Omeros
Page 2
and the blind lighthouse, sensing the edge of a cape,
paused like a giant, a marble cloud in its hands,
to hurl its boulder that splashed into phosphorous
stars; then a black fisherman, his stubbled chin coarse
as a dry sea-urchin’s, hoisted his flour-sack
sail on its bamboo spar, and scanned the opening line
of our epic horizon; now I can look back
to rocks that see their own feet when light nets the waves,
as the dugouts set out with ebony captains,
since it was your light that startled our sunlit wharves
where schooners swayed idly, moored to their cold capstans.
A wind turns the harbour’s pages back to the voice
that hummed in the vase of a girl’s throat: “Omeros.”
III
“O-meros,” she laughed. “That’s what we call him in Greek,”
stroking the small bust with its boxer’s broken nose,
and I thought of Seven Seas sitting near the reek
of drying fishnets, listening to the shallows’ noise.
I said: “Homer and Virg are New England farmers,
and the winged horse guards their gas-station, you’re right.”
I felt the foam head watching as I stroked an arm, as
cold as its marble, then the shoulders in winter light
in the studio attic. I said, “Omeros,”
and O was the conch-shell’s invocation, mer was
both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,
os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes
and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore.
Omeros was the crunch of dry leaves, and the washes
that echoed from a cave-mouth when the tide has ebbed.
The name stayed in my mouth. I saw how light was webbed
on her Asian cheeks, defined her eyes with a black
almond’s outline, as Antigone turned and said:
“I’m tired of America, it’s time for me to go back
to Greece. I miss my islands.” I write, it returns—
the way she turned and shook out the black gust of hair.
I saw how the surf printed its lace in patterns
on the shore of her neck, then the lowering shallows
of silk swirled at her ankles, like surf without noise,
and felt that another cold bust, not hers, but yours
saw this with stone almonds for eyes, its broken nose
turning away, as the rustling silk agrees.
But if it could read between the lines of her floor
like a white-hot deck uncaulked by Antillean heat,
to the shadows in its hold, its nostrils might flare
at the stench from manacled ankles, the coffled feet
scraping like leaves, and perhaps the inculpable marble
would have turned its white seeds away, to widen
the bow of its mouth at the horror under her table,
from the lyre of her armchair draped with its white chiton,
to do what the past always does: suffer, and stare.
She lay calm as a port, and a cloud covered her
with my shadow; then a prow with painted eyes
slowly emerged from the fragrant rain of black hair.
And I heard a hollow moan exhaled from a vase,
not for kings floundering in lances of rain; the prose
of abrupt fishermen cursing over canoes.
Chapter III
I
“Touchez-i, encore: N’ai fendre choux-ous-ou, salope!”
“Touch it again, and I’ll split your arse, you bitch!”
“Moi j’a dire—’ous pas prêter un rien. ’Ous ni shallope,
’ous ni seine, ’ous croire ’ous ni choeur campêche?”
“I told you, borrow nothing of mine. You have a canoe,
and a net. Who you think you are? Logwood Heart?”
“’Ous croire ’ous c’est roi Gros Îlet? Voleur bomme!”
“You think you’re king of Gros Îlet, you tin-stealer?”
Then in English: “I go show you who is king! Come!”
Hector came out from the shade. And Achille, the
moment he saw him carrying the cutlass, un homme
fou, a madman eaten with envy, replaced the tin
he had borrowed from Hector’s canoe neatly back in the prow
of Hector’s boat. Then Achille, who had had enough
of this madman, wiped and hefted his own blade.
And now the villagers emerged from the green shade
of the almonds and wax-leaved manchineels, for the face-off
that Hector wanted. Achille walked off and waited
at the warm shallows’ edge. Hector strode towards him.
The villagers followed, as the surf abated
its sound, its fear cowering at the beach’s rim.
Then, far out at sea, in a sparkling shower
arrows of rain arched from the emerald breakwater
of the reef, the shafts travelling with clear power
in the sun, and behind them, ranged for the slaughter,
stood villagers, shouting, with a sound like the shoal,
and hoisting arms to the light. Hector ran, splashing
in shallows mixed with the drizzle, towards Achille,
his cutlass lifted. The surf, in anger, gnashing
its tail like a foaming dogfight. Men can kill
their own brothers in rage, but the madman who tore
Achille’s undershirt from one shoulder also tore
at his heart. The rage that he felt against Hector
was shame. To go crazy for an old bailing tin
crusted with rust! The duel of these fishermen
was over a shadow and its name was Helen.
II
Ma Kilman had the oldest bar in the village.
Its gingerbread balcony had mustard gables
with green trim round the eaves, the paint wrinkled with age.
