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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