Omeros

by Derek Walcott

  stitched in the one pattern of Maud’s fabulous quilt.

  Chapter LIII

  I

  The Major stood straight as a mast without a sail

  in the wooden waves of the pews. I turned my head

  slowly, as we do at funerals, and saw the veil

  that netted Helen’s beauty. Then I tried to read

  from the gilt hymnal with its ribbon, but felt the mesh

  of her veil brushing my nape, and its black hairs stirred

  with the legend behind my back, the smoke made flesh,

  the phantom singed by a beach-fire. All I had heard

  flamed in that look, galleys drowned in its wake.

  This was the seduction of quicksand, my deep fear

  of vertiginous irises that could not help their work

  any more than the earth’s fascination with fire

  as it left the earth. An amen enclosed a hymn

  and Plunkett’s amen steadied the wavering choir

  in the echoing stone. Fans, like moths, stirred the air.

  And in that gap before the Father’s injunction,

  a smooth black priest with a smoother voice that pleased him

  more than his listeners in its serene unction,

  I felt the chasm that widened at Glen-da-Lough,

  deep as a daisied trench, over the quilted bier,

  the disenfranchisement no hyphenating rook

  could connect between two religions, the one here

  and that of our chapel. I turned around to look

  at the black faces seized by faith and heard the whirr

  of larches turning their missals, the Xeroxed sheets

  that the Major had asked the priest to use in her

  memory, for the midshipman, and the war’s fading fleets.

  I recognized Achille. He stood next to Philoctete

  in a rusted black suit, his eyes anchored to the pew;

  then he lifted them and I saw that the eyes were wet

  as those of a boy, and my eyes were watering too.

  Why should he be here, why should they have come at all,

  none of them following the words, but he had such grace

  that I couldn’t bear it. I could leave the funeral,

  but his wet ebony mask and her fishnetted face

  were shrouded with Hector’s death. Could he, in that small

  suit too tight at the shoulders, who shovelled the pens

  in the rain at Plunkett’s, love him? Where was it from,

  this charity of soul, more piercing than Helen’s

  beauty? runnelling his face like the road to the farm?

  We sang behind Plunkett, and I saw Achille perspire

  over the words, his lips following after the sound.

  II

  I knew little about Maud Plunkett. I knew I was here

  because the Major had trained us all as cadets.

  What I shared with his wife we shared as gardeners.

  I had wanted large green words to lie waxen on

  the page’s skin, floating but rooted in its lymph as

  her lilies in the pond’s cool mud, every ivory prong

  spreading the Japanese peace of Les Nympheas

  in the tongue-still noon, the heat, where a wooden bridge

  with narrow planks arched over the calligraphic

  bamboo, their reflections rewritten when a midge

  wrinkled the smoothness, and from them, the clear concentric

  rings from a pebble, from the right noun on a page.

  I was both there and not there. I was attending

  the funeral of a character I’d created;

  the fiction of her life needed a good ending

  as much as mine; that night by the tasselled shade

  with its oblong halo over her bowed hair sewing,

  I had looked up from the green baize with the Major’s

  face from the ornate desk to see light going

  from her image, and that image was my mother’s,

  whose death would be real, real as our knowing.

  Join, interchangeable phantoms, expected pain

  moves me towards ghosts, through this page’s scrim,

  and the ghosts I will make of you with my scratching pen,

  like a needle piercing the ring’s embroidery

  with a swift’s beak, or where, like a nib from the rim

  of an inkwell, a martin flickers a wing dry.

  Plunkett’s falsetto soared like a black frigate-bird,

  and shifted to a bass-cannon from his wattled throat,

  Achille lowered his head for the way it circled

  high over our pews, and I heard the brass bugle-note

  of his khaki orders as we circled the Parade Ground,

  and then the hymn ended. We watched the Major lift

  his wife’s coffin hung with orchids, many she had found

  in the blue smoke of Saltibus. Then Achille saw the swift

  pinned to the orchids, but it was the image of a swift

  which Maud had sewn into the silk draping her bier,

  and not only the African swift but all the horned island’s

  birds, bitterns and herons, silently screeching there.

  III

  When Plunkett passed, Achille looked at his red hands,

  and the Major widened his eyes at him and Philoctete,

  and nodded at Helen, who turned her black veil away,

  and he saw her head shaking under the covering net.

  Then the big shots passed, and every brown dignitary,

  some with medals and ribbons, gave them a short smile

  of gracious detachment, but with no special surprise

  at their devotion. Achille waited till the aisle

  emptied, the gilt missals were replaced in their pews,

  then stood outside at the church door as the filled hearse

  opened for the orchids and the bird-choked tapestry

  straightened. I saw Helen, in that slow walk of hers,

  come and lean next to him. She lifted the eyed veil,

  and said: “I coming home.” Then he and Philoctete

  walked with her to the transports near the Coal Market.

