But they crossed, they survived. There is the epical splendour.
Multiply the rain’s lances, multiply their ruin,
the grace born from subtraction as the hold’s iron door
rolled over their eyes like pots left out in the rain,
and the bolt rammed home its echo, the way that thunder-
claps perpetuate their reverberation.
So there went the Ashanti one way, the Mandingo another,
the Ibo another, the Guinea. Now each man was a nation
in himself, without mother, father, brother.
II
The worst crime is to leave a man’s hands empty.
Men are born makers, with that primal simplicity
in every maker since Adam. This is pre-history,
that itching instinct in the criss-crossed net
of their palms, its wickerwork. They could not
stay idle too long. The chained wrists couldn’t forget
the carver for whom antelopes leapt, or
the bow-maker the shaft, or the armourer
his nail-studs, the shield held up to Hector
that was the hammerer’s art. So the wet air
revolved in the potter’s palms, in the painter’s eye
the arcs of a frantic springbok bucked soundlessly,
baboons kept signing their mimetic alphabet
in case men forgot it, so out of habit
their fingers grew leaves in the foetid ground of the boat.
So now they were coals, firewood, dismembered
branches, not men. They had left their remembered
shadows to the firelight. Scratching a board
they made the signs for their fading names on the wood,
and their former shapes returned absently; each carried
the nameless freight of himself to the other world.
Then, after wreaths of seaweed, after the bitter nouns
of strange berries, coral sores, after the familiar irons
singing round their ankles, after the circling suns,
dry sand their soles knew. Sand they could recognize.
Men they knew by their hearts. They came up from the darkness
past the disinterested captains, shielding their eyes.
III
Not where russet lions snarl on leaf-blown terraces,
or where ocelots carry their freckled shadows, or wind erases
Assyria, or where drizzling arrows hit the unflinching faces
of some Thracian phalanx winding down mountain passes,
but on a palm shore, with its vines and river grasses,
and stone barracoons, on brown earth, bare as their asses.
Yet they felt the sea-wind tying them into one nation
of eyes and shadows and groans, in the one pain
that is inconsolable, the loss of one’s shore
with its crooked footpath. They had wept, not for
their wives only, their fading children, but for strange,
ordinary things. This one, who was a hunter,
wept for a sapling lance whose absent heft sang
in his palm’s hollow. One, a fisherman, for an ochre
river encircling his calves; one a weaver, for the straw
fishpot he had meant to repair, wilting in water.
They cried for the little thing after the big thing.
They cried for a broken gourd. It was only later
that they talked to the gods who had not been there
when they needed them. Their whole world was moving,
or a large part of the world, and what began dissolving
was the fading sound of their tribal name for the rain,
the bright sound for the sun, a hissing noun for the river,
and always the word “never,” and never the word “again.”
Chapter XXIX
I
At noon a ground dove hidden somewhere in the trees
whooed like a conch or a boy blowing a bottle
stuck on one note with maddening, tireless cries;
it was lower than the nightingale’s full throttle
of grief, but to Helen, stripping dried sheets along
the wire in Hector’s yard, the monodic moan
came from the hole in her heart. It was not the song
that twittered from the veined mesh of Agamemnon,
but the low-fingered O of an Aruac flute.
She rested the sheets down, she threw stones at the noise
in that lime-tree past the fence, and looked for the flight
of the startled dove from the branches of her nerves.
But the O’s encircled her, black as the old tires
where Hector grew violets, like bubbles in soapy
water where she scrubbed the ribbed washboard so hard tears
blurred her wrist. Not Helen now, but Penelope,
in whom a single noon was as long as ten years,
because he had not come back, because they had gone
from yesterday, because the fishermen’s fears
spread in the surfing trees. She watched a bleaching-stone
drying with lather, the print of wet feet fading
where she had unpinned the yellow dress from the line,
while the ground dove cooed and cooed, so sorrow-laden
in its lime-tree, that the lemon dress was her sign.
Embracing the dry sheets, Helen entered the house
where the moan could not reach her, she crammed the sheets down
in the basket. She unhooked her skirt, then the blouse,
panties and bra. She sprawled on the unmade bed, brown
and naked as God made her. The hand was not hers
that crawled like a crab, lower and lower down
into the cave of her thighs, it was not Hector’s
but Achille’s hand yesterday. She turns slowly round
on her stomach and comes as soon as he enters.
II
Lonely as a bachelor’s plate, a full moon cleared
the suds of the clouds. Seven Seas felt the moonlight
on his hands, washing his wares. The dog appeared.
