Omeros

by Derek Walcott

  as far as the Grenadines, though supplies were tight.

  II

  They spent the whole night on the beach in Soufrière,

  talking to other fishermen under the horned,

  holy peaks, where Achille built up a bonfire

  to keep off the mosquitoes, where as the dry palms burned

  he felt like the phantom of a vanishing race

  of heroes, some toothless, some scarred, many of them turned

  drunkards in the empty season, but in each face

  by the cracking sparks there was that obvious wound

  made from loving the sea over their own country.

  Then he and Philoctete spoke till a hooked moon waned

  and the twin horns sharpened out of a quiet sea.

  They slept in the beached canoe till the sunlit wind

  woke them and the other pirogues were setting out.

  They washed and shat in the depot; they tried to find

  a shop with some coffee, but all the doors were shut.

  III

  They saw what they thought were reefs wet with the morning

  level light, seven miles nearer the Grenadines,

  till they began passing the sail, and then a warning

  cry from Philoctete, who was hauling in the lines

  from the bow, showed him that the reefs were travelling

  faster than they were, and begged him to shorten sail.

  Exultant with terror, Philo kept ravelling

  the line round his fist, and then both gasped as one whale—

  “Baleine,” said Achille—lifted its tapering wedge

  as a bouquet of spume hissed from its splitting pod,

  as it slowly heightened the island of itself,

  then sounded, the tail sliding, till it disappeared

  into a white hole whose trough, as it came, lifted

  In God We Troust with its two men high off the shelf

  of the open sea, then set it back down under

  a swell that swamped them, while the indifferent shoal

  foamed northward. He has seen the shut face of thunder,

  he has known the frightening trough dividing the soul

  from this life and the other, he has seen the pod

  burst into spray. The bilge was bailed out, the sail

  turned home, their wet, salted faces shining with God.

  Chapter LXI

  I

  She was framed forever in the last century,

  as was much of Ireland with its lace-draped parlours,

  its shawled pianos, her antique maroon settee

  (on auction after the Raj); it was not all hers,

  this formal affection for candlelight on the

  brass buttons of his Regimental mess-jacket,

  those of an R.S.M., not a proper major,

  since he loved it when she swirled her hair and packed it

  in a bun spiked with a silver pin; when she wore

  a frock with frothing collar and, like an oval

  cameo, posed with one palm nesting the other

  on the maroon couch with its parenthetical,

  rhyming armrests—a daguerreotype of Mother—

  which he studied as he wiggled one polished pump.

  And sometimes she sang a capella, to the squeak

  of his patent leather on the elephant stump

  of the Indian hassock. It was so fin de siècle!

  He often wondered if he’d fought the wrong war in

  the wrong century. That swan-bowed, Victorian neck,

  made whiter by its black-ribboned medallion,

  would make him rise from his armchair and sail her hand

  around the lances of the candles where Helen

  waited in the shadows in that madras head-tie

  that whitened her tolerant and enormous eyes.

  It was all a lark. Like something out of Etty

  or Alma-Tadema, those gold-framed memories,

  stroking the tom in the dark with an ageing hand.

  All her county shone in her face when the power

  was cut, and the wick in the lamp would leap, as live

  as the russet glints of her proud hair when she wore

  it long and spread it over the wild grass to give

  all that a girl could, with the camouflaged troop-ships

  below them in the roadstead, with gulls buzzing the cliff

  and screeching above us when she parted both lips

  and searched for his soul with her tongue, her wild grey eyes

  as flecked with light as the sea; then she was urging

  me to go in, port of entry, with my fingers,

  and I could not. Angry at being a virgin,

  she turned her neck and I brushed the soft downy hair

  from her ear’s shelled perfection with archaic respect;

  she steered my hand through the froth of her underwear,

  sobbing, but with a firmness I didn’t expect

  from such a small wrist, but I couldn’t. And then she

  sat up and stared at the roots of the grass and smiled

  faintly back at me. I said it was unlucky,

  that I needed something to wait for, and perhaps

  that was the nineteenth-century part, Tom. To be

  more like an officer, and not one of those chaps

  who knocked up beer-headed barmaids, got them with child,

  and I told her that, stroking her huddled shoulders.

  I wanted to believe in her more than the war;

  it was like an old novel, with shawls and soldiers,

  that’s how it was, Tom. She said, “I feel like a whore,”

  bending her white neck, stabbing her bun with a pin.

  “Trying to trap you.” I said, “We’ll have a son, yes.

  But this isn’t the way you want this to happen

  either.” She took my fist and rubbed it with her tears.

  They lay back on the grass, and after a while, her

  tears stopped. He told her of an island he had seen

  in an advert. An island where he could retire

  if he lived through the war. She would give him a son.