  Chapter LIV

  I

  I saw him at the bank next day, moustache bristling,

  white, irascible cockatoo hair, the red hands,

  the mouth puckered forward, inaudibly whistling.

  The man behind me said: “Collecting insurance.

  So fast, boy?”

  I turned and said, “Dat ain’t so funny.”

  He stood behind the banana-farmers in line.

  They smelt of wet earth, they smelt green as their money.

  I thought of his own deposits, stinking of swine,

  as he stood in his flaccid shorts, his khaki shirt

  carrying a black armband, and I saw that he was

  one with the farmers, transplanted to the rich dirt

  of their valleys, a ginger-lily from the moss

  of Troumasse River, a white, red-knuckled heron

  in the reeds, who never wanted the privilege

  that peasants, from habit, paid to his complexion.

  He stood his turn in the queue, then at the cage

  he bent to the teller’s bars, and I heard the old voice

  hoarsely requesting his rolls of coins in silver,

  and the voice carried the old bugle-note that as boys

  had racked us in line as cadets. I felt that shiver

  of fear we all knew. His shout could carry over

  the heights of Saltibus to the cliffs of D’Elles Soeurs,

  the khaki slopes of D’Elles Soeurs to LaFargue River.

  Then he passed my queue, as if it were Inspection.

  “Our wanderer’s home, is he?”

  I said: “For a while, sir,”

  too crisply, mentally snapping to attention,

  thumbs along trousers’ seam, picki
ng up his accent

  from a khaki order.

  “Been travellin’ a bit, what?”

  I forgot the melody of my own accent,

  but I knew I’d caught him, and he knew he’d been caught,

  caught out in the class-war. It stirred my contempt.

  He knew the “what?” was a farce, I knew it was not

  officer-quality, a strutting R.S.M.,

  Regimental Sarn’t Major Plunkett, Retired.

  Not real colonial gentry, but spoke like

  them from the height of his pig-farm, but I felt as tired

  as he looked. Still, he’d led us in Kipling’s requiem.

  “Been doin’ a spot of writing meself. Research.”

  The “meself” his accommodation. “P’raps you’ve ’eard …

  the old queen,” shrugging. I said I’d been at the church.

  “Ah! Were you? These things. Eyes tend to get very blurred.

  So sorry I missed you. Bit of an artist, too,

  was old Maud. You must come up. I’ll show you a quilt

  she embroidered for years. Birds and things. Mustn’t keep you.”

  O Christ! I swore, I’m tired of their fucking guilt,

  and our fucking envy! War invented the queue,

  and he taught that Discipline formed its own beauty

  in the rhyming steps of the college Cadet Force,

  that though crowds mimicked his strut, it was his duty

  to make us all gentlemen if not officers.

  “Nice to see you, sir,” said my old Sergeant Major,

  and my eyes blurred. Then he paused at the white glare of

  the street outside, and left, as the guard closed the door,

  the wound of a language I’d no wish to remove.

  II

  I remembered that morning when Plunkett and I,

  compelled by her diffident saunter up the beach,

  sought grounds for her arrogance. He in the khaki

  grass round the redoubt, I in the native speech

  of its shallows; like enemy ships of the line,

  we crossed on a parallel; he had been convinced

  that his course was right; I despised any design

  that kept to a chart, that calculated the winds.

  My inspiration was impulse, but the Major’s zeal

  to make her the pride of the Battle of the Saints,

  her yellow dress on its flagship, was an ideal

  no different from mine. Plunkett, in his innocence,

  had tried to change History to a metaphor,

  in the name of a housemaid; I, in self-defence,

  altered her opposite. Yet it was all for her.

  Except we had used two opposing stratagems

  in praise of her and the island; cannonballs rolled

  in the fort grass were not from Olympian games,

  nor the wine-bottle, crusted with its fool’s gold,

  from the sunken Ville de Paris, legendary

  emblems; nor all their names the forced coincidence

  we had made them. There, in her head of ebony,

  there was no real need for the historian’s

  remorse, nor for literature’s. Why not see Helen

  as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow,

  swinging her plastic sandals on that beach alone,

  as fresh as the sea-wind? Why make the smoke a door?

  III

  All that Greek manure under the green bananas,

  under the indigo hills, the rain-rutted road,

  the galvanized village, the myth of rustic manners,

  glazed by the transparent page of what I had read.

  What I had read and rewritten till literature

  was guilty as History. When would the sails drop

  from my eyes, when would I not hear the Trojan War

  in two fishermen cursing in Ma Kilman’s shop?

  When would my head shake off its echoes like a horse

  shaking off a wreath of flies? When would it stop,

  the echo in the throat, insisting, “Omeros”;

  when would I enter that light beyond metaphor?