In the cabaret downstairs there were wooden tables
for the downslap of dominoes. A bead curtain
tinkled every time she came through it. A neon
sign endorsed Coca-Cola under the NO PAIN
CAFÉ ALL WELCOME. The NO PAIN was not her own
idea, but her dead husband’s. “Is a prophecy,”
Ma Kilman would laugh. A hot street led to the beach
past the small shops and the clubs and a pharmacy
in whose angling shade, his khaki dog on a leash,
the blind man sat on his crate after the pirogues
set out, muttering the dark language of the blind,
gnarled hands on his stick, his ears as sharp as the dog’s.
Sometimes he would sing and the scraps blew on the wind
when her beads rubbed their rosary. Old St. Omere.
He claimed he’d sailed round the world. “Monsieur Seven Seas”
they christened him, from a cod-liver-oil label
with its wriggling swordfish. But his words were not clear.
They were Greek to her. Or old African babble.
Across wires of hot asphalt the blind singer
seemed to be numbering things. Who knows if his eyes
saw through the shades, tapping his cane with one finger?
She helped him draw his veteran’s compensation
every first of the month from the small Post Office.
He never complained about his situation
like the rest of them. The corner box, and the heat
on his hands would make him shift his box to the shade.
Ma Kilman saw Philoctete hobbling up the street,
so she rose from her corner window, and she laid
out the usual medicine for him, a flask of white
acajou, and a jar of yellow Vaseline,
a small enamel basin of ice. He would wait
down and anoint the mouth of the sore on his shin.
III
“Mais qui ça qui rivait-’ous, Philoctete?”
“Moin blessé.”
“But what is wrong wif you, Philoctete?”
“I am blest
wif this wound, Ma Kilman, qui pas ka guérir pièce.
Which will never heal.”
“Well, you must take it easy.
Go home and lie down, give the foot a lickle rest.”
Philoctete, his trouser-legs rolled, stares out to sea
from the worn rumshop window. The itch in the sore
tingles like the tendrils of the anemone,
and the puffed blister of Portuguese man-o’-war.
He believed the swelling came from the chained ankles
of his grandfathers. Or else why was there no cure?
That the cross he carried was not only the anchor’s
but that of his race, for a village black and poor
as the pigs that rooted in its burning garbage,
then were hooked on the anchors of the abattoir.
Ma Kilman was sewing. She looked up and saw his face
squinting from the white of the street. He was waiting
to pass out on the table. This went on for days.
The ice turned to warm water near the self-hating
gesture of clenching his head tight in both hands. She
heard the boys in blue uniforms, going to school,
screaming at his elbow: “Pheeloh! Pheelosophee!”
A mummy embalmed in Vaseline and alcohol.
In the Egyptian silence she muttered softly:
“It have a flower somewhere, a medicine, and ways
my grandmother would boil it. I used to watch ants
climbing her white flower-pot. But, God, in which place?”
Where was this root? What senna, what tepid tisanes,
could clean the branched river of his corrupted blood,
whose sap was a wounded cedar’s? What did it mean,
this name that felt like a fever? Well, one good heft
of his garden-cutlass would slice the damned name clean
from its rotting yam. He said, “Merci.” Then he left.
Chapter IV
I
North of the village is a logwood grove whose thorns
litter its dry shade. The broken road has boulders,
and quartz that glistens like rain. The logwoods were once
part of an estate with its windmill as old as
the village below it. The abandoned road runs
past huge rusted cauldrons, vats for boiling the sugar,
and blackened pillars. These are the only ruins
left here by history, if history is what they are.
The twisted logwood trunks are orange from sea-blast;
above them is a stand of surprising cactus.
Philoctete limped to his yam garden there. He passed
through the estate shuddering, cradling his cutlass,
bayed at by brown, knotted sheep repeating his name.
“Beeeeeh, Philoctete!” Here, in the Atlantic wind,
the almonds bent evenly like a candle-flame.
The thought of candles brought his own death to mind.
The wind turned the yam leaves like maps of Africa,
their veins bled white, as Philoctete, hobbling, went
between the yam beds like a patient growing weaker
down a hospital ward. His skin was a nettle,
his head a market of ants; he heard the crabs groan
from arthritic pincers, he felt a mole-cricket drill
his sore to the bone. His knee was radiant iron,
his chest was a sack of ice, and behind the bars
of his rusted teeth, like a mongoose in a cage,
a scream was mad to come out; his tongue tickled its claws
on the roof of his mouth, rattling its bars in rage.
He saw the blue smoke from the yards, the bamboo poles
weighed down by nets, the floating feather of the priest.
When cutlass cut smoke, when cocks surprise their arseholes
by shitting eggs, he cursed, black people go get rest
from God; at which point a fierce cluster of arrows
targeted the sore, and he screamed in the yam rows.