  Gnats were rising from the grass, and they watched the path

  of the bent lances surrendering to the sun,

  and the shining drops of the drizzle’s aftermath

  glittered like the letters by which she would be known

  from that day forth, on that dragonfly afternoon.

  The heat was hellish in the back of the rumshop.

  The Major leant forward. The cane-bottom chair creaked.

  Sweat clammed his khaki shirt. The sibyl closed her eyes

  and removed her cracked lenses. The candle peaked

  and the flame bent from one of those cavernous sighs

  that came from the bowels of the earth. He waited.

  She buried the sprig of croton to the brass bell’s

  tinkle in the open Bible, and he hated

  the smell of fuming incense and everything else—

  the lace doilies, the beads, his doubt.

  “I see flat

  water, like silver. I see your wife walking there

  in a white dress with frills and pressing her white hat

  with one hand in the breeze by a lake.”

  Glen-da-Lough.

  But she could get that from any cheap calendar.

  The Major smiled. She didn’t have that far to look.

  Close to Maud on the bed’s shambles, he’d imagined

  her soul as a small whirring thing that instantly

  shot from its crumpled sheath, from its nest of dry vine,

  to cross the tin roofs that furrowed into a sea

  till, like a curlew lowering in the grey wind,

  it saw the knolls and broken castles of Ireland.

  Plunkett never thought he would ask the next question.

  “Heaven?” He smiled.

  “Yes. If heaven is
a green place.”

  And her shut eyes watered while his own were open.

  That moment bound him for good to another race.

  Then the Major said, “Tell her something for me, please.”

  “She can hear you,” the gardeuse said, “Just like in life.”

  “Tell her,” said the Major, clearing his throat, “the keys …

  that time when I slammed them, I’m sorry that I caused her

  all that pain. Tell her”—he stopped—“that no other wife

  would have borne so much.” He lifted the small saucer

  where the candle had shrunk to a stub, and he edged

  a twenty-dollar bill under it, near the Bible.

  II

  Ma Kilman opened her eyes, took her spectacles

  off, and rubbed their cracked lenses. She was no sibyl

  without them.

  “She happy, sir.” Like you oracles,

  so would I be, he thought. A twenty-dollar bill

  as an extra. He was rising from her table

  of sweaty plastic when a white hand divided

  the bamboo-bead curtain, and calm as Glen-da-Lough’s

  vision, Maud smiled, to let him through. The wound in his

  head froze him in the scorched street. Innumerable flocks

  of birds screamed from her guidebook over the shacks

  of the village, their shadows like enormous fans,

  all those she had sewn to the silken quilt, with tags

  pinned to their spurs, and he knew her transparent hands

  had unstitched them as he watched them flying over

  the grooved roofs till they were simply the shadow of …

  of a cloud on the hills. He sat in the Rover

  and looked back at the No Pain Café. Maud closed the door

  and sat next to him with the bread, beaming with love.

  There was the same contentment in her demeanour

  as when they had seen the old man with his grey bag

  carrying the serpents’ heads. He had not seen the

  old labourer emerge from the unrolling flag

  of smoke from his charcoal pit. The archangel showed

  her how far he lived: in a cleft of green mountains

  ridged like an iguana’s spine. Under the old road

  with its storm-echoing leaves, steady mountain winds

  made the valley churn like wake at a liner’s stern

  and bent the green bamboos like archers; the old ones

  creaking in their yellow joints. The track snaked through

  ferns, wriggling up from the hidden river with the sign

  S for serpent. He had turned his head away once;

  but that was enough time for the apparition’s

  back to be sealed in bush, trembling at his return.

  III

  His wound healed slowly. He discovered the small joys

  that lay in a life patterned like those on the quilt,

  and he would speak to her in his normal voice

  without feeling silly. Soon he lost any guilt

  for her absence. Her absence was far, yet closer

  than the blue hills of Saltibus in their cool light.

  His memories opened the shutters of mimosa

  like the lilies that widened in her pond at night

  secretly, like angels, in the faith that was hers.

  In the lion-clawed tub he idled in his bath,

  he loved the nap of fresh towels, he scrubbed his ears

  the way she insisted, he liked taking orders

  from her invisible voice. He learned how to pause

  in the shade of the stone arch watching the bright red

  flowers of the immortelle, he forgot the war’s

  history that had cost him a son and wife. He read

  calmly, and he began to speak to the workmen

  not as boys who worked with him, till every name

  somehow sounded different; when he thought of Helen

  she was not a cause or a cloud, only a name

  for a local wonder. He liked being alone

  sometimes, and that was the best sign. He knew that Maud

  was proud of him whenever the squared sunlight shone

  on the taut comforter, that it was so well made.

