Omeros

by Derek Walcott

  but carrying its own death inside it, wearily.

  Red god gone with autumn and white winter early.

  Chapter XLIII

  I

  Flour was falling on the Plains. Her hair turned grey

  carrying logs from the woodpile. The tiny turret

  of the fort in the snow pointed like a chalet

  in a child’s crystal and Catherine remembered

  the lights on all afternoon in a Boston street,

  the power of the globe that lay in a girl’s palm

  to shake the world to whiteness and obliterate

  it the way the drifts were blurring the Parkin farm,

  the orange twilight cast by the feverish grate

  at the carpet’s edge on arrows of andirons

  in a brass quiver. She felt the light marking lines

  on her warm forehead, reddening the snow mountains

  above the chalet with their green crepe-paper pines;

  then she would shake the crystal and all would be snow,

  the Ghost Dance, assembling then, as it was now.

  Work made her wrists cold iron. She rested the axe

  down in its white echo. No life was as hard as

  the Sioux’s, she thought. But a pride had stiffened their backs.

  Hunger could shovel them up like dried cicadas

  into the fiery pit like that in the hearth,

  when she stared round-eyed in the flames. They were not meek,

  and she had been taught the meek inherit the earth.

  The flour kept falling. Inedible manna

  fell on their children’s tongues, from dribbling sacks

  condemned by the army. The crow’s flapping banner

  flew over the homes of the Braves. They stood like stakes

  without wires: the Crows, the Sioux, the Dakotas.

  The snow blew in their wincing faces like papers

  from another treaty which a blind shaman tears

  to bits in the wind. The pines have lifted their spears.

  Except that the thick, serrated line on the slope

  was rapidly growing more pine-trees. A faint bugle

  sounded from the chalet. She watched the pine-trees slip

  in their white smoke downhill to the hoot of an owl

  and yapping coyotes answering the bugle,

  as the pines lowered their lances in a gallop,

  and she heard what leapt from the pine-logs as a girl,

  the crackle of rifle-fire from the toy fort,

  like cicadas in drought; then she heard the cannon—

  the late muffled echo after it was fired

  and the dark blossom it made, its arch bringing down

  lances and riders with it. The serrated sea

  of pines spread out on the plain, their own avalanche

  whitening them, but they screamed in the ecstasy

  of their own massacre, since this was the Ghost Dance,

  and the blizzard slowly erased their swirling cries,

  the horses and spinning riders with useless shields,

  in the white smoke, the Sioux, the Dakotas, the Crows.

  The flour basting their corpses on the white fields.

  The absence that settled over the Dakotas

  was contained in the globe. Its pines, its tiny house.

  II

  “I pray to God that I never share in man’s will,

  which widened before me. I saw a chain of men

  linked by wrists to our cavalry. I watched until

  they were a line of red ants. I let out a moan

  as the last ant disappeared. Then I rode downhill

  away from the Parkin farm to the Indian camp.

  I entered the camp in the snow. A starved mongrel

  and a papoose sat in the white street, with a clay

  vessel in the child’s hands, and the dog’s fanged growl

  backed off from my horse, then lunged. Then I turned away

  down another street through the tents to more and more

  silence. There were hoof-marks frozen in the flour dust

  near a hungry tent-mouth. I got off. Through its door

  I saw white-eyed Omeros, motionless. He must

  be deaf too, I thought, as well as blind, since his head

  never turned, and then he lifted the dry rattle

  in one hand, and it was the same sound I had heard

  in Cody’s circus, the snake hiss before battle.

  There was a broken arrow, and others in the quiver

  around his knees. Those were our promises. I stared

  a long while at his silence. It was a white river

  under black pines in winter. I was only scared

  when my horse snorted outside, perhaps from the sound

  of the rattler. I went back outside. Where were the

  women and children? I walked on the piebald ground

  with its filthy snow, and stopped. I saw a warrior

  frozen in a drift and took him to be a Sioux

  and heard the torn war flags rattling on their poles,

  then the child’s cry somewhere in the flour of snow,

  but never found her or the dog. I saw the soles

  of their moccasins around the tents, and a horse

  ribbed like a barrel with flies circling its teeth.

  I walked like a Helen among their dead warriors.

  III

  “This was history. I had no power to change it.

  And yet I still felt that this had happened before.

  I knew it would happen again, but how strange it

  was to have seen it in Boston, in the hearth-fire.

  I was a leaf in the whirlwind of the Ordained.

  Then Omeros’s voice came from the mouth of the tent:

  ‘We galloped towards death swept by the exaltation

  of meeting ourselves in a place just like this one:

  The Ghost Dance has tied the tribes into one nation.

  As the salmon grows tired of its ladder of stone,

  so have we of fighting the claws of the White Bear,

  dripping red beads on the snow. Whiteness is everywhere.’”

