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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Book One
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Book Two
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Book Three
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Book Four
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Book Five
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL
Chapter XLI
Chapter XLII
Chapter XLIII
Book Six
Chapter XLIV
Chapter XLV
Chapter XLVI
Chapter XLVII
Chapter XLVIII
Chapter XLIX
Chapter L
Chapter LI
Chapter LII
Chapter LIII
Chapter LIV
Chapter LV
Book Seven
Chapter LVI
Chapter LVII
Chapter LVIII
Chapter LIX
Chapter LX
Chapter LXI
Chapter LXII
Chapter LXIII
Chapter LXIV
Also by Derek Walcott
Copyright
FOR MY SHIPMATES IN THIS CRAFT,
FOR MY BROTHER, RODERICK,
& FOR ROGER STRAUS
BOOK ONE
Chapter I
I
“This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes.”
Philoctete smiles for the tourists, who try taking
his soul with their cameras. “Once wind bring the news
to the laurier-cannelles, their leaves start shaking
the minute the axe of sunlight hit the cedars,
because they could see the axes in our own eyes.
Wind lift the ferns. They sound like the sea that feed us
fishermen all our life, and the ferns nodded ‘Yes,
the trees have to die.’ So, fists jam in our jacket,
cause the heights was cold and our breath making feathers
like the mist, we pass the rum. When it came back, it
give us the spirit to turn into murderers.
I lift up the axe and pray for strength in my hands
to wound the first cedar. Dew was filling my eyes,
but I fire one more white rum. Then we advance.”
For some extra silver, under a sea-almond,
he shows them a scar made by a rusted anchor,
rolling one trouser-leg up with the rising moan
of a conch. It has puckered like the corolla
of a sea-urchin. He does not explain its cure.
“It have some things”—he smiles—“worth more than a dollar.”
He has left it to a garrulous waterfall
to pour out his secret down La Sorcière, since
the tall laurels fell, for the ground-dove’s mating call
to pass on its note to the blue, tacit mountains
whose talkative brooks, carrying it to the sea,
turn into idle pools where the clear minnows shoot
and an egret stalks the reeds with one rusted cry
as it stabs and stabs the mud with one lifting foot.
Then silence is sawn in half by a dragonfly
as eels sign their names along the clear bottom-sand,
when the sunrise brightens the river’s memory
and waves of huge ferns are nodding to the sea’s sound.
Although smoke forgets the earth from which it ascends,
and nettles guard the holes where the laurels were killed,
an iguana hears the axes, clouding each lens
over its lost name, when the hunched island was called
“Iounalao,” “Where the iguana is found.”
But, taking its own time, the iguana will scale
the rigging of vines in a year, its dewlap fanned,
its elbows akimbo, its deliberate tail
moving with the island. The slit pods of its eyes
ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries,
that rose with the Aruacs’ smoke till a new race
unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees.
These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space
for a single God where the old gods stood before.
The first god was a gommier. The generator
began with a whine, and a shark, with sidewise jaw,
sent the chips flying like mackerel over water
into trembling weeds. Now they cut off the saw,
still hot and shaking, to examine the wound it
had made. They scraped off its gangrenous moss, then ripped
the wound clear of the net of vines that still bound it
to this earth, and nodded. The generator whipped
back to its work, and the chips flew much faster as
the shark’s teeth gnawed evenly. They covered their eyes
from the splintering nest. Now, over the pastures
of bananas, the island lifted its horns. Sunrise
trickled down its valleys, blood splashed on the cedars,
and the grove flooded with the light of sacrifice.
A gommier was cracking. Its leaves an enormous
tarpaulin with the ridgepole gone. The creaking sound
made the fishermen leap back as the angling mast
leant slowly towards the troughs of ferns; then the ground
shuddered under the feet in waves, then the waves passed.
II
Achille looked up at the hole the laurel had left.
He saw the hole silently healing with the foam
of a cloud like a breaker. Then he saw the swift
crossing the cloud-surf, a small thing, far from its home,
confused by the waves of blue hills. A thorn vine gripped
his heel. He tugged it free. Around him, other ships
were shaping from the saw. With his cutlass he made
a swift sign of the cross, his thumb touching his lips
while the height rang with axes. He swayed back the blade,
and hacked the limbs from the dead god, knot after knot,
wrenching the severed veins from the trunk as he prayed:
“Tree! You can be a canoe! Or else you cannot!”
