Omeros by Derek Walcott

Author:Derek Walcott [Walcott, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9781466880405
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-09-08T22:00:00+00:00

II

Seven Seas asked him to rake the leaves in his yard.

The pomme-Arac shed so many the rusted drum

filled quickly, and more were falling as he carried

each pile. Through the teeth of the rake Achille heard them

talk a dead language. He would clean up this whole place.

He cutlassed the banana trash. He gripped a frond

of the rusting coconut, swivelling its base

till it gave, then he dumped the rubbish in a mound

round the smoking drum. The black dog did dog-dances

around him, yapping, crouching, entangling his heel.

Meanwhile, the bonfire rose with crackling branches.

Seven Seas, on his box, called the dog from Achille.

He wanted to ask Seven Seas where trees got names,

watching the ribbed branches blacken with the same stare

of the blind man at the leaves of the leaping flames,

and why our life’s spark is exceeded by a star.

But the light of a star is dead and maybe our

light was the same. Then Achille saw the iguana

in the leaves of the pomme-Arac branches and fear

froze him at the same time it fuelled the banner

of the climbing flame. Then the ridged beast disappeared.

He stepped back from the pomme-Arac’s shade on the grass

diagrammed like the lizard. Then, as if he heard

his thought, Seven Seas said: “Aruac mean the race

that burning there like the leaves and pomme is the word

in patois for ‘apple.’ This used to be their place.”

Maybe he’d heard the iguana with his dog’s ears,

because the dog was barking around the trunk’s base.

He had never heard the dog’s name either. It was

one of those Saturdays that contain centuries,

when the strata of history layered underheel,

which earth sometimes flashes with its mineral signs,

can lie in a quartz shard. Gradually, Achille

found History that morning. Near the hedge, the tines

of the rake in the dead leaves grated on some stone,

so he crouched to uproot the obstruction. He saw

deep marks in the rock that froze his fingers to bone.

The features incised there glared back at his horror

from its disturbed grave. A face that a child will draw:

blank circles for eyes, a straight line down for the nose,

a slit for a mouth, but the expression angrier

as Achille’s palm brushed off centuries of repose.

A thousand archaeologists started screaming

as Achille wrenched out the totem, then hurled it far

over the oleander hedge. It lay dreaming

on one cheek in the spear-grass, but that act of fear

multiplied the lances on his scalp. Stone-faced souls

peered with their lizard eyes through the pomme-Arac tree,

then turned from their bonfire. Instantly, like moles

or mole crickets in the shadow of History,

the artifacts burrowed deeper into their holes.

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