Omeros

by Derek Walcott

  out of its fringed case. This was the oar. His saddle

  the heaving plank at the stern, a wave’s crest was the

  white eagle bonnet; then slowly he fired the oar

  and a palm-tree crumpled; then to repeated cracks

  from the rifle, more savages, until the shore

  was littered with palm spears, bodies: like Aruacs

  falling to the muskets of the Conquistador.

  II

  Seven Seas asked him to rake the leaves in his yard.

  The pomme-Arac shed so many the rusted drum

  filled quickly, and more were falling as he carried

  each pile. Through the teeth of the rake Achille heard them

  talk a dead language. He would clean up this whole place.

  He cutlassed the banana trash. He gripped a frond

  of the rusting coconut, swivelling its base

  till it gave, then he dumped the rubbish in a mound

  round the smoking drum. The black dog did dog-dances

  around him, yapping, crouching, entangling his heel.

  Meanwhile, the bonfire rose with crackling branches.

  Seven Seas, on his box, called the dog from Achille.

  He wanted to ask Seven Seas where trees got names,

  watching the ribbed branches blacken with the same stare

  of the blind man at the leaves of the leaping flames,

  and why our life’s spark is exceeded by a star.

  But the light of a star is dead and maybe our

  light was the same. Then Achille saw the iguana

  in the leaves of the pomme-Arac branches and fear

  froze him at the same time it fuelled the banner

  of the climbing flame. Then the ridged beast disappeared.

  He stepped back from the pomme-Arac’s shade on the grass

  diagrammed like the lizard. Then, as if he heard

  his thought, Seven Seas said: “Aruac mean the race

  that burning there like the leaves and pomme is the word

  in patois for ‘apple.’ This used to be their place.”

  Maybe he’d heard the iguana with his dog’s ears,

  because the dog was barking around the trunk’s base.

  He had never heard the dog’s name either. It was

  one of those Saturdays that contain centuries,

  when the strata of history layered underheel,

  which earth sometimes flashes with its mineral signs,

  can lie in a quartz shard. Gradually, Achille

  found History that morning. Near the hedge, the tines

  of the rake in the dead leaves grated on some stone,

  so he crouched to uproot the obstruction. He saw

  deep marks in the rock that froze his fingers to bone.

  The features incised there glared back at his horror

  from its disturbed grave. A face that a child will draw:

  blank circles for eyes, a straight line down for the nose,

  a slit for a mouth, but the expression angrier

  as Achille’s palm brushed off centuries of repose.

  A thousand archaeologists started screaming

  as Achille wrenched out the totem, then hurled it far

  over the oleander hedge. It lay dreaming

  on one cheek in the spear-grass, but that act of fear

  multiplied the lances on his scalp. Stone-faced souls

  peered with their lizard eyes through the pomme-Arac tree,

  then turned from their bonfire. Instantly, like moles

  or mole crickets in the shadow of History,

  the artifacts burrowed deeper into their holes.

  III

  A beach burns their memory. Copper almond leaves

  cracking like Caribs in a pepper smoke, the blue

  entering God’s eye and nothing raked from their lives

  except one elegy from Aruac to Sioux,

  the shadow of a frond’s bonnet riding white sand,

  while Seven Seas tried to tell Achille the answer

  to certain names. The cane’s question shook in his hand

  while the pomme-Arac leaves burned. He said he was once

  a Ghost Dancer like that smoke. He described the snow

  to Achille. He named the impossible mountains

  that he had seen when he lived among the Indians.

  Sybils sweep the sand of our archipelago.

  Chapter XXXII

  I

  She floated so lightly! One hand, frail as a swift,

  gripping the verandah. The cotton halo fanned

  from her shrunken crown, and I felt that I could lift

  that fledgling, my mother, in the cup of my hand

  and settle her somewhere else: away from the aged

  women rubbing rosaries in the Marian Home,

  but I was resigned like them. I no longer raged

  at the humiliations of time. Her turn had come

  to be bent by its weight, its indifferent process

  that drummed in wrist and shank. Time was that fearful friend

  they talked to, who sat beside them in empty chairs,

  as deaf as they were; who sometimes simply listened.

  They were all withdrawn. They’d entered a dimension

  where every thought was weightless, every form clouded

  by its ephemeral halo. Time’s intention

  rather than death was what baffled them; in the deed

  of dying there was terror, but what did time mean,

  after some friend stopped talking and around her bed

  they opened the panels of an unfolding screen?

  The frail hair grew lovelier on my mother’s head,

  but when my arm rested on her hollow shoulder

  it staggered slightly from the solicitous weight.

  I was both father and son. I was as old as her

  exhausted prayer, as her wisps of memory floated

  with a vague patience, telling her body: “Wait,”

  when all that brightness had withered like memory’s flower,

  like the allamanda’s bells and the pale lilac

  bougainvillea vines that had covered our gabled house.