The bearded elders endured the decimation
of their tribe without uttering a syllable
of that language they had uttered as one nation,
the speech taught their saplings: from t
he towering babble
of the cedar to green vowels of bois-campêche.
The bois-flot held its tongue with the laurier-cannelle,
the red-skinned logwood endured the thorns in its flesh,
while the Aruacs’ patois crackled in the smell
with curling tongues, then ash, and their language was lost.
Like barbarians striding columns they have brought down,
the fishermen shouted. The gods were down at last.
Like pygmies they hacked the trunks of wrinkled giants
for paddles and oars. They were working with the same
concentration as an army of fire-ants.
But vexed by the smoke for defaming their forest,
blow-darts of mosquitoes kept needling Achille’s trunk.
He frotted white rum on both forearms that, at least,
those that he flattened to asterisks would die drunk.
They went for his eyes. They circled them with attacks
that made him weep blindly. Then the host retreated
to high bamboo like the archers of Aruacs
running from the muskets of cracking logs, routed
by the fire’s banner and the remorseless axe
hacking the branches. The men bound the big logs first
with new hemp and, like ants, trundled them to a cliff
to plunge through tall nettles. The logs gathered that thirst
for the sea which their own vined bodies were born with.
Now the trunks in eagerness to become canoes
ploughed into breakers of bushes, making raw holes
of boulders, feeling not death inside them, but use—
to roof the sea, to be hulls. Then, on the beach, coals
were set in their hollows that were chipped with an adze.
A flat-bed truck had carried their rope-bound bodies.
The charcoals, smouldering, cored the dugouts for days
till heat widened the wood enough for ribbed gunwales.
Under his tapping chisel Achille felt their hollows
exhaling to touch the sea, lunging towards the haze
of bird-printed islets, the beaks of their parted bows.
Then everything fit. The pirogues crouched on the sand
like hounds with sprigs in their teeth. The priest
sprinkled them with a bell, then he made the swift’s sign.
When he smiled at Achille’s canoe, In God We Troust,
Achille said: “Leave it! Is God’ spelling and mine.”
After Mass one sunrise the canoes entered the troughs
of the surpliced shallows, and their nodding prows
agreed with the waves to forget their lives as trees;
one would serve Hector and another, Achilles.
III
Achille peed in the dark, then bolted the half-door shut.
It was rusted from sea-blast. He hoisted the fishpot
with the crab of one hand; in the hole under the hut
he hid the cinder-block step. As he neared the depot,
the dawn breeze salted him coming up the grey street
past sleep-tight houses, under the sodium bars
of street-lamps, to the dry asphalt scraped by his feet;
he counted the small blue sparks of separate stars.
Banana fronds nodded to the undulating
anger of roosters, their cries screeching like red chalk
drawing hills on a board. Like his teacher, waiting,
the surf kept chafing at his deliberate walk.
By the time they met at the wall of the concrete shed
the morning star had stepped back, hating the odour
of nets and fish-guts; the light was hard overhead
and there was a horizon. He put the net by the door
of the depot, then washed his hands in its basin.
The surf did not raise its voice, even the ribbed hounds
around the canoes were quiet; a flask of l’absinthe
was passed by the fishermen, who made smacking sounds
and shook at the bitter bark from which it was brewed.
This was the light that Achille was happiest in.
When, before their hands gripped the gunwales, they stood
for the sea-width to enter them, feeling their day begin.
Chapter II
I
Hector was there. Theophile also. In this light,
they have only Christian names. Placide, Pancreas,
Chrysostom, Maljo, Philoctete with his head white
as the coiled surf. They shipped the lances of oars,
placed them parallel in the grave of the gunwales
like man and wife. They scooped the leaf-bilge from the planks,
loosened knots from the bodies of flour-sack sails,
while Hector, at the shallows’ edge, gave a quick thanks,
with the sea for a font, before he waded, thigh-in.
