Omeros

Home > Fantasy > Omeros > Page 6
Omeros Page 6

by Derek Walcott


  these loud-mouthed forests on their illiterate heights,

  these springs speaking a dialect that cooled his mind

  more than pastures with castles! To prefer the hush

  of a hazed Atlantic worried by the salt wind!

  Others could read it as “going back to the bush,”

  but harbour after crescent harbour closed his wound.

  There was a lot in the island that Maud hated:

  the moisture rotting their library; that was the worst.

  It seeped through the shawled piano and created

  havoc with the felt hammers, so the tuner cost

  a regular fortune. After that, the cluttered light

  on the choked market steps; insects of any kind,

  especially rain-flies; a small, riddling termite

  that cored houses into shells and left windows blind;

  barefoot Americans strolling into the banks—

  there was a plague of them now, worse than the insects

  who, at least, were natives. Turbanned religious cranks

  urging sisters with candles to the joy of sects,

  the velocity of passenger transports on

  uncurbed highway, comets that hurtled out of sight

  and brought a flash to the heart; the darkening monsoon

  of merciless July with patches of sunlight

  mercurial as Helen, the slanted, almond eyes

  of her ebony beauty. And then an elate

  sunrise would flood Maud’s garden, pouring relentless

  light in angelic lilies, yellow chalices

  of morning-glories, and Queen Anne’s seraphic lace.

  Just then he saw the butterfly pinned to a blade

  like a nervous pennant. She had followed him here.

  The dilating panels pulsed to his trembling blood,

  the wing-folded palms in their parody of prayer;

  then they would widen, like the eyes of Maud’s scissors

  following a seam. Was he condemned to see her

  every time one twinkled up out of Maud’s garden?

  What did she want? For History to exorcise her

  theft of the yellow frock? Did she crave his pardon?

  After a while the happiness grew oppressive.

  Only the dead can endure it in paradise,

  and it felt selfish for so long. He felt as if

  the still, lemon panels were painted with her eyes.

  There’s too much poverty below us. Every leaf

  defines its limits. All roots have their histories.

  “It’s so still. It’s like Adam and Eve all over,”

  Maud whispered. “Before the snake. Without all the sin.”

  And their peace was so deep, they sat in the Rover

  listening to the bamboos. He switched on the engine

  and they bucketed, wobbling over rain-ruts, hurled

  on the groaning springs down to the flat, real world.

  Chapter XI

  I

  Pigs were his business. These people were not resigned

  to living with garbage, drifting in numbed content

  as the filth narrowed the drains. They had not designed

  the Attic ideal of the first slave-settlement,

  with sea-grapes for olives and black philosophers

  with clouds over their elbows. They had not laid out

  narrow-gauge pipes for buckets, but none for sewers.

  They had not sucked the cane till sugar was played out.

  Empires were swinish. These had splendid habits

  of cleanliness, compulsively sweeping yards dry

  with their palm-brooms. Encouraged to screw like rabbits

  by estates who liked labour and, naturally, by

  a Church that damned them to hell for contraceptives.

  But they waxed their tables, flailed their beaten laundry

  on the river-rocks; there were ikons in their lives—

  the Virgin, the Virgin Lamp, the steps lined with flowers,

  and they learnt quickly, good repairers of engines

  and fanatical maids. Helen had kept the house

  as if it were her own, and that’s when it all begins:

  when the maid turns into the mistress and destroys

  her own possibilities. They start to behave

  as if they owned you, Maud said. This was the distress

  of the pale lemon frock, which Helen claimed Maud gave

  her but forgot. He stayed out of it, but that dress

  had an empire’s tag on it, mistress to slave.

  The price was envy and cunning. The big church, the

  middens by cloudy lagoons, kids racing like piglets.

  If History saw them as pigs, History was Circe

  with her schoolteacher’s wand, with high poles at the fêtes

  of saint-day processions past al fresco latrines.

  So Plunkett decided that what the place needed

  was its true place in history, that he’d spend hours

  for Helen’s sake on research, so he proceeded

  to the whirr of enormous moths in the still house.

  Memory’s engines. The butterfly dress was hers,

  at least her namesake’s, in the Battle of the Saints.

  II

  During this period his life grew increasingly

  bookish and slippered, like a don’s. He stayed in. Maud

  wondered about his wound. When she took in his tea

  he nodded towards the side-table, and this made

  her leave him with his ziggurat of books, his charts,

  and the balsa fleet he carved with a small scalpel,

  while she sipped hers in the arched shade with her orchids.

  Dusk darkened the pots, an allamanda’s bell

  bronzed in the sky-fire, then melted into night.

  Dennis was still at work when she took her tray in.

  The desk was dark, except for a green pool of light

  cast on its baize by a lamp curved like a heron.