  Chapter LXII

  I

  Behind lace Christmas bush, the season’s red sorrel,

  what seemed a sunstruck stasis concealed a ferment

  of lives behind tin fences, an endless quarrel

  which Seven Seas recorded with no instrument

  except ears sharper than his mongrel’s; gardening

  in his plot of old tires with violets, he’d hear them

  over the roofs. He could hear the priest pardoning

  their sins at vespers, the penitential anthem

  of a Sunday in which no serious sins occurred.

  The fishermen in black, rusty suits passed by him.

  The helm of their turning week had come to a stop.

  Seven Seas at his window heard their faint anthem:

  “Salve Regina” in the pews of a stone ship,

  which the black priest steered from his pulpit like a helm,

  making the swift’s sign from brow to muttering lip.

  The village was surrendering a life besieged

  by the lances of yachts in the white marina,

  where egrets had hidden in the feathering reeds

  of the lagoon. It had become a souvenir

  of itself, and from the restaurant tables

  with settings white as the yachts you could look towards

  the marina’s channel to the old weathered gables

  of upstairs houses over the fishermen’s yards

  with biscuit-tin palings and cracked asphalt streets;

  old tires wreathing a pier, vine-burdened fences,

  an old woman pinning white, surrendering sheets

  on a line. Its life adjusted to the lenses

  of cameras that, perniciously elegiac,

  took shots of passing things—Seven Seas and the dog

  in the pharmacy’s shade, every comic mistake

  in spelling, like In God We Troust on a pirogue,

  BLUE GENES, ARTLANTIC CITY, NO GABBAGE DUMPED HERE.

  The village imitated the hotel brochure

  with photogenic poverty, with atmosphere.

  Those who were “people” lovers also have

  a snapshot of Philoctete showing you his shin,

  not saying how it was healed; some have Hector’s grave

  heaped with its shells, and an oar. All were welcomed in

  the No Pain Café with its bamboo beads, then some

  proceeded to the islet where a warped bottle

  crusted with fool’s gold in the amusing museum

  shone like a false chalice, engravings of the Battle,

  then a log with its entry, Plunkett, in lilac

  ink. And, over and over again, the name Helen

  of the West Indies, until they all turned their back

  on the claim. They crushed the immortelle’s vermilion

  platoons under their sandals climbing to the redoubt,

  from where they shot the humped island with its blue horns

  and hazed Africa windward. None saw a swift dart

  over the cactus on the cliff or heard it cry once.

  Lizards emerged like tongues from the mouths of cannons.

  II

  In the lion-coloured grass of the dry season

  cannon gape at the sea from the windy summit,

  their holes out of breath in the heat. If you rest one

  palm on the hot iron barrel it will burn it,

  but a lizard crawls there and raises its question:

  “If this place is hers, did that empty horizon

  once flash its broadsides with their inaudible rays

  in her honour? Was that immense enterprise on

  the baize tables of empi
res for one who carries

  cheap sandals on a hooked finger with the Pitons

  for breasts? Were both hemispheres the split breadfruit of

  her African ass, her sea the fluted chitons

  of a Greek frieze? And is she the Helen they love,

  instead of a carved mouth with the almond’s odour?

  She walked on this parapet in a stolen dress,

  she stood in a tilted shack with its open door.

  Who gives her the palm? Did sulking Achille grapple

  with Hector to repeat themselves? Exchange a spear

  for a cutlass; and when Paris tosses the apple

  from his palm to Venus, make it a pomme-Cythère,

  make all those parallels pointless. Names are not oars

  that have to be laid side by side, nor are legends;

  slowly the foaming clouds have forgotten ours.

  You were never in Troy, and, between two Helens,

  yours is here and alive; their classic features

  were turned into silhouettes from the lightning bolt

  of a glance. These Helens are different creatures,

  one marble, one ebony. One unknots a belt

  of yellow cotton slowly from her shelving waist,

  one a cord of purple wool, the other one takes

  a bracelet of white cowries from a narrow wrist;

  one lies in a room with olive-eyed mosaics,

  another in a beach shack with its straw mattress,

  but each draws an elbow slowly over her face

  and offers the gift of her sculptured nakedness,

  parting her mouth. The sanderlings lift with their cries.

  And those birds Maud Plunkett stitched into her green silk

  with sibylline steadiness were what islands bred:

  brown dove, black grackle, herons like ewers of milk,

  pinned to a habitat many had adopted.

  The lakes of the world have their own diaspora

  of birds every winter, but these would not return.

  The African swallow, the finch from India

  now spoke the white language of a tea-sipping tern,

  with the Chinese nightingales on a shantung screen,

  while the Persian falcon, whose cry leaves a scar

  on the sky till it closes, saw the sand turn green,

  the dunes to sea, understudying the man-o’-war,

  talking the marine dialect of the Caribbean

  with nightjars, finches, and swallows, each origin

  enriching the islands to which their cries were sewn.

  Across the bay the ridge bristled once with a fort,

  then the inner promontory itself; its shipping

  was martial then, its traffic in masts the swift fleet