Omeros

by Derek Walcott

  Chapter XVI

  I

  Plunkett’s ances-tree (his pun) fountained in blossoms

  and pods from a genealogical willow

  above his blotter’s green field. One pod was the Somme’s.

  It burst with his father’s lungs. Then a pale yellow

  asterisk for a great-uncle marked Bloemfontein.

  At the War Office he’d paid some waxworks fellow

  to draw flowers for battles, buds for a campaign.

  The cold-handed bugger’d done it for a fortune.

  Undertaker’s collar, bald as a snooker-ball,

  as hunched as a raven, he plucked titles in turn

  from their cliffs of gilt ledgers, picking with his bill

  from Agincourt to Zouave, returning to where

  he found blue blood in the Plunketts. The Major

  voiced no objection. But why Scots? Why a claymore

  with a draped tartan? And, when the willow faded

  into a dubious cloud, he smiled. To pay more,

  naturally, and he did. A carved, scrolled shield waited

  at the willow’s base, his name and hyphen

  for a closing date, then a space for son and heir.

  “No heir,” he told the mummy from Madame Tussaud,

  who believed he had dropped an aitch. “I mean ‘No. Here,’”

  snapped the Major, pointing to where the blank place showed

  on the waiting shield. “No heir: the end of the line.

  No more Plunketts.”

  The crow wrote it on the design.

  II

  An evening with the Plunketts: he marking cannons

  by their Type, Trunions, Bore, Condition, Size, Weight,

  in a marbled ledger, by order of Ordnance,

  Cipher—GR. III, GR>IV, Site, Silhouette, Date,

  nib scratching the page, beaking the well for a word,

  Maud with her needle, embroidering a silhouette

  from Bond’s Ornithology, their quiet mirrored

  in an antique frame. Needlepoint constellations

  on a clear night had prompted this intricate thing,

  this immense quilt, which, with her typical patience,

  she’d started years ago, making its blind birds sing,

  beaks parted like nibs from their brown branch and cover

  on the silken shroud. Mockingbirds, finches, and wrens,

  nightjars and kingfishers, hawks, hummingbirds, plover,

  ospreys and falcons, with beaks like his scratching pen’s,

  terns, royal and bridled, wild ducks, migrating teal,

  pipers (their fledgling beaks), wild waterfowl, widgeon,

  Cypseloides Niger, l’hirondelle des Antilles

  (their name for the sea-swift). They flew from their region,

  their bright spurs braceleted with Greek or Latin tags,

  to pin themselves to the silk, and, crying their names,

  pecked at her fingers. They fluttered like little flags

  from the branched island, budding in accurate flames.

  The Major pinched his eyes and turned from the blotter—

  green as a felt field in Ireland—and saw her mind

  with each dip of her hand skim the pleated water

  like a homesick curlew. Frogs machine-gunned the wind.

  Dun surf cannonaded. A star furled its orchid,

  faded and fell. The hours drowsed like centuries

  mesmerized by the clock’s metronome. Maud lifted

  and shook the silk from her lap, smoothing her knees.

  She did not look up. He watched as the beaked scissors made

  another paper cutout. A scratch in his throat

  made him cough, softly. Softly the pendulum swayed

  in its ornate mahogany case; he was tired,

  but her hair in the aureole cast by the shade

  never shifted. How often had he admired

  her hands in the half-dark out of the lamplit ring

  in the deep floral divan, diving like a swift

  to the drum’s hoop, as quick as a curlew drinking

  salt, with its hover, skim, dip, then vertical lift.

  Tonight he shuddered like the swift, thinking,

  This is her shroud, not her silver jubilee gift.

  His vision was swimming with fathom-depths, degrees

  bubbling with zeroes on the old nautical charts;

  he pinched his eyesockets. Cannons flashed from his eyes.

  He dropped the dividers, tired of fits and starts;

  the exact line of engagement was hard to find,

  whimsical cartographers aligned the islands

  as differently as dead leaves in a subtle wind.

  He bent to the map, rubbing his scalp with his hands.

  III

  Once, after the war, he’d made plans to embark on

  a masochistic odyssey through the Empire,

  to watch it go in the dusk, his “I” a column

  with no roof but a pediment, from Singapore

  to the Seychelles in his old Eighth Army outfit,

  calculating that the enterprise would take him

  years, with most of the journey being done on foot,

  before it was all gone, a secular pilgrim

  to the battles of his boyhood, where they were fought,

  from the first musket-shot that divided Concord,

  cracking its echo to some hill-station of Sind,

  after which they would settle down somewhere, but Maud

  was an adamant Eve: “It’ll eat up your pension.”

  But that was his daydream, his pious pilgrimage.

  And he would have done it, if he had had a son,

  but he was an armchair admiral in old age,

  with cold tea and biscuits, his skin wrinkled like milk,

  a gawky egret she stitched in her sea-green silk.

