of both navies; sails soared to the boatswain’s piping,
like Seven Seas’s kettle, squadrons would slowly surge
from volcanic inlets. Its map, riddled with bays
like an almond leaf, provided defence or siege,
but its cannons, set in their spiked circle, could blaze
like the forehead of Mars. Now French, now British yards
fluttered from its mornes; no sooner was one flag set
than another battle unravelled its lanyards
and a bugle hoisted the other. Each sunset,
with its charred flagships, its smouldering fires, its coals
fanned by the breeze at landfall, dilated and died,
every Redcoat an ember, its garrisoned souls
shouldering their muskets like palm-fronds until Parade
marched into night’s black oblivion that vizored
Mars’ brow. Along the horizon in a green flash
a headland swallowed the sun’s leaf like a lizard
to the thudding cannonballs of a calabash.
Then long shadows alternated like the keyboard
of Plunkett’s piano to the fringed lamp of the moon,
as the siege and battles were changed to its shawled song
crossing the sea. Now there were hundreds of Frenchmen
and British listening in their separate cemeteries,
who died for a lizard, for red leaves to belong
to their ranks, for that green flash that was History’s.
III
Galleons of clouds are becalmed, waiting for a wind.
The lizard spins on its tripod, panning, to find
the boulders below where slaves built the breakwater.
The Battle of the Saints moves through the surf of trees.
School-texts rustle to the oval portrait of a
cloud-wigged Rodney, but the builders’ names are not there,
not Hector’s ancestor’s, Philoctete’s, nor Achille’s.
The blue sky is a French tunic, its Croix de Guerre
the sunburst of a medal. The engraved ovals
of both admirals fit, when a schoolbook closes,
into one locket. Screaming only in vowels,
the children burst out of History. Some classes
race past the breakwater, the anonymous cairn
carried by a line of black ants, some up the street
to crouch under the window-ledge by Ma Kilman,
to shout at his elbow and frighten Philoctete,
then yell: “Aye! Seven Seas!” in their American
accent. One stalks near the growling dog on a bet.
Their books are closed like the folded wings of a moth.
The lizard leaps into the grass. You bend your head
to hear “Iounalo” from the cannon’s mouth.
Chapter LXIII
I
Seven Seas sat anchored in the rumshop window,
the khaki dog stretched at his feet clicking at flies.
The Saturday sunlight laid a map on the floor
and smaller maps on his shades. Hefting the empties
from the blocko, the girl took them out the back door
to stack them near the gate. She was Ma Kilman’s niece
fresh from the country, and the village was for her
a startling city, its music widening her eyes
like a new Helen. The dog’s tail thudded the floor.
The hot deck of the rumshop idled like a ship
becalmed in Saturday’s doldrums. In the rocker
Ma Kilman yawned, steering them into deep gossip.
“Statics is her uncle, the girl. He went Florida,
after the election, as a migrant-picker.
You know Maljo. Didier? That man worried her,
yes, with his outside children plus what he stick her
with, but this one, my godchild, is legitimate.
She very obedient. She will make a good maid.”
“I know Florida,” Seven Seas said. “The life better
there, but not good. That is the trouble with the States.”
“Statics change,” she said. “Somebody bring a letter
home from him. Christine, you go and sit by those crates
in the yard and call me when the sweet-drink truck come.”
The girl went out to the yard.
“A long letter home.
His job is to put the oranges in a sack
one by one, as if they is islands.”
“In the South,”
Seven Seas said, “the Deep South, you musn’t talk back.
You do what the white man give you and shut your mouth.”
“Anyway,” she sighed, “Statics meet this Cherokee
woman, a wild Indian, you know, and they live well
together. ‘Good electricity,’ he say. He
send her photo to his wife, so his wife could tell
people she know a real Indian, not a West
Indian. I see the picture and she look real wild,
not with feathers and so on, but with big, big breast
like she ready! Which is why I send out the child.
Aye, aye! Statics send to say one night at a bar,
a true-true Indian come in and next thing he know
this Choctaw truck-driver lift him by the collar
and start choking him, and he tell the woman, ‘Let’s blow,
babe,’ and leave Statics high and dry like a canoe.
Statics write to say his woman now is the dollar.”
II
Helen came into the shop, and she had that slow
feline smile of a pregnant woman, the slow grace
that can go with it. Sometimes the gods will hallow
all of a race’s beauty in a single face.
