Omeros

by Derek Walcott

  The wind changed gear like a transport with the throttle

  of the racing sea. He picked up the bottle. Before

  he could, sprinting to it, fight with the rusted latch,

  thudding lances of rain pinned him against the door,

  but he shouldered it open, then he heard the crash

  of thousands of iron nails poured in a basin

  of rain on his tin roof. The cloud galleons warred

  with flashing blue broadsides. Achille, soaked to the skin,

  filled the lamp and lit it; he angled the brass guard

  leeward of the wind and whipped off his shirt in bed.

  Shadows writhed from the wick, the plantains in the yard

  were wrestling to share the small roof over his head.

  After a while, he got used to the heavy sound

  on the galvanize. He ate cold jackfish and prayed

  that his cold canoe was all right on the high sand.

  He imagined the galleon, its ghost, through the frayed

  ropes of the hurricane as he lowered the wick.

  Hector and Helen. He lay in the dark, awake.

  II

  Hector wasn’t with Helen. He was with the sea,

  trying to save his canoe when its anchor-rope

  had loosened, but sheets of black rain mercilessly

  spun the bow back in the wave-troughs when he would grope

  at the mooring, and in the brown, nut-littered troughs

  the hull was swamping as bilge whirlpooled round his feet;

  he saw how every wash crashed. Spray high as a house!

  Then the long, cannon-loud boom breaking after it,

  not seeing land through the rain, thinking it was close

  from the sand-chirred water, and then he was afraid

  when he saw how they were heading past the lighthouse

  that spun in the gusts, with the anchor gone, the boat

  keeling to the gunwale, so he shifted his weight,

  he paddled hard with the short oar to come about,

  but he paddled air, the wave crests brownish-white,

  churning with wrenched palm-fronds; he stood up with the oar,

  rocking on the keel-board, then he sat, his soul wet

  and shaking. He crept to the bow, then dived ashore,

  but the spinning stern clubbed him, so he stayed under

  the debris to find some calm and depth, but the more

  he dived, the faster the current spun him, thunder

  and lightning cracked and he saw the canoe founder

  without any grief; he rode a trough for a while,

  paddling on his back, to measure the right rhythm

  of the crests, then slid down a slow-gathering wall

  like a surfer: once he caught the beat, he could swim

  with the crumbling surf, not against the sea’s will,

  letting it spin him if it chose, even if it chose

  to treat him like its garbage; then he felt the swirl

  of fine sand and staggered up straight in the shallows.

  III

  The Cyclone, howling because one of the lances

  of a flinging palm has narrowly grazed his one eye,

  wades knee-deep in troughs. As he blindly advances,

  Lightning, his stilt-walking messenger, jiggers the sky

  with his forked stride, or he crackles over the troughs

  like a split electric wishbone. His wife, Ma Rain,

  hurls buckets from the balcony of her upstairs house.

  She shakes the sodden mops of the palms and once again

  changes her furniture, the cloud-sofas’ grumbling casters

  not waking the Sun. The Sun had been working all day

  and would sleep through it all. After their disasters

  it was he who cleaned up after their goddamned party.

  So he went straight to bed at the first sign of a drizzle.

  Now, like a large coalpot with headlands for its handles,

  the Sea cooks up a storm, raindrops start to sizzle

  like grease, there is a brisk business in candles

  in Ma Kilman’s shop. Candles, nails, a sudden increase in

  the faithful, and a mark-up on matches and bread.

  In the grey vertical forest of the hurricane season,

  when the dirty sea returns the wreaths of the dead,

  all the village could do was listen to the gods in session,

  playing any instruments that came into their craniums,

  the harp-sighing ripple of a hither-and-zithering sea,

  the knucklebone pebbles, the abrupt Shango drums

  made Neptune rock in the caves. Fête start! Erzulie

  rattling her ra-ra; Ogun, the blacksmith, feeling

  No Pain; Damballa winding like a zandoli

  lizard, as their huge feet thudded on the ceiling,

  as the sea-god, drunk, lurched from wall to wall, saying:

  “Mama, this music so loud, I going in seine,”

  then throwing up at his pun. People were praying,

  but then the gods, who were tired, were throwing a fête,

  and their fêtes went on for days, and their music ranged

  from polkas of rain to waves dancing La Comète,

  and the surf clapped hands whenever the patterns changed.

  For the gods aren’t men, they get on well together,

  holding a hurricane-party in their cloud-house,

  and what brings the gods close is the thunderous weather,

  where Ogun can fire one with his partner Zeus.

  Achille in his shack heard chac-chac and violin

  in the telephone wires, a sound like Helen

  moaning, or Seven Seas, blind as a sail in rain.

  In the devastated valleys, crumpling brown water

  at their prows, headlights on, passenger-vans floated

  slowly up roads that were rivers, through the slaughter

  of the year’s banana-crop, past stiff cows bloated

  from engorging mud as the antlers of trees tossed

  past the banks like migrating elk. It was as if

  the rivers, envying the sea, tired of being crossed

  in one leap, had joined in a power so massive

  that it made islands of villages, made bridges

  the sieves of a force that shouldered culverts aside.

