Omeros

by Derek Walcott

  with his huge hands and their rope-furrowed calluses,

  then he took up the wand and stood there in the mirror

  of her pride and her butterfly-quiet kisses.

  He was resinous and frightening. He smelt like trees

  on a ridge at sunrise, like unswaying cedars;

  then he set out for the hot road towards Castries,

  the square already filling with tables. Buses

  passed him with screaming children and in their cries

  was the ocean’s distance over three centuries.

  III

  Their small troupe stood in the hot street. Three musicians,

  fife, chac-chac, and drummer and the androgynous

  warriors, Philo and Achille. Un! Deux! Trois! The dance

  began with Philo as its pivot, to the noise

  of dry leaves scraping asphalt, the banana-trash

  levitating him slowly as the roofs spun round

  the dip and swivel of the head, a calabash

  masking the agonized face, as Achille drummed the ground

  with quick-stuttering heels, stopped. And then he stood straight.

  Now he strode with the wand and the fluttering mitre

  until he had walked to the far end of the street.

  There he spun. Then, knee passing knee, he stepped lighter

  than a woman with her skirt lifted high crossing

  the stones of a stream when the light is small mirrors,

  with the absurd strength of his calves and his tossing

  neck, which shook out the mitre like a lion’s mane,

  with a long running leap, then a spin, while he held

  the shaft low, like a rod divining. All the pain

  re-entered Philoctete, of the hacked yams, the hold

  closing over their heads, the bolt-closing iron,

  over eyes that never saw the light of this world,

  their memory still there although all the pain was gone.

  He swallowed his nausea, and spun his arms faster,

  like a goblet on a potter’s wheel, its brown blur

  soothed by his palms, as the bamboo fifes grew shriller

  to the slitted eyes of the fifers. The drummer’s wrists

  whirred like a hummingbird’s wings, and, to Achille, the

  faster they flew, the more he remembered, blent

  to his rite; then suddenly the music ceased.

  The crowd clapped, and Achille, with great arrogance, sent

  Philoctete to bow and pick up the coins on the street

  glittering like fish-scales. He let the runnels of sweat

  dry on his face. Philoctete sat down. Then he wept.

  BOOK SEVEN

  Chapter LVI

  I

  One sunrise I walked out onto the balcony

  of my white hotel. The beach was already swept,

  and in the clear grooves of the January sea

  there was only one coconut shell, but it kept

  nodding in my direction as a swimmer might

  with sun in his irises, or a driftwood log,

  or a plaster head, foaming. It changed shapes in light

  according to each clouding thought. A khaki dog

  came racing its faster shadow on the clean sand,

  then stopped, yapping at the shell, not wetting its paws,

  backing off from the claws of surf that made the sound

  of a cat hissing; then it faked an interest

  in a crab-hole and worried it. If that thing was

  a coconut, why didn’t it drift with the crest

  of the slow-breathing swell? Then, as if from a vase,

  or a girl’s throat, I heard a moan from the village

  of a blowing conch, and I saw the first canoe

  on the horizon’s glittering scales. The old age

  of the wrinkled sea was in that moan, and I knew

  that the floating head had drifted here. The mirrors

  of the sky were clouded, and I heard my own voice

  correcting his name, as the surf hissed: “Omeros.”

  The moment I named it, the marble head arose,

  fringed with its surf curls and beard, the hollow shoulders

  of a man waist-high in water with an old leather

  goatskin or a plastic bag, pricking the dog’s ears,

  making it whine with joy. Then, suddenly, the weather

  darkened, and it darkened the forked, slow-wading wood

  until it was black, and the shallows in that second

  changed to another dialect as Seven Seas stood

  in the white foam manacling his heels. He beckoned,

  that is, the arm of that log brought in by the tide,

  then the cloud passed, and the white head glared, almond-eyed

  in her white studio with its foam-scalloped beard

  a winter ago, then it called to the khaki dog

  that still backed off from the surf, yet now what appeared

  changed again to its shadow, then a driftwood log

  that halted and beckoned, moving to the foam’s swell,

  one elbow lifted, calling me from the hotel.

  They kept shifting shapes, or the shapes metamorphosed

  in the worried water; no sooner was the head

  of the blind plaster-bust clear than its brow was crossed

  by a mantling cloud and its visage reappeared

  with ebony hardness, skull and beard like cotton,

  its nose like a wedge; no sooner I saw the one

  than the other changed and the first was forgotten

  as the sand forgets a shadow in widening sun,

  their bleached almond seeds their only thing in common.

  So one changed from marble with a dripping chiton

  in the early morning on that harp-wired sand

  to a foam-headed fisherman in his white, torn

  undershirt, but both of them had the look of men

  whose skins are preserved in salt, whose accents were born

  from guttural shoal, whose vision was wide as rain

  sweeping over the sand, clouding the hills in gauze.