  She sat on a chair beside him. He didn’t speak,

  and the tea was untouched. One finger traced the line

  of some map, and the nose, with its man-o’-war’s beak,

  skimmed the white page. She had never felt more alone.

  A light rain had washed the stars. They looked very close.

  Maud sighed, then went upstairs. She could feel the white sea

  losing its white noise slowly, drawing the windows;

  she studied the map on one forearm, then briskly

  loosened the bridal knot of the mosquito net,

  then stretched it to the corners of the tautened pane,

  carried the straw basket with the bright spools in it

  down to the divan, her needles swift as his pen.

  III

  She thought: I dreamed of this house with woods around it,

  with trees I’d read of, whose flowers I’d never seen.

  Part of a barracks, with no noise to surround it

  but cicadas chattering like my sewing-machine.

  I loved the young teak with bodies clean as birches

  in light that freckled the leopard shade of the path,

  when martins at dusk with their crisscrossing stitches

  would sew the silk sky, or preen around the birdbath.

  I saw it when we first came. Unapproachable

  cliff on one side, but its ledges a nesting place

  for folding herons and gulls, and my teak table

  with its lion-claw legs and its varnished surface

  spread with fine scalloped linen, white as the sea’s lace,

  and ringing crystal, with a fresh wreath of orchids

  like Remembrance Day, at my brass candlestick’s base,

  in Dennis’s honour mainly, and the place cards

  near the bone-china of my huge lily-pad plates.

  Have I put on airs, to think of dinner-candles

  and
flags and lances since we slow-marched down the aisle

  under crossed swords? Then, my tureen with thick handles

  hefted by Helen, her cap white as my napkins

  rolled in their crested holders. She’d set it in place,

  and step back in shadow that blent with her fine skin’s.

  What a loss, that girl! I ladled the fragrant steam

  of my stew in thick portions, the dark full of fireflies

  that never catch the leaves. It’s as clear as a dream,

  but more real. Well, folks lived for centuries

  like this with candles and airs on the piano,

  the love-songs fading over a firefly sea,

  their mouths round as the moon over a black canoe

  like the one I smiled at today: In God We Troust.

  But then we all trust in Him, and that’s why we know

  the peace of a wandering heart when it is housed.

  Chapter XII

  I

  Our house with its bougainvillea trellises,

  the front porch gone, was a printery. In its noise

  I was led up the cramped stair to its offices.

  I saw the small window near which we slept as boys,

  how close the roof was. The heat of the galvanize.

  A desk in my mother’s room, not that bed, sunlit,

  with its rose quilt where we were forbidden to sit.

  Pink handbills whirred under their spinning negative

  and two girls stacked them from their retractable bed

  as fast as my own images were reprinted

  as I remembered them in an earlier life

  that made the sheets linen, the machines furniture,

  her wardrobe her winged, angelic mirror. The hum

  of the wheel’s elbow stopped. And there was a figure

  framed in the quiet window for whom this was home,

  tracing its dust, rubbing thumb and middle finger,

  then coming to me, not past, but through the machines,

  clear as a film and as perfectly projected

  as a wall cut by the jalousies’ slanted lines.

  He had done a self-portrait, it was accurate.

  In his transparent hand was a book I had read.

  “In this pale blue notebook where you found my verses”—

  my father smiled—“I appeared to make your life’s choice,

  and the calling that you practise both reverses

  and honours mine from the moment it blent with yours.

  Now that you are twice my age, which is the boy’s,

  which the father’s?”

  “Sir”—I swallowed—“they are one voice.”

  In the printery’s noise, and as we went downstairs

  in that now familiar and unfamiliar house,

  he said, in an accent of polished weariness,

  “I was raised in this obscure Caribbean port,

  where my bastard father christened me for his shire:

  Warwick. The Bard’s county. But never felt part

  of the foreign machinery known as Literature.

  I preferred verse to fame, but I wrote with the heart

  of an amateur. It’s that Will you inherit.

  I died on his birthday, one April. Your mother

  sewed her own costume as Portia, then that disease

  like Hamlet’s old man’s spread from an infected ear,

  I believe the parallel has brought you some peace.

  Death imitating Art, eh?”

  At the door to the yard,

  he said, “I grew grapes here. Small, a little sour,

  still, grapes all the same.”

  “I remember them,” I said.

  “I thought they died before you were born. Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” The furred nap like nettles, their globes’ green acid.

  “What was Warwick doing, transplanting Warwickshire?”

  I saw him patterned in shade, the leaves in his hair,

  the vines of the lucent body, the swift’s blown seed.

  II

  Out on the sidewalk the sunlight drained like the print

  of a postcard flecked with its gnawing chemical

  in which there was light, but with a sepia tint,

  even on Grass Street with our Methodist chapel.