  The rain passed, but people looked up to the ridges

  fraying with its return, and the flood, in its pride,

  entered the sea; then Achille could hear the tunnels

  of brown water roaring in the mangroves; its tide

  hid the keels of the canoes, and their wet gunwales

  were high with rainwater that could warp them rotten

  if they were not bailed. The river was satisfied.

  It was a god too. Too much had been forgotten.

  Then, a mouse after a fête, its claws curled like moss,

  nosing the dew as the lighthouse opened its eye,

  the sunlight peeped out, and people surveyed the loss

  that the gods had made under a clearing-up sky.

  Candles shortened and died. The big yellow tractors

  tossed up the salad of trees, in yellow jackets

  men straightened the chairs of dead poles, the contractors

  in white helmets and slickers heard the castanets

  of the waves going up the islands, moving on

  from here to Guadeloupe, the beaded wires were still.

  They saw the mess the gods made in one night alone,

  as Lightning lifted his stilts over the last hill.

  Achille bailed out his canoe under an almond

  that shuddered with rain. There would be brilliant days still,

  till the next storm, and their freshness was wonderful.

  Chapter X

  I

  For Plunkett, despair came with this shitty weather,

  from the industrious torr
ents of mid-July

  till the farm was drubbed to a standstill. This year, the

  rain was an unshifting thicket, the branched sky

  grew downwards like mangroves, or an immense banyan.

  The bulbs dangled weakly from the roof of the pens,

  their cords sticky with flies, till he, like everyone

  else, watched the drifts, hating the separate silence

  that settled his labourers when their work was done.

  He saw that their view of him would always remain

  one of patronage; his roof was over their heads,

  as they sat disconsolately watching the rain

  erode and dissolve the mounds of Maud’s garden-beds,

  their eyes glazed and clouded with some forgotten pain

  from the white shambles of lilies, the dripping boards

  of rope-twisted water blown from the leaking pen,

  while Maud sat embroidering her tapestry of birds

  in the lamplit house which each horizontal gust

  blew farther from him. He saw her in the windows

  and felt she was drifting away, just like the ghost

  of the drowned galleon. He bolted up to the house.

  He stayed in the house. The ginger tom boxed its paws

  at the yarn-knitting window. Hogs ran to slaughter

  like infantry tired of trenches and shovels,

  and rain-maddened lilies chose a death by water,

  like pregnant virgins in Victorian novels.

  Maud rescued some. In rain hat and yellow slicker,

  she bent over their beds in the gentler drizzles;

  then the beds would darken, the drizzles grow thicker

  in an even heavier downpour than the last.

  Trees and power poles fell. Lamps came on in the house.

  A winter besieged them with limp weeklies and tea.

  Beyond the orchids she watched the grey-shawled showers

  cross the grey lawn, then go down towards the grey sea.

  By the crystal teardrop lamp she’d brought from Ireland,

  humming then stopping, then humming. Settling the bulbs

  of saved lilies in vases with her leaf-veined hand.

  Seychelles. Seashells. He watched her, then, with glottal gulps

  that maddened her, sucked his tea. He felt murderous

  as the monsoon when she started playing some tripe

  about “Bendemeer’s stream,” each chord binding the house

  with nerves of itching ivy; he crammed in his pipe,

  then bit it erect, and in a raw, sodden rage

  strode to the unshawled piano and slammed the lid,

  missing her fingers. Maud waited. She closed the page

  of Airs from Erin and, very carefully, hid

  it under the velvet of the piano stool,

  brushed past him with her shawl, and climbed up the slow stairs,

  tugging at her fingers. No fool like an old fool,

  the Major raged. The window was streaming with tears,

  but none came. When? It was the old wound in his head.

  Rubbish. Easy excuse. He never blamed the war.

  It was like original sin. Then the Major heard

  someone knocking carefully. The voice said: “Major?

  Major, we going,” and left. The ginger uncurled

  from the dark sofa. He lifted him carefully,

  placed him by the window to look out on this world

  the way he no longer did. Then, his heart full, he

  went up, eased the door: Sleeping. But she never slept

  with one elbow over her eyes. Sorrow dissolved

  him, and he sat on the bed, and then both of them wept

  the forgiving rain of those who have truly loved.

  It seemed long as the season, and then the rain stopped.

  II

  Once the rains passed they took the olive Land Rover

  round the shining island, up mornes with red smudges

  of fresh immortelles with old things to discover;

  the deep-green crescents held African villages

  that, over centuries, had roofed their shacks with tins,

  erected a square stone church, until by stages,

  the shacks would creep down the ridges to become towns.

  That was how History saw them. He studied the course

  that it offered: the broken roads, the clear rivers

  that congealed to sepia lagoons, from which some case

  of bilharzia would erupt in kids whose livers

  caught the hookworm’s sickle. Pretty, dangerous streams.