He scraped rice and fish into its enamel plate
and said, “Watch the bones, eh!”; then he smelt Philoctete
entering the yard, making sure to hook back the gate
so the dog wouldn’t slide out. He said: “Nice moonlight,”
following the man’s sore’s smell. “No news about your friend, yet?”
he asked in English. Philoctete sat on the same
step he chose every moonlight and said in Creole:
“They say he drown.” The dog chewed noisily.
“His name
is what he out looking for, his name and his soul,”
Seven Seas said.
“Where that?”
They both looked at the moon.
It made the yard clean, it clarified every leaf.
“Africa,” the blind one said. “He go come back soon.”
Philoctete nodded. What else was left to believe
but miracles? Whose vision except a blind man’s,
or a blind saint’s, her name as bright as the island’s?
III
On that moonlit night I was snoring, cupping her side,
when she shook me off from her damp flesh with a shout
that bristled me. She yanked the chain of her bedside
lamp, as I, with ponderous head and wincing snout,
saw her hands claw her face. As I shifted closer
she flailed me away in terror and she cowered
close to the headboard, so I moved to enclose her
within my split trotters, with my curved tusks lowered,
spines prickling my hunch. “Monster!” She shuddered. “Monster!
I turned round to watch your face while you were sleeping,
and you snored, rooting a trough, and covered with flies.”
By
then, if monsters weep, I would have been weeping
through the half-sleep that still gummed my slitted eyes.
Her fingers were branches. I boared through their bracken
towards her breasts, and their tenderness took me in.
I felt her sobbing, then her small shoulders slacken
to her body’s smile. “Oh, God, I drank too much wine
at dinner last night.” Then Circe embraced her swine.
Now, running home, Achille sprung up from the seabed
like a weightless astronaut, not flexing his knees
through phosphorescent sleep; the parchment overhead
of crinkling water recorded three centuries
of the submerged archipelago, in its swell
the world above him passed through important epochs
in which treaties were shredded like surf, governments fell,
markets soared and plunged, but never once did the shocks
of power find a just horizon, from capture
in chains to long debates over manumission,
from which abolitionists soared in a rapture
of guilt. Kings lost their minds. A Jesuit mission
burned in Veracruz; fleeing the Inquisition
a Sephardic merchant, bag locked in one elbow,
crouched by a Lisbon dock, and in that position
was reborn in the New World: Lima; Curaçao.
A snow-headed Negro froze in the Pyrenees,
an ape behind bars, to Napoleon’s orders,
but the dark fathoms were godless, then the waters
grew hungrier and a wave swallowed Port Royal.
Victoria revolved with her gold orb and sceptre,
Wilberforce was struck by lightning, a second Saul
at the crossroads of empire, while the spectre
breathed in the one element that had made them all
fishes and men; Darwin claimed fishes equal
in the sight of the sea. Madrasi climbed the hull
with their rolled bundles from Calcutta and Bombay,
huddling like laundry in the hold of the Fatel
Rozack, ninety-six days out and forty-one more away
from the Cape of Good Hope. In a great sea-battle,
before them, a midshipman was wounded and drowned.
Dawn brought a sea-drizzle. Achille, cramped from a sound
sleep, watched the lights of the morning plane as it droned.
Chapter XXX
I
He yawned and watched the lilac horns of his island
lift the horizon.
“I know you ain’t like to talk,”
the mate said, “but this morning I could use a hand.
Where your mind was whole night?”
“Africa.”
“Oh? You walk?”
The mate held up his T-shirt, mainly a red hole,
and wriggled it on. He tested the bamboo pole
that trawled the skipping lure from the fast-shearing hull
with the Trade behind them.
“Mackerel running,” he said.
“Africa, right! You get sunstroke, chief. That is all.
You best put that damn captain-cap back on your head.”
All night he had worked the rods without any sleep,
watching Achille cradled in the bow; he had read
the stars and known how far out they were and how deep
the black troughs were and how long it took them to lift,
but he owed it to his captain, who took him on
when he was stale-drunk. He had not noticed the swift.
“You know what we ketch last night? One mako size ‘ton,’”
using the patois for kingfish, blue albacore.
“Look by your foot.”
The kingfish, steel-blue and silver,
lay fresh at his feet, its eye like a globed window
ringing with cold, its rim the circular river
of the current that had carried him back, with the spoon
bait in its jaw, the ton was his deliverer,
now its cold eye in sunlight was blind as the moon.
A grey lens clouded the gaze of the albacore
that the mate had gaffed and clubbed. It lay there, gaping,
its blue flakes yielding the oceanic colour
of the steel-cold depth from which it had shot, leaping,
stronger than a stallion’s neck tugging its stake,
sounding, then bursting its trough, yawning at the lure
of a fishhook moon that was reeled in at daybreak
round the horizon’s wrist. Tired of slapping water,
the tail’s wedge had drifted into docility.
