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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

  of a resinous bonfire that turned the leaves brown

  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

  damned business was happening. He felt the sore twitch

  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,