  Look, Catherine! There are no more demons outside the door.

  The white wolf drags its shawled tail into the high snow

  through the pine lances, the blood dried round its jaw;

  it is satisfied. Come, come to the crusted window,

  blind as it is with the ice, through the pane’s cataract;

  see, it’s finished. It’s over, Catherine, you have been saved.

  But she sat on a chair in the parlour while the cracked

  window spread its webs, and for days and nights starved

  and thinned in her rocker. The maddened wind runs

  around the still farm. Bread greened, and like a carved

  totem her body hardened to wood. Apples dried, onions

  curled with green sprouts, and rats, growing bolder,

  with eyes like berries, moved like the burial lanterns

  of the cavalry. Her shawl slipped from one shoulder

  but she left it there, in peace, since this was peace now,

  the winter of the Ghost Dance. “I’m one year older,”

  she said to the feathery window. “I loved snow

  once, but now I dread its white siege outside my door.”

  Years severed in half by winter! By a darkness

  through which branches groped, paralyzed in their distress.

  Which flocks betrayed. Wild geese with their own honking noise

  over jammed highways, the Charles’s slow-moving ice.

  No twilight, but lamps turned on in mid-afternoon,

  my humped shadow like a bear entering its cave,

  clawing at the frozen lock, as every noun

  became its muffled echo, every street a grave

  with snow on both sides. I caught the implications

  of a traffic-light winking on an iron s
ky

  that I could, since the only civilizations

  were those with snow, whiten to anonymity.

  Turn the page. Blank winter. The obliteration

  of nouns fading into echoes, the alphabet

  of scribbling branches. Boots stamp the trolley station.

  Dead cars foam at the mouth with icicles. The boat

  of the streetcar’s light divides the frozen breakers,

  then steaming passengers scratch at the webbed windows’

  quickly stitched lace. Swaying in black coats and parkas,

  every face is a lantern wincing when the doors

  part their rubber accordion, their tears like glass.

  The name I had mispronounced was as muffled now

  as any white noun outside the spectral stations

  along the line, where the faces were flecked with snow

  when the full car passed them, resigned in their patience

  like statues in their museum. Her old address

  enlarged with the next stop. The passengers staggered

  on the straps, the doors in a blast of malice

  grinned open, the bell rang, and suddenly I stood

  in bewildering whiteness, flakes clouding my eyes.

  The streets were white as her studio, huge boulders

  of sculptured coral, the blinding limestone of Greece

  like frozen breakers on the path between closed doors.

  The panes of ice in the gutters were as grey as

  those of the houses. I climbed steps, I read buzzers,

  searched from the pavement again for that attic where

  a curved statue had rolled black stockings down its knees,

  unclipped and then shaken the black rain of its hair,

  and “Omeros” echoed from a white-throated vase.

  But no door opened to show me her startled eyes

  behind its brass chain, no light linked the Asian bones

  of the axe-blade cheek. The glaucous windows were blind.

  I had lost the address. I walked through coral stones

  that whined like a cemetery in the sunlit wind,

  then waited for the trolley’s eye as we did once

  on the other side of that year. One came. Its doors

  yawned and rattled shut. Its hull slid past the combers.

  Houses passed like a wharf. Hers. Or some other house.

  BOOK SIX

  Chapter XLIV

  I

  In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez,

  the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane

  down the archipelago’s highways. The first breeze

  rattled the spears and their noise was like distant rain

  marching down from the hills, like a shell at your ears.

  In the cool asphalt Sundays of the Antilles

  the light brought the bitter history of sugar

  across the squared fields, heightening towards harvest,

  to the bleached flags of the Indian diaspora.

  The drizzling light blew across the savannah

  darkening the racehorses’ hides; mist slowly erased

  the royal palms on the crests of the hills and the

  hills themselves. The brown patches the horses had grazed

  shone as wet as their hides. A skittish stallion

  jerked at his bridle, marble-eyed at the thunder

  muffling the hills, but the groom was drawing him in

  like a fisherman, wrapping the slack line under

  one fist, then with the other tightening the rein

  and narrowing the circle. The sky cracked asunder

  and a forked tree flashed, and suddenly that black rain

  which can lose an entire archipelago

  in broad daylight was pouring tin nails on the roof,

  hammering the balcony. I closed the French window,

  and thought of the horses in their stalls with one hoof

  tilted, watching the ropes of rain. I lay in bed

  with current gone from the bed-lamp and heard the roar

  of wind shaking the windows, and I remembered

  Achille on his own mattress and desperate Hector

  trying to save his canoe, I thought of Helen

  as my island lost in the haze, and I was sure

  I’d never see her again. All of a sudden

  the rain stopped and I heard the sluicing of water

  down the guttering. I opened the window when

  the sun came out. It replaced the tiny brooms

  of palms on the ridges. On the red galvanized

  roof of the paddock, the wet sparkled, then the grooms

  led the horses over the new grass and exercised

  them again, and there was a different brightness

  in everything, in the leaves, in the horses’ eyes.