  They, like her natural memory, would not come back.

  Her days were dim as dusk. There were no more hours.

  From her cupped sleep, she wavered with recognition.

  I would bring my face closer to hers and catch the

  scent of her age.

  “Who am I? Mama, I’m your son.”

  “My son.” She nodded.

  “You have two, and a daughter.

  And a lot of grandchildren,” I shouted. “A lot to

  remember.”

  “A lot.” She nodded, as she fought her

  memory. “Sometimes I ask myself who I am.”

  We looked at the hills together, at roofs that I knew

  in childhood. “Their names are Derek, Roddy, and Pam.”

  “I have to go back to the States again.”

  “Well, we

  can’t be together all the time,” she said, “I know.”

  “There is too much absence,” I said. Then a blessed

  lucidity broke through a cloud. She smiled. “I know

  who you are. You are my son.”

  “Warwick’s son,” she said.

  “Nature’s gentleman.” His vine-leaves haloed her now.

  II

  I left her on the verandah with her white hair,

  to buckets clanging in the African twilight

  where two girls at the standpipe collected water,

  and children with bat-like cries seemed trapped behind bright

  galvanized fences, and down the thickening road

  as bulbs came on behind curtains, the shadows crossed

  me, signing their black language. I felt transported,

  past shops smelling of cod to a place I had lost

  in the open book of the street, and could not fi
nd.

  It was another country, whose excitable

  gestures I knew but could not connect with my mind,

  like my mother’s amnesia; untranslatable

  answers accompanied these actual spirits

  who had forgotten me as much as I, too, had

  forgotten a continent in the narrow streets.

  Now, in night’s unsettling noises, what I heard

  enclosed my skin with an older darkness. I stood

  in a village whose fires flickered in my head

  with tongues of a speech I no longer understood,

  but where my flesh did not need to be translated;

  then I heard patois again, as my ears unclogged.

  The bay was black in starlight. The reek of the beach

  was rimmed with a white noise. The beam of the lighthouse

  revolved over trees and skipped what it couldn’t reach.

  The fronds were threshing over the lit bungalows,

  and a breaker arched with a sound like tearing cloth

  ripped down the stitched seam, a sound Mama made sewing

  when, in disgust, she’d rip the stitches with her mouth.

  As I closed the door I felt the surf-noise going

  far out back to sea, from each window, one by one,

  and yet, inside the rooms was this haze of motion,

  above the taut sheet still fragrant from the iron,

  and I watched, enlarged by the lamp, a stuttering moth.

  III

  The moth’s swift shadow rippled on an emerald

  lagoon that clearly showed the submerged geography

  of the reef’s lilac shelf, where a lateen sail held

  for Gros Îlet village like a hooked butterfly

  on its flowering branch: a canoe, nearing the island.

  Soundless, enormous breakers foamed across the pane,

  then broke into blinding glare. Achille raised his hand

  from the drumming rudder, then watched our minnow plane

  melt into cloud-coral over the horned island.

  BOOK FOUR

  Chapter XXXIII

  I

  With the stunned summer going, with the barrel-organ

  oaks, the fiddles of gnats, with the surrendering groan

  of a carousel by Long Island Sound, the lake with a moon

  adrift there in daylight like an unstrung balloon,

  with the cold in your palm like a statue’s on

  your girlfriend’s knee, from the wooden croak of a loon

  from the summer-theatre, the picnic tents of New London,

  by the tidal rock-pools, from the broiled prawn

  of faces in salad landscapes, to the folding accordion

  of fin-de-siècle wave swells, the circuses came down

  along the coast of my new empire; the carousels stiffen,

  and pegs are pulled from grass that is going brown

  in the early cold. They live by an unceasing

  self-deceit in an eternal republic, by the vernal sin

  in the blue distance, as summer widens its increasing

  pardon. Clouds unbutton their bodices,

  and butterflies sail in their yellow odysseys,

  and shadows everywhere wear the same size.

  But the horizon is closer as the awnings fold

  and the flags and guywires are pulled down, and the field

  is left to its broad scar. Now the bleachers are too cold

  except for stubborn lovers who think that the night

  will say its stars for the first time. It is late

  for us to measure our footfall. And the dark slate

  Sound that is scratched with chalk lines, the lighthouses

  squinting in the fog, the slowly buttoned blouses

  make us walk slowly, Mayakovsky’s clouds in trousers.

  From the provincial edge of an atlas, from the hem

  of a frayed empire, a man stops. Not for another anthem

  trembling over the water—he has learnt three of them—

  but for that faint sidereal drone interrupted by the air

  gusting over black water, or so that he can hear

  the surf in the pores of wet sand wince and pucker.