She wanted some margarine. Ma Kilman showed her where
the tubs were kept in the freezer. Helen chose one,
then she paid Ma Kilman and left. The dividing air
closed in her wake, and the shop went into shadow,
with the map on the floor, as if she were the sun.
“She making child,” she said. “Achille want to give it,
even is Hector’s, an African name. Helen
don’t want no African child. He say he’ll leave it
till the day of the christening. That Helen must learn
where she from. Philo standing godfather. You see?
Standing, Philo, standing straight! That sore used to burn
that man till he bawl, songez?”
“I heard his agony
from the yam garden,” Seven Seas said. “They doing well,
the white yams. The sea-breeze does season them with salt.”
He hummed in the silence. The song of the chanterelle,
the river griot, the Sioux shaman. Asphalt
rippled its wires, like a harp. The street was still.
Seven Seas sighed. What was the original fault?
“Plunkett promise me a pig next Christmas. He’ll heal
in time, too.”
“We shall all heal.”
The incurable
wound of time pierced them down the long, sharp-shadowed street.
A thudding wave. The sunlight setting a table.
And the distant drone of a comet. The sibyl
snored. Seven Seas sat there as if carved in marble.
His beard white, his hands on the cane, very still.
A swift squeaked like a hinge, then shot from the windowsill.
III
I followed a sea-swift to both sides of this text;
her hyphen stitched its seam, like the interlocking
basins of a globe in which one half fits the next
into an equator, both shores neatly clicking
into a globe; except that its meridian
was not North and South but East and West. One, the New
World, made exactly like the Old, hal
ves of one brain,
or the beat of both hands rowing that bear the two
vessels of the heart with balance, weight, and design.
Her wing-beat carries these islands to Africa,
she sewed the Atlantic rift with a needle’s line,
the rift in the soul. Now, as vision grows weaker,
it glimpses the straightened X of the soaring swift,
like a cedar’s branches widening in sunrise,
in oars that are crossed and settled in calm water,
since the place held all I needed of paradise,
with no other sign but a lizard’s signature,
and no other laurel but the laurier-cannelle’s.
Chapter LXIV
I
I sang of quiet Achille, Afolabe’s son,
who never ascended in an elevator,
who had no passport, since the horizon needs none,
never begged nor borrowed, was nobody’s waiter,
whose end, when it comes, will be a death by water
(which is not for this book, which will remain unknown
and unread by him). I sang the only slaughter
that brought him delight, and that from necessity—
of fish, sang the channels of his back in the sun.
I sang our wide country, the Caribbean Sea.
Who hated shoes, whose soles were as cracked as a stone,
who was gentle with ropes, who had one suit alone,
whom no man dared insult and who insulted no one,
whose grin was a white breaker cresting, but whose frown
was a growing thunderhead, whose fist of iron
would do me a greater honour if it held on
to my casket’s oarlocks than mine lifting his own
when both anchors are lowered in the one island,
but now the idyll dies, the goblet is broken,
and rainwater trickles down the brown cheek of a jar
from the clay of Choiseul. So much left unspoken
by my chirping nib! And my earth-door lies ajar.
I lie wrapped in a flour-sack sail. The clods thud
on my rope-lowered canoe. Rasping shovels scrape
a dry rain of dirt on its hold, but turn your head
when the sea-almond rattles or the rust-leaved grape
from the shells of my unpharaonic pyramid
towards paper shredded by the wind and scattered
like white gulls that separate their names from the foam
and nod to a fisherman with his khaki dog
that skitters from the wave-crash, then frown at his form
for one swift second. In its earth-trough, my pirogue
with its brass-handled oarlocks is sailing. Not from
but with them, with Hector, with Maud in the rhythm
of her beds trowelled over, with a swirling log
lifting its mossed head from the swell; let the deep hymn
of the Caribbean continue my epilogue;
may waves remove their shawls as my mourners walk home
to their rusted villages, good shoes in one hand,
passing a boy who walked through the ignorant foam,
and saw a sail going out or else coming in,
and watched asterisks of rain puckering the sand.
II
You can see Helen at the Halcyon. She is dressed
in the national costume: white, low-cut bodice,
with frilled lace at the collar, just a cleft of a breast
for the customers when she places their orders
on the shields of the tables. They can guess the rest
under the madras skirt with its golden borders
and the flirtatious knot of the madras head-tie.