  I came down to the beach. In its pointed direction,

  the dog raced, passing the daisy-prints of its paws.

  II

  Up a steep path where even goats are careful,

  the path that Philoctete took past the foaming cove,

  the blind stone led me, my heart thudding and fearful

  that it would burst like the sea in a drumming cave.

  It was a cape that I knew, tree-bent and breezy,

  no wanderer could have chosen a better grave.

  If this was where it ended, the end was easy—

  to give back the borrowed breath the joy that it gave,

  with the sea exulting, the wind so wild with love.

  His stubble chin jerked seaward, and the empty eyes

  were filled with them, with the colour of the blue day;

  so a swift will dart its beak just before it flies

  towards its horizon, hazed Greece or Africa.

  I could hear the crumpling parchment of the sea in

  the wind’s hand, a silence without emphasis,

  but I saw no shadow underline my being;

  I could see through my own palm with every crease

  and every line transparent since I was seeing

  the light of St. Lucia at last through her own eyes,

  her blindness, her inward vision as revealing

  as his, because a closing darkness brightens love,

  and I felt every wound pass. I saw the healing

  thorns of dry cactus drop to the dirt, and the grove

  where the sibyl swayed. I thought of all my travelling.

  III

  “I saw you in London,” I said, “sunning on the steps

  of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, your dog-eared manuscript

  clutched to your heaving chest. The queues at the bus-s
tops

  smiled at your seaman’s shuffle, and a curate kicked

  you until you waddled down to the summery Thames.”

  “That’s because I’m a heathen. They don’t know my age.

  Even the nightingales have forgotten their names.

  The goat declines, head down, with these rocks for a stage

  bare of tragedy. The Aegean’s chimera

  is a camera, you get my drift, a drifter

  is the hero of my book.”

  “I never read it,”

  I said. “Not all the way through.”

  The lift of the

  arching eyebrows paralyzed me like Medusa’s

  shield, and I turned cold the moment I had said it.

  “Those gods with hyphens, like Hollywood producers,”

  I heard my mouth babbling as ice glazed over my chest.

  “The gods and the demi-gods aren’t much use to us.”

  “Forget the gods,” Omeros growled, “and read the rest.”

  Then there was the silence any injured author

  knows, broken by the outcry of a frigate-bird,

  as we both stared at the blue dividing water,

  and in that gulf, I muttered, “I have always heard

  your voice in that sea, master, it was the same song

  of the desert shaman, and when I was a boy

  your name was as wide as a bay, as I walked along

  the curled brow of the surf; the word ‘Homer’ meant joy,

  joy in battle, in work, in death, then the numbered peace

  of the surf’s benedictions, it rose in the cedars,

  in the laurier-cannelles, pages of rustling trees.

  Master, I was the freshest of all your readers.”

  “Ready?”

  I nodded. We descended the goat-track,

  down to the chumbling cove with its crescent beach,

  and the old goat, skipping, shouted over his back:

  “Who gave you my proper name in the ancient speech

  of the islands?”

  “A girl.”

  We climbed down in silence.

  “A Greek girl?”

  “Who else?”

  “From what city? Do you know?”

  “No. I forget.”

  “Thebes? Athens?”

  “Yeah. Could be Athens,”

  I said, stumbling. “What difference does it make now?”

  That stopped the old goat in his tracks. He turned:

  “What difference?

  None, maybe, to you, but a girl … that’s very nice.

  Her image rises out of every battle’s noise.

  A girl smells better than a book. I remember Helen’s

  smell. The sun on her flesh. The light’s coins on my eyes.

  That ten years’ war was nothing, an epic’s excuse.

  Did you, you know, do it often?” Then his head tossed

  at a horizon whose smile was as sad as his.

  I saw in its empty line a love that was lost.

  “Often,” I lied. He said,

  “Are they still fighting wars?”

  I saw a coming rain hazing his pupils.

  “Not over beauty,” I answered. “Or a girl’s love.”

  “Love is good, but the love of your own people is

  greater.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s why I walk behind you.

  Your name in her throat’s white vase sent me to find you.”

  “Good. A girl smells better than the world’s libraries.”

  Chapter LVII

  I

  At the edge of the shallows was a black canoe

  stayed by a grizzled oarsman, his white chin stubbled

  as a dry sea-urchin’s; but still I did not know

  why, wading aboard, I felt such an untroubled

  weightlessness, or why the ferryman held the prow,

  except it was for that marble freight whose shadow

  now sat amidships. The marble shaded its eyes

  with one palm and shouted: “Home!” and the startled dog

  scuttled into an almond grove. I heard the oars

  clicking their teeth, but no wake followed the pirogue,

  and the oarsman seemed to stare through me to the shore’s

  dividing line, as each stroke diminished its trees.