  Chapter XVII

  I

  Now, whenever his mind drifted in detachment

  like catatonic noon on the Caribbean Sea,

  Plunkett recited every billet, regiment,

  of the battle’s numerological poetry;

  he learnt eighty ships of the line, he knew the drift

  of the channel that day, and when the trade wind caught

  the British topsails, and a deep-draught sigh would lift

  his memory clear. At noon, he climbed to the fort

  as his self-imposed Calvary; from it, the cross

  of the man-o’-war bird rose. He heard the thunder

  in the cannonading caves, and checked the pamphlet

  from the museum, ticking off every blunder

  with a winged V, for the errors in either fleet.

  In his flapping shorts he measured every distance

  with a squared, revolving stride in the khaki grass.

  One day, at high noon, he felt under observance

  from very old eyes. He spun the binoculars

  slowly, and saw the lizard, elbows akimbo,

  belling its throat on the hot noon cannon, eyes slit,

  orange dewlap dilating on its pinned shadow.

  He climbed and crouched near the lizard. “Come to claim it?”

  the Major asked. “Every spear of grass on this ground

  is yours. Read the bloody pamphlet. Did they name it

  Iounalo for you?”

  The lizard spun around

  to the inane Caribbean. Plunkett also.

  “Iounalo, twit! Where the iguana is found.”

  He brought it for the slit eye to read by the glow

  of the throat’s furious wick.

  “Is that how it’s spelt?”

  The tongue leered. The Major stood, brushed off his khaki

  shorts, and rammed the pamphlet into his leather belt.

  “Iounalo, eh? It’s all folk-malarkey!”

  The grass was as long as his shorts. History was fact,

  History was a cannon, not a lizard; De Gr
asse

  leaving Martinique, and Rodney crouching to act

  in the right wind. Iounalo, my royal arse!

  Hewanorra, my hole! Was the greatest battle

  in naval history, which put the French to rout,

  fought for a creature with a disposable tail

  and elbows like a goalie? For this a redoubt

  was built? And his countrymen died? For a lizard

  with an Aruac name? It will be rewritten

  by black pamphleteers, History will be revised,

  and we’ll be its villians, fading from the map

  (he said “villians” for “villains”). And when it’s over

  we’ll be the bastards! Somehow the flaring dewlap

  had enraged him. He slammed the door of the Rover,

  but, driving down the cool aisle of casuarinas

  like poplars, was soothed by the breakwater. In a while

  he was himself again. He was himself or as

  much as was left. Innumerable iguanas

  ran down the vines of his skin, like Helen’s cold smile.

  II

  He kept up research in Ordnance. The crusted wrecks

  cast in the armourer’s foundry, the embossed crown

  of the cannon’s iron asterisk: Georgius Rex,

  or Gorgeous Wrecks, Maud punned. In that innocence

  with which History fevers its lovers, a black wall

  became its charred chapel, and a mortar-seized fence

  of green stones near the Military Hospital

  bent his raw knees for a sign; when he came outside

  from a pissed tunnel, his face had the radiance

  of a convert. How many young Redcoats had died

  for her? How many leaves had caught yellow fever

  from that lemon dress? He heard the dry bandolier

  of the immortelle rattling its pods. “Forever”

  was the flame tree’s name, without any reason,

  since it marched like Redcoats preceding the monsoon.

  How was the flower immortal when it would flare

  only in drought, a flag of the rainy season,

  of gathering thunderheads, each with its scrolled hair

  wigged like an admiral’s? Then he found the entry

  in pale lilac ink. Plunkett. One for the lacy trough.

  Plunkett? His veins went cold. From what shire was he?

  III

  On what hill did he pause to watch gulls follow a plough,

  seabag on one shoulder, with his apple-cheeked sheen?

  This was his search’s end. He had come far enough

  to find a namesake and a son. Aetat xix.

  Nineteen. Midshipman. From the horned sea, at sunrise

  in the first breeze of landfall, drowned! And so, close

  his young eyes and the ledger. Pray for his repose

  under the wreath of the lilac ink, and the wreath

  of the foam with white orchids. Bless my unbelief,

  Plunkett prayed. He would keep the namesake from Maud.

  He thought of the warm hand resting on the warm loaf

  of the cannon. And the crown for which it was made.

  Chapter XVIII

  I

  The battle fanned north, out of sight of the island,

  out of range of the claim by native historians

  that Helen was its one cause. An iguana scanned

  the line of a sea that settled down to silence

  except for one last wash over the breakwater

  as the French fleet worked its way up to Guadeloupe

  with Rodney heeling them hard. What he was after

  was such destruction it would be heard in Europe—

  masts splintering like twigs and fed to the fire

  in George the Third’s hearth—in which the sun’s gold sovereign

  would henceforth be struck in the name of one Empire

  only in the Caribbean, gilding the coast

  of the Eastern Seaboard from Georgia to Maine.