The rest walked up the sand with identical stride
except for foam-haired Philoctete. The sore on his shin
still unhealed, like a radiant anemone. It had come
from a scraping, rusted anchor. The pronged iron
peeled the skin in a backwash. He bent to the foam,
sprinkling it with a salt hiss. Soon he would run,
hobbling, to the useless shade of an almond,
with locked teeth, then wave them off from the shame
of his smell, and once more they would leave him alone
under its leoparding light. This sunrise the same
its wires up to his groin. With his hop-and-drop
limp, hand clutching one knee, he left the printed beach
to crawl up the early street to Ma Kilman’s shop.
She would open and put the white rum within reach.
His shipmates watched him, then they hooked hands like anchors
under the hulls, rocking them; the keels sheared dry sand
till the wet sand resisted, rattling the oars
that lay parallel amidships; then, to the one sound
of curses and prayers at the logs jammed as a wedge,
one after one, as their tins began to rattle,
the pirogues slid to the shallows’ nibbling edge,
towards the encouraging sea. The loose logs swirled
in surf, face down, like warriors from a battle
lost somewhere on the other shore of the world.
They were dragged to a place under the manchineels
to lie there face upward, the sun moving over their brows
with the stare of myrmidons hauled up by the heels
high up from the tide-mark where the pale crab burrows.
The fishermen brushed their palms. Now all the canoes
were riding the pink morning swell. They drew their bows
gently, the way grooms handle horses in the sunrise,
flicking the ropes like reins, pinned them by the nose—
Praise Him, Morning Star, St. Lucia, Light of My Eyes,
threw bailing tins in them, and folded their bodies across
the tilting hulls, then sculled one oar in the slack
of the stern. Hector rattled out his bound canvas
to gain ground with the gulls, hoping to come back
before that conch-coloured dusk low pelicans cross.
II
Seven Seas rose in the half-dark to make coffee.
Sunrise was heating the ring of the horizon
and clouds were rising like loaves. By the heat of the
glowing iron rose he slid the saucepan’s base on-
to the ring and anchored it there. The saucepan shook
from the weight of water in it, then it settled.
His kettle leaked. He groped for the tin chair and took
his place near the saucep
an to hear when it bubbled.
It would boil but not scream like a bosun’s whistle
to let him know it was ready. He heard the dog’s
morning whine under the boards of the house, its tail
thudding to be let in, but he envied the pirogues
already miles out at sea. Then he heard the first breeze
washing the sea-almond’s wares; last night there had been
a full moon white as his plate. He saw with his ears.
He warmed with the roofs as the sun began to climb.
Since the disease had obliterated vision,
when the sunset shook the sea’s hand for the last time—
and an inward darkness grew where the moon and sun
indistinctly altered—he moved by a sixth sense,
like the moon without an hour or second hand,
wiped clean as the plate that he now began to rinse
while the saucepan bubbled; blindness was not the end.
It was not a palm-tree’s dial on the noon sand.
He could feel the sunlight creeping over his wrists.
The sunlight moved like a cat along the palings
of a sandy street; he felt it unclench the fists
of the breadfruit tree in his yard, run the railings
of the short iron bridge like a harp, its racing
stick rippling with the river; he saw the lagoon
behind the church, and in it, stuck like a basin,
the rusting enamel image of the full moon.
He lowered the ring to sunset under the pan.
The dog scratched at the kitchen door for him to open
but he made it wait. He drummed the kitchen table
with his fingers. Two blackbirds quarrelled at breakfast.
Except for one hand he sat as still as marble,
with his egg-white eyes, fingers recounting the past
of another sea, measured by the stroking oars.
O open this day with the conch’s moan, Omeros,
as you did in my boyhood, when I was a noun
gently exhaled from the palate of the sunrise.
A lizard on the sea-wall darted its question
at the waking sea, and a net of golden moss
brightened the reef, which the sails of their far canoes
avoided. Only in you, across centuries
of the sea’s parchment atlas, can I catch the noise
of the surf lines wandering like the shambling fleece
of the lighthouse’s flock, that Cyclops whose blind eye
shut from the sunlight. Then the canoes were galleys
over which a frigate sawed its scythed wings slowly.
In you the seeds of grey almonds guessed a tree’s shape,
and the grape leaves rusted like serrated islands,