that green sunrise of axes and laurel-trees,

till the sunset chars it, slowly, to an ember.

And Achille himself had been one of those children

whose voices are surf under a galvanized roof;

sheep bleating in the schoolyard; a Caribbean

whose woolly crests were the backs of the Cyclops’s flock,

with the smart man under one’s belly. Blue stories

we recited as children lifted with the rock

of Polyphemus. From a plaster Omeros

the smoke and the scarves of mare’s tails, continually

chalked associate phantoms across our own sky.

III

Out of their element, the thrashing mackerel

thudded, silver, then leaden. The vermilion scales

of snappers faded like sunset. The wet, mossed coral

sea-fans that winnowed weeds in the wiry water

stiffened to bony lace, and the dripping tendrils

of an octopus wrung its hands at the slaughter

from the gutting knives. Achille unstitched the entrails

and hurled them on the sand for the palm-ribbed mongrels

and the sawing flies. As skittish as hyenas

the dogs trotted, then paused, angling their muzzles

sideways to gnaw on trembling legs, then lift a nose

at more scavengers. A triumphant Achilles,

his hands gloved in blood, moved to the other canoes

whose hulls were thumping with fishes. In the spread seine

the silvery mackerel multiplied the noise

of coins in a basin. The copper scales, swaying,

were balanced by one iron tear; then there was peace.

They washed their short knives, they wrapped the flour-bag sails,

then they helped him haul
In God We Troust
back in place,

jamming logs under its keel. He felt his muscles

unknotting like rope. The nets were closing their eyes,

sagging on bamboo poles near the concrete depot.

In the standpipe’s sandy trough aching Achilles

washed sand from his heels, then tightened the brass spigot

to its last drop. An immense lilac emptiness

settled the sea. He sniffed his name in one armpit.

He scraped dry scales off his hands. He liked the odours

of the sea in him. Night was fanning its coalpot

from one catching star. The No Pain lit its doors

in the village. Achille put the wedge of dolphin

that he’d saved for Helen in Hector’s rusty tin.

A full moon shone like a slice of raw onion.

When he left the beach the sea was still going on.

ALSO BY DEREK WALCOTT

POEMS

Selected Poems

The Gulf

Another Life

Sea Grapes

The Star-Apple Kingdom

The Fortunate Traveller

Midsummer

Collected Poems: 1948–1984

The Arkansas Testament

The Bounty

PLAYS

Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays

The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!

Remembrance and Pantomime

Three Plays: The Last Carnival;

Beef, No Chicken; A Branch of the Blue Nile

The Odyssey

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18h Street, New York 10011

Copyright
©
1990 by Derek Walcott

All rights reserved

Published in 1990 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First paperback edition, 1992

“Yesterday” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney copyright
©
1965 Northern Songs Ltd. All rights for the U.S., Canada, and Mexico controlled and administered by EMI Blackwood Music Inc. under license from ATV Music (MACLEN). All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

Acknowledgments are made to
Partisan Review, The New Repubic, Frank, Antaeus,
and
The New Yorker,
where portions of this book were originally published, some of them in slightly different form.

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Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-374-52350-3

Paperback ISBN-10: 0-374-52350-9

www.fsgbooks.com

eISBN 9781466880405

First eBook edition: July 2014