Achille had slept through the fight. Cradled at the bow
like a foetus, like a sea-horse, his memory
dimmed in the sun with the scales of the albacore.
“Look, land!” the mate said. Achille altered the rudder
to keep sideways in the deep troughs without riding
the crests, then he looked up at an old man-o’-war
tracing the herring-gulls with that endless gliding
that made it the sea-king.
“Them stupid gulls does fish
for him every morning. He himself don’t catch none,
white slaves for a black king.”
“When?” the mate said. “You wish.”
“Look him dropping.” Achille pointed. “Look at that son-
of-a-bitch stealing his fish for the whole focking week!”
A herring-gull climbed with silver bent in its beak
and the black magnificent frigate met the gull
halfway with the tribute; the gull dropped the mackerel
but the frigate-bird caught it before it could break
the water and soared.
“The black bugger beautiful,
though!” The mate nodded, and Achille felt the phrase lift
his heart as high as the bird whose wings wrote the word
“Afolabe,” in the letters of the sea-swift.
“The king going home,” he said as he and the mate
watched the frigate steer into that immensity
of seraphic space whose cumuli were a gate
dividing for a monarch entering his city.
II
Like parchment charts at whose corners four winged heads spout
jets of curled, favouring gusts, their cheeks like cornets
till the sails belly as the hull goes hard about
through seas as scrolled as dragons in ornate knots,
so strong gusts favoured the sail, until he could shout
from happiness, except that the mate would have heard.
This was the shout on which each odyssey pivots,
that silent cry for a reef, or familiar bird,
not the outcry of battle, not the tangled plots
of a fishnet, but when a wave rhymes with one’s grave,
a canoe with a coffin, once that parallel
is crossed, and cancels the line of master and slave.
Then an uplifted oar is stronger than marble
Caesar’s arresting palm, and a swift outrigger
fleeter than his galleys in its skittering bliss.
And I’m homing with him, Homeros, my nigger,
my captain, his breastplates bursting with happiness!
Let the dolphins like outriders escort him now
past Barrel of Beef, because he can see the white
balconies of the hotel dipping with the bow,
and, under his heel, the albacore’s silver weight.
III
And this was the hymn that Achille could not utter:
“Merci, Bon Dieu, pour la mer-a, merci la Vierge”—
“Thank God for the sea who is His Virgin Mother”;
“Qui ba moin force moin”— “Who gave me the privilege
of working for Him. Every bird is my brother”;
“Toutes gibiers c’est frères moin’, pis n’homme ni pour travail”—
“Because man must work like the birds until he die.”
He could see the heightening piles of the jetty
in front of the village hung with old tires, the mate
standing in his torn red shirt, the anchor ready,
then the conch-shell blowing and blowing its low note
like a ground dove’s. And way up, in his yam garden,
Philoctete planting green yam shoots heard the moaning sea,
and crossed his bare, caving chest, and asked God pardon
for his doubt. In the sharp shade of the pharmacy
Seven Seas heard it; he heard it before the dog
thudded its tail on the box and the fishermen
ran down the hot street to pull the tired pirogue.
Achille let the mate wave back. Then he saw Helen.
But he said nothing. He sculled with a single oar.
He watched her leave. The mate hoisted the albacore.
Chapter XXXI
I
A remorseful Saturday strolled through the village,
down littered pavements, the speakers gone from the street
whose empty shadows contradicted the mirage
of last night’s blockorama, but the systems’ beat
thudded in Achille’s head that replayed the echo,
as he washed the canoe, of a Marley reggae—
“Buffalo soldier.” Thud. “Heart of America.”
Thud-thud. Mop and pail. He could not rub it away.
Between the soft thud of surf the bass beat wider,
backing his work up with its monodic phrasing.
He saw the smoky buffalo, a black rider
under a sweating hat, his slitted eyes grazing
with the herds that drifted like smoke under low hills,
the wild Indian tents, the sky’s blue screen, and on it,
the black soldier turned his face, and it was Achille’s.
Then, pennons in reggae-motion, a white bonnet
in waves of heat like a sea-horse, leading them in
their last wide charge, the soft hooves pounding in his skull,
Red Indians bouncing to a West Indian rhythm,
to the cantering beat which, as he swayed, the scull
of the lance-like oar kept up like a metronome,
as, fist by fist, from the bow he pulled up anchor,
he saw, like palms on a ridge, the Red Indians come
with blurred hooves drumming to the music’s sweet anger,
while his own horse neighed and stamped, smelling a battle
in its own sweat. Achille eased the long Winchester
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