She pauses between the tables, holding a tray
over her stomach to hide the wave-rounded sigh
of her pregnancy. There is something too remote
about her stillness. Women study her beauty,
but turn their faces away if their eyes should meet,
like an ebony carving. But if she should swerve
that silhouette hammered out of the sea’s metal
like a profile on a shield, its sinuous neck
longing like a palm’s, you might recall that battle
for which they named an island or the heaving wreck
of the Ville de Paris in her foam-frilled bodice,
or just think, “What a fine local woman!” and her
head will turn when you snap your fingers, the slow eyes
approaching you with the leisure of a panther
through white tables with palm-green iron umbrellas,
past children wading with water-wings in the pool;
and Africa strides, not alabaster Hellas,
and half the world lies open to show its black pearl.
She waits for your order and you lower your eyes
away from hers that have never carried the spoil
of Troy, that never betrayed horned Menelaus
or netted Agamemnon in their irises.
But the name Helen had gripped my wrist in its vise
to plunge it into the foaming page. For three years,
phantom hearer, I kept wandering to a voice
hoarse as winter’s echo in the throat of a vase!
Like Philoctete’s wound, this language carries its cure,
its radiant affliction; reluctantly now,
like Achille’s, my craft slips the chain of its anchor,
moored to its cross as I leave it; its nodding prow
lettered as simply, ribbed in our native timber,
riding these last worried lines; its rhythm agrees
that all it forgot a swift made it remember
since that green sunrise of axes and laurel-trees,
till the sunset chars it, slowly, to an ember.
And Achille himself had been one of those children
whose voices are surf under a galvanized roof;
sheep bleating in the schoolyard; a Caribbean
with the smart man under one’s belly. Blue stories
we recited as children lifted with the rock
of Polyphemus. From a plaster Omeros
the smoke and the scarves of mare’s tails, continually
chalked associate phantoms across our own sky.
III
Out of their element, the thrashing mackerel
thudded, silver, then leaden. The vermilion scales
of snappers faded like sunset. The wet, mossed coral
sea-fans that winnowed weeds in the wiry water
stiffened to bony lace, and the dripping tendrils
of an octopus wrung its hands at the slaughter
from the gutting knives. Achille unstitched the entrails
and hurled them on the sand for the palm-ribbed mongrels
and the sawing flies. As skittish as hyenas
the dogs trotted, then paused, angling their muzzles
sideways to gnaw on trembling legs, then lift a nose
at more scavengers. A triumphant Achilles,
his hands gloved in blood, moved to the other canoes
whose hulls were thumping with fishes. In the spread seine
the silvery mackerel multiplied the noise
of coins in a basin. The copper scales, swaying,
were balanced by one iron tear; then there was peace.
They washed their short knives, they wrapped the flour-bag sails,
then they helped him haul In God We Troust back in place,
jamming logs under its keel. He felt his muscles
unknotting like rope. The nets were closing their eyes,
sagging on bamboo poles near the concrete depot.
In the standpipe’s sandy trough aching Achilles
washed sand from his heels, then tightened the brass spigot
to its last drop. An immens
e lilac emptiness
settled the sea. He sniffed his name in one armpit.
He scraped dry scales off his hands. He liked the odours
of the sea in him. Night was fanning its coalpot
from one catching star. The No Pain lit its doors
in the village. Achille put the wedge of dolphin
that he’d saved for Helen in Hector’s rusty tin.
A full moon shone like a slice of raw onion.
When he left the beach the sea was still going on.
ALSO BY DEREK WALCOTT
POEMS
Selected Poems
The Gulf
Another Life
Sea Grapes
The Star-Apple Kingdom
The Fortunate Traveller
Midsummer
Collected Poems: 1948–1984
The Arkansas Testament
The Bounty
PLAYS
Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays
The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!
Remembrance and Pantomime
Three Plays: The Last Carnival;
Beef, No Chicken; A Branch of the Blue Nile
The Odyssey
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18h Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 1990 by Derek Walcott
All rights reserved
Published in 1990 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First paperback edition, 1992
“Yesterday” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney copyright © 1965 Northern Songs Ltd. All rights for the U.S., Canada, and Mexico controlled and administered by EMI Blackwood Music Inc. under license from ATV Music (MACLEN). All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.
Acknowledgments are made to Partisan Review, The New Repubic, Frank, Antaeus, and The New Yorker, where portions of this book were originally published, some of them in slightly different form.
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Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-374-52350-3
Paperback ISBN-10: 0-374-52350-9
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eISBN 9781466880405
First eBook edition: July 2014