  We passed under uprights with fretworks on their eaves,

  mansards with similar woodwork, their verandahs

  shuttered at both corners by half-cranked jalousies

  through which pale cousins peered or a half-cracked aunt, as

  if from the madhouse or a convent. Windows

  framed their unshifting lives. During the hot, long day

  they kept changing posts near which they leant, their elbows

  jutting from a ledge, elbows as well known as they

  were, or with a white head dipping in a rocker

  while the black town walked barefoot and deafening bells

  pounded the Angelus; but none saw the walker

  in his white suit, their reveries were somewhere else,

  they looked on their high-brown life as a souvenir

  with a dried Easter palm, its amber sweets, its carts

  horse-drawn, rubbing their beads and muttering Veni,

  Creator to velvet cushions with embroidered hearts.

  As iron bells ruled the town, and the poui flowers fell.

  III

  It was one. We passed the brown phantoms in white-drill

  suits, some with pith-helmets whom the Angelus sent

  back to work after lunch, suits rippled by the grille

  of shade made by the long-stemmed pillars as we went

  past them, the asphalt so hot that it was empty.

  Heat waves rippled over it and one or two cars

  pumped their bulb-horns and waved as they rattled by.

  Then we came to a green square cut in smaller squares.

  And the light from a bluer postcard filled its sky,

  and it seemed, from his steps, that water sprang in plumes

  from the curled, iron-green fountain at its centre,

  though its gates were shut under pluming cabbage-palms,

  a paradise I had to believe to enter.

  But I did not ask him about the other life,

  because the white shadow I had made from my mind

  was vague in its origin and thin as belief,

  unsinged as an Easter lily, fresh as the wind,

  its whisper as soft as a pavement-scratching leaf.

  Chapter XIII

  I

  “I grew up where alleys ended in a harbour

  and Infinity wasn’t the name of our street;

  where the town anarchist was the corner barber

  with his own flagpole and revolving Speaker’s seat.

  There were rusted mirrors in which we would look back

  on the world’s events. There, toga’d in a pinned sheet,

  the curled hairs fell like commas. On their varnished rack,

  The World’s Great Classics read backwards in his mirrors

  where he doubled as my chamberlain. I was known

  for quoting from them as he was for his scissors.

  I bequeath you that clean sheet and an empty throne.”

  We’d arrived at that corner where the barber-pole

  angled from the sidewalk, and the photographer,

  who’d taken his portrait, and, as some think, his soul,

  leant from a small window and scissored his own hair

  in a mime, suggesting a trim was overdue

  to my father, who laughed and said “Wait” with one hand.

  Then the barber mimed a shave with his mouth askew,

  and left the window to wait by his wooden door

  framed with dead portraits, and he seemed to understand

  something in the life opposite not seen before.

  “The rock he lived on was nothing. Not a nation

 
or a people,” my father said, and, in his eyes,

  this was a curse. When he raged, his indignation

  jabbed the air with his scissors, a swift catching flies,

  as he pumped the throne serenely round to his view.

  He gestured like Shylock: “Hath not a Jew eyes?”

  making his man a negative. An Adventist,

  he’s stuck on one glass that photograph of Garvey’s

  with the braided tricorne and gold-fringed epaulettes,

  and that is his other Messiah. His paradise

  is a phantom Africa. Elephants. Trumpets.

  And when I quote Shylock silver brims in his eyes.

  II

  “Walk me down to the wharf.”

  At the corner of Bridge

  Street, we saw the liner as white as a mirage,

  its hull bright as paper, preening with privilege.

  “Measure the days you have left. Do just that labour

  which marries your heart to your right hand: simplify

  your life to one emblem, a sail leaving harbour

  and a sail coming in. All corruption will cry

  to be taken aboard. Fame is that white liner

  at the end of your street, a city to itself,

  taller than the Fire Station, and much finer,

  with its brass-ringed portholes, mounting shelf after shelf,

  than anything Castries could ever hope to build.”

  The immaculate hull insulted the tin roofs

  beneath it, its pursers were milk, even the bilge

  bubbling from its stern in quietly muttering troughs

  and its humming engines spewed expensive garbage

  where boys balanced on logs or, riding old tires,

  shouted up past the hull to tourists on the rails

  to throw down coins, as cameras caught their black cries,

  then jackknife or swan-dive—their somersaulting tails

  like fishes flipped backwards—as the coins grew in size

  in the wobbling depth; then, when they surfaced, fights

  for possession, their heads butting like porpoises,

  till, like a city leaving a city, the lights

  blazed in its moving rooms, and the liner would glide

  over its own phosphorus, and wash hit the wharves

  long after stewards had set the service inside

  the swaying chandeliered salons, and the black waves

  settle down to their level. The stars would renew

  their studded diagrams over Achille’s canoe.

  From here, in his boyhood, he had seen women climb

  like ants up a white flower-pot, baskets of coal

 

‹ Prev