  Their past was flat as a postcard, and their future,

  a brighter and flatter postcard, printed the schemes

  of charters with their poverty-guaranteed tour.

  In the frayed whisks of the vanished storm he felt his

  own scalp, freckled, with its skeins of thinning hair,

  but sunshine broke through the misty precipices

  with a double rainbow that turbanned La Sorcière,

  the sorceress mountain with a madras kerchief

  and flashing spectacles. They called her Ma Kilman

  because the village was darkened by their belief

  in her as a gardeuse, sybil, obeah-woman

  webbed with a spider’s knowledge of an after-life

  in her cracked lenses. She took Holy Communion

  with Maud sometimes, but there was an old African

  doubt that paused before taking the wafer’s white leaf.

  The Rover whined up the Morne till they saw, below

  a shelf of sunshot asphalt, the expansive plunge

  of Cul-de-Sac valley and the soaked indigo

  serration of peaks. A sky, loaded like a sponge,

  dabbed at, then dried the defiant beads of moisture

  on the levelled bananas with their fecal smell

  of new mud; but their irrigation ditches were

  channels of light and the oval potholes small

  mirrors of blueing cloud that the tires shattered,

  that almost instantly reglazed their reflection,

  until the storm’s green ruin no longer mattered,

  and the sparkling road only increased affection

  when they watched the sunlight redefining Roseau’s

  old sugar-factory roof. The road climbed the bay,

  as a cool wind thatched the bamboos like osiers,

  urging them with light tongues downward to Anse La Raye,

  chattering with expectation at the young sprouts

  that would spring from the storm. Their delight was strengthened

  by boys racing the Rover with half-naked shouts,

  offering them bananas, until the bends straightened

  and left them gasping for breath against the wet trees,

  till others sprouted from grass around the next bend;

  then the sea widened its blue around Canaries,

  and the road, coiling with ochre precipices,

  was like a rope that bound them, much closer even

  than the hurricane, by its azure silences,

  the way lianas knot their inseparable vine

  around two tree trunks sometimes, or a mast grows leaves

  in the heart of a forest, binding every vein,

  rooted in the island for the rest of their lives.

  The horns of the island were peaks split asunder

  by a volcanic massif. Through ferns, Soufrière

  waited under springs whose smoke signalled the thunder

  of the dead. It was a place where an ancient fear

  increased as he neared it. Holes of boiling lava

  bubbled in the Malebolge, where the mud-caked skulls

  climbed, multiplying in heads over and over,

  while the zircon gas from the flues climbed the bald hills.

  This was the gate of sulphur through which he must pass,

  singeing his memory, tho
ugh he pinched his nostrils

  until the stench faded into verdurous peace,

  like registering skulls in the lime-pits of Auschwitz.

  The wound closed in smoke, then wind would reopen it,

  a geyser would jet its gas through a cracked fissure

  the way that steam suddenly hissed from the bonnet

  of the uncapped radiator, scalding his face

  if he didn’t leap clear. He filled the cooling ring

  from a stream in the ferns. Then they went on climbing

  around larger and greener ferns, their wide fronds

  large as a fan belt’s, passing the old sulphur mine

  with its rusted wheel, its hawsers of lianas,

  where a Messrs. Bennett & Ward, his countrymen,

  in 1836 went home to England as

  bush and high taxes foreclosed their wild enterprise.

  Wreaths of funereal moss draped their endeavour.

  A huge wheel’s teeth locked in rust. What had stopped their scheme?

  Quarrels over money? Had one caught a fever,

  and, yellow as that leaf, in his delirium

  babbled of an alchemy that could turn sulphur

  gold, while his partner dabbed the cold sweat of a dream

  from his forehead? Had they had another offer

  somewhere on the outer boundaries of freedom

  and free enterprise that came with an empire?

  What was their force? How would they extract the mineral

  from the mine and transport it? Transport it to where?

  Or had they run out of money and that was all,

  until fever grass and bush foreclosed the idea

  and their banks were weed? He saw the sprocketed wheel

  gritting its teeth at the sulphur that still lay there.

  III

  In the sharp blue heights beyond them there were orchids

  springing from the side-paths. Sometimes, a resinous

  woodsman would startle them, his bag full of snake-heads

  to flog to Der Guva’ment. He walked without noise,

  a shaft of light angling the floor of the forest

  without shaking the ferns, his soles quiet as moss.

  Through stumps of brown teeth he pointed out the hillcrest

  with gaping, precipitous valleys, where smoke rose

  from a charcoal pit, and under the smoke, the lines

  of a white, amnesiac Atlantic, then with a bow,

  and a patois blessing with old African signs,

  as soundless as light on the road they watched him go.

  England seemed to him merely the place of his birth.

  How odd to prefer, over its pastoral sites—

  reasonable leaves shading reasonable earth—