  II

  Back in a Brookline of brick and leaf-shaded lanes

  I lived like a Japanese soldier in World War

  II, on white rice and spare ribs, and, just for a change,

  spare ribs and white rice, until the Chinese waiter

  setting my corner-table muttered my order,

  halfheartedly flashing the bedragonned menu.

  Like a Jap soldier on his Pacific island

  who prefers solitude to the hope of rescue,

  I could blend with the decor of its bamboo grove

  and read my paper in peace. I knew they all knew

  about my abandonment in the war of love:

  the busboys, the couples, their eyes turned from the smell

  of failure, while my own eyes had turned Japanese

  looking for a letter, for its rescuing sail,

  till I grew tired, like wounded Philoctetes,

  the hermit who did not know the war was over,

  or refused to believe it. The late summer light

  squared the carpet, moved from the floor to the sofa,

  moved from the sofa, which turned to a hill at night.

  But even at night the heat stayed in the concrete

  pavements while the fan whirred its steel blades like a palm’s,

  as I brushed imaginary sand off from my feet,

  turned off the light, and pillowed her waist with my arms,

  then tossed on my back. The fan turned, rustling the sheet.

  I reached from my raft and reconnected the phone.

  In its clicking oarlocks, it idled, my one oar.

  But castaways make friends with the sea; living alone

  they learn to survive on fistfuls of rainwater

  and windfall sardines. But a house which is unblest

  by familiar voices, startled by the clatter

  of cutlery in a sink with absence for its guest,

  as it drifts, its rooms intact, in doldrum summer,

  is less a mystery than the Marie Celeste.

  Hot concrete pavements, storefronts with watery glass,

  in supermarkets her back steering a basket,

  same hair, same shoulders, same compact, cynical ass

  rounding the aisle, afraid of things I might ask it.

  Her wrist yanking the trolley cord and the trolley

  gliding with its bell to a stop, as she gets off

  to her fixed appointments. Down some chic side-alley

  with its bakery and boutiques, the dead-end of love—

  all taken in stride as the car picks up slowly

  and passes her confident hair, gathering speed,

  past faces frowning at the sunlight as she,

  walking backwards with the crowd, begins to recede

  with shapes on a wharf; or her elbow in the shade

  of a florist’s awning, that, as I grew closer

  to the sprinkled shelves, disappeared like a lizard,

  while I stood there, in the aisles of Vallombrosa,

  drugged by the perfume of flowers I didn’t need.

  Then, back to the sunstruck pavement, where passers-by

  avoided my dewy gaze with a cautious nod,

  when they were the busy, transparent ones, not I.

  I had nowhere to go but home. Yet I was lost.

  Like them I could jiggle keys in purse or pocket.

  Like them I fiddled with the door, hoping a ghost

  would rise from her chair and help me to unlock it.

  III

  House of umbrage, house of fear,

  house of multiplying air

  House of memories that grow

  like shadows out of Allan Poe

  House where marriages go bust,

  house of t
elephone and lust

  House of caves, behind whose door

  a wave is crouching with its roar

  House of toothbrush, house of sin,

  of branches scratching, “Let me in!”

  House whose rooms echo with rain,

  of wrinkled clouds with Onan’s stain

  House that creaks, age fifty-seven,

  wooden earth and plaster heaven

  House of channelled CableVision

  whose dragonned carpets sneer derision

  Unlucky house that I uncurse

  by rites of genuflecting verse

  House I unhouse, house that can harden

  as cold as stones in the lost garden

  House where I look down the scorched street

  but feel its ice ascend my feet

  I do not live in you, I bear

  my house inside me, everywhere

  until your winters grow more kind

  by the dancing firelight of mind

  where knobs of brass do not exist,

  whose doors dissolve with tenderness

  House that lets in, at last, those fears

  that are its guests, to sit on chairs

  feasts on their human faces, and

  takes pity simply by the hand

  shows her her room, and feels the hum

  of wood and brick becoming home.

  Chapter XXXIV

  I

  The Crow horseman pointed his lance at the contrail

  high over the Dakotas, over Colorado’s

  palomino mountains; shapes so edged with detail

  I mistook them for lakes. Under the crumbling floes

  of a gliding Arctic were dams large as our cities,

  and the icy contrails scratched on the Plexiglas

  hung like white comets left by their seraphic skis.

  Clouds whitened the Crow horseman and I let him pass

  into the page, and I saw the white waggons move

  across it, with printed ruts, then the railroad track

  and the arrowing interstate, as a lost love

  narrowed from epic to epigram. Our contracts

  were torn like the clouds, like treaties with the Indians,

  but with mutual treachery. Through the window,

  the breakers burst like the spray on Pacific pines,

  and Manifest Destiny was behind me now.

  My face frozen in the ice-cream paradiso

  of the American dream, like the Sioux in the snow.

  II

  The wandering smoke below me was like Achille’s

  hallucination. Lances, the shattering silver

  of cavalry fording a stream, as oxen-wheels