  II

  I smelt the leaves threshing at the top of the year

  in green January over the orange villas

  and military barracks where the Plunketts were,

  the harbour flecked by the wind that comes with Christmas,

  edged with the Arctic, that was christened Vent Noël;

  it stayed until March and, with luck, until Easter.

  It freshened the cedars, waxed the laurier-cannelle,

  and hid the African swift. I smelt the drizzle

  on the asphalt leaving the Morne, it was the smell

  of an iron on damp cloth; I heard the sizzle

  of fried jackfish in oil with their coppery skin;

  I smelt ham studded with cloves, the crusted accra,

  the wax in the varnished parlour: Come in. Come in,

  the arm of the Morris chair sticky with lacquer;

  I saw a sail going out and a sail coming in,

  and a breeze so fresh it lifted the lace curtains

  like a petticoat, like a sail towards Ithaca;

  I smelt a dead rivulet in the clogged drains.

  III

  Ah, twin-headed January, seeing either tense:

  a past, they assured us, born in degradation,

  and a present that lifted us up with the wind’s

  noise in the breadfruit leaves with such an elation

  that it contradicts what is past! The cannonballs

  of rotting breadfruit from the Battle of the Saints,

  the asterisks of bulletholes in the brick walls

  of the redoubt. I lived there with every sense.

  I smelt with my eyes, I could see with my nostrils.

  Chapter XLV

  I

  One side of the coast plunges its precipices

  into the Atlantic. Turns require wide locks,

  since the shoulder is sharp and the curve just misses

  a long drop over the wind-bent trees and the rocks

  between the trees. There is a wide view of Dennery,

  with its stone church and raw ochre cliffs at whose base

  the African breakers end. Across the flecked sea

  whose combers veil and unveil the rocks with their lace

  the next port is Dakar. The uninterrupted wind

  thuds under the wings of frigates, you see them bent

  from a force that has crossed the world, tilting to find

  purchase in the sudden downdrafts of its current.

  The breeze threshed the palms on the cool December road

  where the Comet hurtled with empty leopard seats,

  so fast a man on a donkey trying to read

  its oncoming fiery sign heard only two thudding beats

  from the up-tempo zouk that its stereo played

  when it screeched round a bridge and began to ascend

  away from the palm-fronds and their wickerwork shade

  that left the windscreen clear as it locked round the bend,

  where Hector suddenly saw the trotting piglet

  and thought of Plunkett’s warning as he heard it screel

  with the same sound t
hat the tires of the Comet

  made rounding the curve from the sweat-greased steering wheel.

  The rear wheels spin to a dead stop, like a helm.

  The piglet trots down the safer side of the road.

  Lodged in their broken branches the curled letters flame.

  Hector had both hands on the wheel. His head was bowed

  under the swaying statue of the Madonna

  of the Rocks, her smile swayed under the blue hood,

  and when her fluted robe stilled, the smile stayed on her

  dimpled porcelain. She saw, in the bowed man, the calm

  common oval of prayer, the head’s usual angle

  over the pew of the dashboard. Her lifted palm,

  small as a doll’s from its cerulean mantle,

  indicated that he had prayed enough to the lace

  of foam round the cliff’s altar, that now, if he wished,

  he could lift his head, but he stayed in the same place,

  the way a man will remain when Mass is finished,

  not unclenching his hands or freeing one to cross

  forehead, heart, and shoulders swiftly and then kneel

  facing the altar. He bowed in endless remorse,

  for her mercy at what he had done to Achille,

  his brother. But his arc was over, for the course

  of every comet is such. The fated crescent

  was printed on the road by the scorching tires.

  A salt tear ran down the porcelain cheek and it went

  in one slow drop to the clenched knuckle that still gripped

  the wheel. On the flecked sea, the uninterrupted

  wind herded the long African combers, and whipped

  the small flag of the island on its silver spearhead.

  II

  Drivers leant over the rail. One seized my luggage

  off the porter’s cart. The rest burst into patois,

  with gestures of despair at the lost privilege

  of driving me, then turned to other customers.

  In the evening pastures horses grazed, their hides wet

  with light that shot its lances over the combers.

  I had the transport all to myself.

  “You all set?

  Good. A good pal of mine died in that chariot

  of his called the Comet.”

  He turned in the front seat,

  spinning the air with his free hand. I sat, sprawled out

  in the back, discouraging talk, with my crossed feet.

  “You never know when, eh? I was at the airport

  that day. I see him take off like a rocket.

  I always said that thing have too much horsepower.