  But it was mine to make what I wanted of it, or

  what I thought was wanted. A cool wood off the road,

  a hut closed like a wound, and the sound of a river

  coming through the trees on a country Saturday,

  with no one in the dry front yard, the still leaves,

  the yard, the shade of a breadfruit tree on the door,

  then the track from which a man’s figure emerges,

  then a girl carrying laundry, the road-smell like loaves,

  the yellow-dressed butterflies in the grass marges.

  Chapter LV

  I

  Through the year, pain came and went. Then came Christmas,

  everything right and exact, everything correct,

  the golden pillars of Scotch, red sorrel, sea-moss,

  the hunger of happiness spread through Philoctete

  like a smooth white tablecloth, everything in place,

  the plastic domes of hot dishes frosting with dew,

  gravy-boats anchored on patterns of doilied lace

  withdrawn from camphored cupboards, the napkin holder

  of yellow bone, the cutlery flashing in light

  after a year in the drawer, shoulder to shoulder

  the small army of uncorked wines and the corked-too-tight

  explosives of ginger-beer, the ham pierced with cloves,

  a crusted roast huge as a thigh, black pudding, souse,

  the glazed cornmeal pies sweating in banana leaves,

  and a smell of forgiveness drifting from each house

  with the smell of varnish, and a peace that drifted

  out to the empty beach; that brimmed in the eyes of

  wineglasses, his heart bubbling when she lifted

  the steaming shield from the rice. “Ah, Philosophe!”

  he said to himself from the depth of gratitude,

  “you cannot say life not good, or people not kind,”

  as Ma Kilman sipped her sauce from the ladling wood

  and pronounced, “It good,” to both the one who was blind

  and the healed one, in her generous widowhood.

  The day after Christmas Achille rose excited

  by the half-dark. A stale cock crew. Grass grew lighter

  in the pastures. Moon-basins flashed in the riverbed.

  Today he was not the usual kingfish-fighter

  but a muscular woman, a scarf round his head.

  Today was the day of fifes, the prattling skin

  of the goat-drums, the day of dry gourds, of brass bells

  round his ankles, not chains from the Bight of Benin

  but those fastened by himself. He was someone else

  today, a warrior-woman, fierce and benign.

  Today he was African, his own epitaph,

  his own resurrection. Today people would laugh

  at what they had lost in the paille-banane dancers;

  today was the day when they wore the calabash

  with its marks; today the rustling banana-trash

  would whirl with spinning Philoctete, the cancer’s

  anemone gone from his shin; the balancer’s

  day on the bamboo poles and the stilt-strider’s height

  floating past balconies, past the fretwork mansards;

  today was the children’s terror and their delight,

  running up the street and hiding in people’s yards.

  Achille walked out into the blinding emptiness

  of the shut village. He strode like a prizefighter

  on Boxing Day, carrying Helen’s yellow dress,

  and the towel that matched it draped over his head,

  the Lifebuoy soap in a dish swallowed by his hand

  to wash off the love-sweat with Helen. By the shed

  of the fishermen’s depot a trough in the sand


  held the public standpipe with its brass-knuckled fist.

  The shower was a trickle. First Achille lathered

  his skull white as Seven Seas’s hair, then pulled the waist

  of the trunks to forage his crotch. Then he rolled dirt

  from back of the ankles with a hard-pressing wrist,

  then rubbed one heel where the thorn-vine had left its hurt.

  Then he opened the shower full out and let it drum

  the streaming soap past his eyes, groping to close it.

  “You smell like a flower,” he teased himself. “How come?”

  Next he unfrayed the soap-dried knots in his armpit,

  and spray flew from his hair to the quick-picking comb.

  The village was hung over. The sun slept in the street

  like a dog, with no traffic. He shook Philo’s gate.

  The sufferer was cured now. He walked very straight.

  II

  Those elbows like anchors, those huge cannonball fists

  wriggled through the armholes of the tight lemon dress.

  Helen helped him stuff the rags and align his breasts.

  At first she had laughed, but then, with firm tenderness,

  Achille explained that he and Philo had done this

  every Boxing Day, and not because of Christmas,

  but for something older; something that he had seen

  in Africa, when his name had followed a swift,

  where he had been his own father and his own son.

  The sail of her bellying stomach seemed to him

  to bear not only the curved child sailing in her

  but Hector’s mound, and her hoarse, labouring rhythm

  was a delivering wave. There, in miniature,

  the world was globed like a fruit, since its texture is

  both acid and sweet like a golden pomme-Cythère,

  the apple of Venus, and the Ville de Paris

  that he had dived for once, in search of a treasure

  that was kneeling right there, that had always been his.

  She did not laugh anymore, but she helped him lift

  the bamboo frame with its ribbons and spread them out

  from the frame, and everything she did was serious.

  She knelt at his feet and hooked the bells to the skirt.

  Small circular mirrors necklaced the split bodice

  that was too small for his chest, and their flashing lights

  multiplied her face with the tears in their own eyes.

  She lifted the mitre, its panes like Easter kites,

  and with this she fitted him. He straightened its spire