He stretched out the foot. He edged the razor-sharp steel
through pleading finger and thumb. The yam leaves recoiled
in a cold sweat. He hacked every root at the heel.
He hacked them at the heel, noticing how they curled,
head-down without their roots. He cursed the yams:
“Salope!
You all see what it’s like without roots in this world?”
Then sobbed, his face down in the slaughtered leaves. A sap
trickled from their gaping stems like his own sorrow.
A fly quickly washed its hands of the massacre.
Philoctete felt an ant crawling across his brow.
It was the breeze. He looked up at a blue acre
and a branch where a swift settled without a cry.
II
He felt the village through his back, heard the sea-hum
of transports below. The sea-swift was watching him.
Then it twittered seaward, swallowed in the cloud-foam.
For as long as it takes a single drop to dry
on the wax of a dasheen leaf, Philoctete lay
on his pebbled spine on hot earth watching the sky
altering white continents with its geography.
He would ask God’s pardon. Over the quiet bay
the grass smelt good and the clouds changed beautifully.
Next he heard warriors rushing towards battle,
but it was wind lifting the dead yams, the rattle
of a palm’s shaken spears. Herdsmen haieing cattle
who set out to found no cities; they were the found,
who were bound for no victories; they were the bound,
who levelled nothing before them; they were the ground.
He would be the soul of patience, like an old horse
stamping one hoof in a pasture, rattling its mane
or swishing its tail as flies keep circling its sores;
if a horse could endure afflictions so could men.
He held to a branch and tested his dead hoof once
on the springy earth. It felt weightless as a sponge.
III
I sat on the white terrace waiting for the cheque.
Our waiter, in a black bow-tie, plunged through the sand
between the full deck-chairs, bouncing to discotheque
music from the speakers, a tray sailed in one hand.
The tourists revolved, grilling their backs in their noon
barbecue. The waiter was having a hard time
with his leather soles. They kept sliding down a dune,
but his tray teetered without spilling gin-and-lime
on a scorched back. He was determined to meet the
beach’s demands, like a Lawrence of St. Lucia,
except that he was trudging towards a litre
of self-conscious champagne. Like any born loser
he soon kicked the bucket. He rested his tray down,
wiped the sand from the ice-cubes, then plunked the cubes in
the bucket, then the bottle; after this was done,
he seemed ready to help the wife stuff her boobs in
her halter, while her husband sat boiling with rage
like a towelled sheik. Then Lawrence frowned at a mirage.
That was when I turned with him towards the village,
and saw, through the caging wires of the noon sky,
a beach with its padding panther; now the mirage
dissolved to a woman with a madras head-tie,
but the head proud,
although it was looking for work.
I felt like standing in homage to a beauty
that left, like a ship, widening eyes in its wake.
“Who the hell is that?” a tourist near my table
asked a waitress. The waitress said, “She? She too proud!”
As the carved lids of the unimaginable
ebony mask unwrapped from its cotton-wool cloud,
the waitress sneered, “Helen.” And all the rest followed.
Chapter V
I
Major Plunkett gently settled his Guinness, wiped
the rime of gold foam freckling his pensioned moustache
with a surf-curling tongue. Adjacently, Maud sipped
quietly, wifely, an ale. Under the peaked thatch
designed like a kraal facing the weathered village,
the raffia decor was empty. He heard the squeak
of Maud’s weight when she shifted. The usual mirage
of clouds in full canvas steered towards Martinique.
This was their watering-hole, this rigid custom
of lowering the yardarm from the same raffia chairs
once a week at one, between the bank and the farm,
once Maud delivered her orchids, for all these years
of self-examining silence. Maud stirred the ends
of damp curls from her nape. The Major drummed the edge
of the bar and twirled a straw coaster. Their silence
was a mutual communion. They’d been out here
since the war and his wound. Pigs. Orchids. Their marriage
a silver anniversary of bright water
that glittered like Glen-da-Lough in Maud’s home county
of Wicklow, but for Dennis, in his khaki shirt
and capacious shorts in which he’d served with Monty,
the crusted tourists were corpses in the desert
from the Afrika Korps. Pro Rommel, pro mori.
The regimental brandies stiffened on the shelves
near Napoleonic cognacs. All history
in a dusty Beefeater’s gin. We helped ourselves
to these green islands like olives from a saucer,
munched on the pith, then spat their sucked stones on a plate,
like a melon’s black seeds. Pro honoris causa,
but in whose honour did his head-wound graduate?
This was their Saturday place, not a corner-pub,
not the wrought-iron Victoria. He had resigned
from that haunt of middle-clarse farts, an old club
with more pompous arses than any flea could find,
a replica of the Raj, with gins-and-tonic