RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

earnestly for the ―thousands of arrowhead leavings‖ of ancient Turtle Island cultures, but
ultimately he must pick up the tools he walks in with—―cold drill, / pick, singlejack, and
sack / of dynamite‖— and learn to accept modernity alongside his desire to live
according to the old ways.
A similar entwining strategy can be read at the end of book three in Omeros, after
Achille‘s etak journey and before the poet‘s autobiographical tour of the Atlantic and
treatment of the historical Catherine Weldon:
. . . Achille raised his hand
from the drumming rudder, then watched our minnow plane
melt into cloud-coral over the horned island. (168)
As Achille restores his ties to St. Lucia and Helen, he sees the author‘s ―minnow‖ plane
rise above the volcanic Pitons from his pirogue. The transnational poet writes an
indigenous character, who looks back at him. Building on this sense of simultaneity in the
next chapter, the poet imagines the metaphorical and functional similarities of oars and
telephones:
I reached from my raft and reconnected the phone.
In its clicking oarlocks, it idled, my one oar.
But castaways make friends with the sea; living alone (171)
The poet does not confuse his phone with an oar. He unites the native and modern,
restoring continuity to a fractured region and making ―friends with the sea‖ on which he
travels. The poetic strategy of both authors is to unite the local mythos with modern
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Jay Johnson, left for the adjacent Mariposa County in 1996 (131).