  The Dutch islands were in Rodney’s pocket and the cost

  to the New England colonies was the French fleet

  racing like mare’s tails, each ship a dissolving ghost

  of canvas turned cloud, until that immense defeat

  would block their mutinous harbours from arms and men.

  The Major made his own flock of V’s, winged comments

  in the margin when he found parallels. If she

  hid in their net of myths, knotted entanglements

  of figures and dates, she was not a fantasy

  but a webbed connection, like that stupid pretense

  that they did not fight for her face on a burning sea.

  He had no idea how time could be reworded,

  which is the historian’s task. The factual fiction

  of textbooks, pamphlets, brochures, which he had loaded

  in a ziggurat from the library, had the affliction

  of impartiality; skirting emotion

  as a ship avoids a reef, they followed one chart

  dryly with pen and compass, flattening an ocean

  to paper diagrams, but his book-burdened heart

  found no joy in them except their love of events,

  and none noticed the Homeric repetition

  of details, their prophecy. That was the difference.

  He saw coincidence, they saw superstition.

  And he himself had believed them. Except, once,

  when he came into the bedroom from the pig-farm

  to pick up his chequebook, he was fixed by her glance

  in the armoire’s full-length mirror, where, one long arm,

  its fist closed like a snake’s head, slipped through a bracelet

  from Maud’s jewel-box, and, with eyes calm as Circe,

  simply continued, and her smile said, “You will let

  me try this,” which he did. He stood at the mercy

  of that beaked, black arm, which with serpentine leisure

  replaced the bangle. When she passed him at the door

  he had closed his eyes at her closeness, a pleasure

  in that passing scent which was both natural odour

  and pharmacy perfume. That victory was hers,

  and so was his passion; but the passionless books

  did not contain smell, eyes, the long black arm, or his

  knowledge that the island’s beauty was in her looks,

  the wild heights of its splendour and arrogance.

  He moved to the coiled bracelet, rubbing his dry hands.

  II

  The bracelet coiled like a snake. He heard it hissing:

  Her housebound slavery could be your salvation.

  You can pervert God’s grace and adapt His blessing

  to your advantage and dare His indignation

  at a second Eden with its golden apple,

  henceforth her shadow will glide on every mirror

  in this house, and however that fear may appall,

  go to the glass and see original error

  in the lust you deny, all History’s appeal

  lies in this Judith from a different people,

  whose long arm is a sword, who has turned your head

  back to her past, her tribe; you live in the terror

  of age before beauty, the way that an elder

  longed for Helen on the parapets, or that bed.

  Like an elder trembling for Susanna, naked.

  He murmured to the mirror: No. My thoughts are pure.

  They’re meant to help her people, ignorant and poor.

  But these, smiled the bracelet, are the vows of empire.

  Black maid or blackmail, her presence in the stone house

  was oblique but magnetic. Every hour of the day,

  even poking around the pigs, he knew where she was;

  he could see her shadow through the sheets of laundry,

  and since she and her shadow were the same, the sun />
  behind her often made their blent silhouette seem

  naked, or sometimes, carrying a clean basin

  of water to the bleaching stones, she wore the same

  smile that made a drama out of every passing.

  III

  The village was bounded by a scabrous pasture

  where boys played cricket. On its Caribbean side

  was a cemetery of streaked stones and the tower

  of a Norman church where the old river died.

  Like reeds in the old lagoon the French in their power

  had lifted a forest of masts with Trojan pride.

  When the pages of sea-grapes in their restlessness

  lifted a sudden gust, through asterisks of rain,

  he climbed the small hill of garbage, and on its mess

  he stood there, measuring out the site with his cane

  and a small map he had found that was falling apart

  from its weathered spine in the back of the library.

  From this he had made his own diagram, a chart

  that he measured as two thousand steps from the sea,

  which concluded in the mound’s elegiac rampart.

  In the rain-blotted dusk, what was he raking for,

  poking with his cane there among the ruined shoes,

  a question on a seething heap, raking some more

  when something shone, metallic? What thing did he lose?

  The midden was a boredom of domestic trash

  whose artifacts showed nothing but their simple sins,

  as clearly as rainwater in a calabash,

  cracked as the crescent moons of enamel basins.

  Boys watched the white man’s inexhaustible patience

  chasing the curious piglets away from his work,

  which was to prove that the farthest exclamations

  of History are written by a flag of smoke,

  from Carthage, from Pompeii, from the burial mound

  of antipodal Troy. Midden built on midden;

  by nature men always chose the same dumping ground

  or an ancestral grove, and what lay hidden

  under the heap of waste was the French cemetery

  when the place was an outpost, facing Gros Îlet.

  But this was also her village, this was where she

  walked and swam on its beach, this was her parapet.

  The midden proved to have been the capital port.

  But then she had been the glory of nations once,

  the shoes and basins of Troy. Imperial France

  lay in his palm: two brass regimental buttons.

  Chapter XIX

  I