  We followed the hotel’s shoreline between bathers

  whose bodies the oars passed through: lovers, families,

  without dividing them yet. No one noticed us

  or thought of that shadow wobbling underwater

  that sharked towards them, breaking the sun-wired mesh,

  or stared at our strange crew; it was only after

  our current reached them that they stood hugging their flesh.

  Then the oarsman smiled. The island filed past my eyes,

  the hills that I knew, a road. I felt them going

  for good round the point; then we were passing Castries,

  the wharf where my father stood. The wharf was rowing

  farther away from me till the white liner stuck

  to the green harbour was no bigger than a toy,

  as Seven Seas watched me with each receding stroke.

  And my cheeks were salt with tears, but those of a boy,

  and he saw how deeply I had loved the island.

  Perhaps the oarsman knew this, but I didn’t know.

  Then I saw the ebony of his lifted hand.

  And Omeros nodded: “We will both praise it now.”

  But I could not before him. My tongue was a stone

  at the bottom of the sea, my mouth a parted conch

  from which nothing sounded, and then I heard his own

  Greek calypso coming from the marble trunk,

  widening the sea with a blind man’s anger:

  “In the mist of the sea there is a horned island

  with deep green harbours where the Greek ships anchor”

  and the waves were swaying to the stroke of his hand,

  as I heard my own thin voice riding on his praise

  the way a swift follows a crest, leaving its shore:

  “It was a place of light with luminous valleys

  under thunderous clouds. A Genoan wanderer

  saying the beads of the Antilles named the place

  for a blinded saint. Later, others would name her

  for a wild wife. Her mountains tinkle with springs

  among moss-bearded forests, and the screeching of birds

  stitches its tapestry. The white egret makes rings

  stalking its pools. African fishermen make boards

  from trees as tall as their gods with their echoing

  axes, and a volcano, stinking with sulphur,

  has made it a healing place.” My voice was going

  under the strength of his voice, which carried so far

  that a black frigate heard it, steadying its wing.

  II

  The charred ferryman kept rowing, black as the coal

  on which the women climbed.

  “Wha’ happenin’, bossman?”

  He grinned, and I caught a dead whiff of alcohol;

  but all islands have that legendary oarsman

  slapping down dominoes on a rumshop table,

  then raking the slabs in with a gravedigger’s breath,

  who grins and never loses. That comfortable,

  common, familiar apparition of my death

  spoke my own language, the one for which I had died,

  his cracked soles braced against the rib of the gunwale,

  not the marble tongue of the bust I sat beside,

  and what was dying but the shadow of a sail

  crossing this page or her face? That’s why he had grinned,

  rowing my ribbed trunk in sleep, it was he who steered

  it to that other beach in an altering wind.

  Now Seven Seas spoke to him, and the oarsman veered

  the prow, br
aking an oar, and sculling it, until

  the canoe was entering a hill-locked lagoon—

  Marigot shot with fires of the immortelle,

  with a crescent beach as thin as the quarter-moon,

  virginal, inviolate, until the masts of war.

  III

  Seven Seas showed me the ghostly fleet at anchor

  in that deep-draught shelter, assembled to destroy

  their shadowy opposites, and spat in rancour

  over the side of the pirogue. “This is like Troy

  all over. This forest gathering for a face!

  Only the years have changed since the weed-bearded kings.

  Beyond these stone almonds I can see Comte de Grasse

  pacing like horned Menelaus while his wife swings

  her sandals by one hand, strutting a parapet,

  knowing that her beauty is what no man can claim

  any more than this bay. Her beauty stands apart

  in a golden dress, its beaches wreathed with her name.”

  We rowed through the rotting fleet in a dead silence,

  stirred only by the chuckle of the prow, then each mast

  after reflection changed to a spindly fence

  at the curve of a mangrove river, and then mist

  blurred out Achille by his river. And then the bust

  with its marble mouth revolved its irisless eyes.

  Chapter LVIII

  I

  Up heights the Plunketts loved, from Soufrière upwards

  past that ruined scheme which hawsers of lianas

  had anchored in bush, of Messrs. Bennett & Ward,

  the blind guide led me with a locked marble hand as

  we smelt the foul sulphur of hell in paradise

  on the brittle scab crusting its volcano’s sores

  and the scorching light that had put out Lucia’s eyes

  seared mine when I saw the Pool of Speculation

  under its horned peaks. I heard the boiling engines

  of steam in its fissures, the deep indignation

  of Hephaestus or Ogun grumbling at the sins

  of souls who had sold out their race, the ancient forge

  of bubbling lead erupted with speculators

  whose heads gurgled in the lava of the Malebolge

  mumbling deals as they rose. These were the traitors

  who, in elected office, saw the land as views

  for hotels and elevated into waiters

  the sons of others, while their own learnt something else.

  Now, in their real estate, they lunged at my shoes

  to pull me down with them as we walked along shelves

  bubbling with secrets, with melting fingers of mud