enthrone yourself, if your sheet is a barber-chair,
a sail leaving harbour and a sail coming in,
the shadows of grape-leaves on sunlit verandahs
made me content. The sea-swift vanishes in rain,
and yet in its travelling all that the sea-swift does
it does in a circular pattern. Remember that, son.”
The surf was dark. The lights stuttered in the windows
along the empty beach, red and green lights tossed on
the cold harbour, and beyond them, like dominoes
with lights for holes, the black skyscrapers of Boston.
BOOK FIVE
Chapter XXXVII
I
I crossed my meridian. Rust terraces, olive trees,
the grey horns of a port. Then, from a cobbled corner
of this mud-caked settlement founded by Ulysses—
swifts, launched from the nesting sills of Ulissibona,
their cries modulated to “Lisbon” as the Mediterranean
aged into the white Atlantic, their flight, in reverse,
repeating the X of an hourglass, every twitter an aeon
from which a horizon climbed in the upturned vase.
A church clock spun back its helm. Turtleback alleys
crawled from the sea, not towards it, to resettle
in the courtyard under the olives, and a breeze
turned over the leaves to show their silvery metal.
Here, clouds read backwards, muffling the clash
of church bells in cotton. There, on an opposite wharf,
Sunday in a cream suit, with a grey horned moustache,
strolled past wooden crates, and the long-shadowed Sabbath
was no longer Lisbon but Port of Spain. There, time sifts
like grain from a jute sack under the crooning pigeons.
Sunday clicks open a gold watch, startling the swifts
from the opening eye of a tower, closes it, then slips the sun’s
pendulum back into its fob, patting it with a nod.
Sunday strolls past a warehouse whose iron-ringed door
exhales an odour of coffee as a reek of salt cod
slithers through the railings. Sunday is a widower
in an ice-cream suit, and a straw with a mourning band,
an old Portugee leathery as Portugal, via Madeira,
with a stalled watch for a compass. When he rewinds its hand
it raises an uproar of docks, mulatto clerks cowed
by jets of abuse from wine-barrelled wholesalers,
winches and cranes, black drivers cursing black loaders,
and gold-manacled vendors teasing the Vincentian sailors
folded over the hulls. Then not a single word, as
Saturday went home at one, except from the pigeons
and a boy rattling his stick along the rusted staves
of a railing, its bars caging him as he runs.
After that arpeggio, Sunday hears his own footsteps,
making centuries recede, the ebbing market in slaves
and sugar declining below the horizon. Then Sunday stops
to hear schooners thudding on overlapping wharves.
II
Across the meridian, I try seeing the other side,
past rusty containers, waves like welts from the lash
in a light as clear as oil from the olive seed.
Once the world’s green gourd was split like a calabash
by Pope Alexander’s decree. Spices, vanilla
sweetened this wharf; the grain of swifts would scatter
in their unchanging pattern, their cries no shriller
than they are now over the past, or ours, for that matter,
if our roles were reversed, and the sand in one half
replicated the sand in the other. Now I had come
to a place I felt I had known, an antipodal wharf
where my forked shadow swayed to the same brass pendulum.
Yes, but not as one of those pilgrims whose veneration carried
the salt of their eyes up the grooves of a column
to the blue where forked swifts navigated. Far from it; instead,
I saw how my shadow detached itself from them
when it disembarked on the wharf through a golden haze
of corn from another coast. My throat was scarred
from a horizon that linked me to others, when our eyes
lowered to the cobbles that climbed to the castle yard,
when the coins of the olives showed us their sovereign’s face.
My shadow had preceded me. How else could it recognize
that light to which it was attached, this port where Europe
rose with its terrors and terraces, slope after slope?
III
A bronze horseman halts at a wharf, his green-bronze
cloak flecked with white droppings, his wedged visor
shading the sockets’ hyphenating horizons,
his stare fixed like a helm. We had no such erections
above our colonial wharves, our erogenous zones
were not drawn to power, our squares shrank the directions
of the Empire’s plazas. Above us, no stallions paw
the sky’s pavement to strike stars from the stones,
no sword is pointed to recapture the port of Genoa.
