Authors: Derek Walcott
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
eISBN 9781466880405
First eBook edition: July 2014