• BOOK 1 | Chapter 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
• BOOK 2 | Chapter 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
• BOOK 3 | Chapter 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 |
• BOOK 4 | Chapter 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 |
• BOOK 5 | Chapter 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 |
• BOOK 6 | Chapter 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 |
• BOOK 7 | Chapter 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 |
• TEXT INDEX
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BOOK ONE

Chapter I

"This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes."

Pholoctet 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

fisherman 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 show 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 Sorciere, 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 would it

had made. They scraped off its gangrenous moss, then ripped

the would 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 the towering babble

of the cedar to green vowels of bois-campeche.

The bois-flot held it 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 toward 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 it 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.

Book 1 - Chapter 2