There the past is an infinite Sunday. It’s hot, or it rains;
the sun lifts the sheets of the rain, and the gutters
run out. For those to whom history is the presence
of ruins, there is a green nothing. No bell tower utters
its flotilla of swallows memorizing an alphabet,
no cobbles crawl towards the sea. We think of the past
as better forgotten than fixed with stony regret.
Here, a castle in the olives rises over the tiered roofs
of crusted tile but, like the stone Don in the opera,
is the ghost of itself. Over the flagstones, hooves
clop down from the courtyard, stuttering pennons appear
from the mouths of arches, and the past dryly grieves
from the O’s of a Roman aqueduct; silver cuirasses
flash in the reversible olives, their silvery leaves,
and twilight ripens the municipal canvases,
where, one knee folded, like a drinking deer, an admiral
with a grey horned moustache and foam collar proffers a gift
of plumed Indians and slaves. The wharves of Portugal
were empty as those of the islands. The slate pigeons lift
from the roof of a Levantine warehouse, the castle in the trees
is its own headstone. Yet, once, Alexander’s meridian
gave half a gourd to Lisbon, the seeds of its races,
and half to Imperial Spain. Now Sunday afternoon passes
the empty cafés, their beads hanging like rosaries,
as shawled fado singers sob in turn to their mandolins
while a cobbled lane climbs like a tortoise, and tiredly raises
its head of a pope at the limp sails on washing lines.
Chapter XXXVIII
I
In scorched summer light, from the circle of Charing Cross,
he arose with the Underground’s grit and its embers of sparrows
in a bargeman’s black greatcoat, clutching in one scrofulous
claw his brown paper manuscript. The nose, like a pharos,
bulbed from his cragged face, and the beard under it was
foam that exploded into the spray burst of eyebrows.
On the verge of collapse, the fallen sails of his trousers
were upheld by a rope. In the barges of different shoes
he flapped towards the National. The winch of his voice,
a fog still in its throat, barged through the queues
at the newspaper kiosks, then changed gears with the noise
of red double-decke
rs embarking on chartered views
from pigeon-stirred Trafalgar; it broke off the icing
from wedding-cake London. Gryphons on their ridge
of sandstone snarled because it had carried the cries in
the Isle of Dogs running over Westminster Bridge.
Today it would anchor in the stone waves of the entrance
of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. There, in tiered sunshine,
the black sail collapsed, face sunward with both hands
crossed over the shop-paper volume bound with grey twine.
He looked like a heap of slag-coal crusting the tiers
with their summering tourists. Eyes shut, the frayed lips
chewed the breeze, the beard curled like the dog’s ears
of his turned-down Odyssey, but Omeros was naming the ships
whose oars spidered soundlessly over the sun-webbed calm
behind his own lashes. Then, suddenly, a raging sparrow
of a church-warden bobbed down the steps. It picked one arm.
The bargeman huddled. It screeched. It yanked an elbow,
then kicked him with polished pumps, and a curse as
Greek to the choleric cleric as one might imagine
sprayed the spluttering soutane. It showed him the verses
framed at the entrance announcing this Sunday’s lesson
in charity, etc. Then, like a dromedary, over the sands
of the scorching pavement, the hump began to press on
back to the river. The sparrow, rubbing both hands,
nodded, and chirruped up the steps back to its sanctuary,
where, dipping one claw in the font, it vanished inside
the webbed stone. The bargeman tacked towards his estuary
of light. It was summer. London rustled with pride.
II
He curled up on a bench underneath the Embankment wall.
He saw London gliding with the Thames around its neck
like a barge which an old brown horse draws up a canal
if its yoke is Time. From here he could see the dreck
under the scrolled skirts of statues, the grit in the stone lions’
eyes; he saw under everything an underlying grime
that itched in the balls of rearing bronze stallions,
how the stare of somnolent sphinxes closed in time
to the swaying bells of “cities all the floure”
petalling the spear-railed park where a couple suns
near the angled shade of All-Hallows by the Tower,
as the tinkling Thames drags by in its ankle-irons,
while the ginkgo’s leaves flexed their fingers overhead.
He mutters its fluent alphabet, the peaked A of a spire,
the half-vowels of bridges, down to the crumpled Z
of his overcoat draping a bench in midsummer’s fire.
He read the inverted names of boats in their element,
he saw the tugs chirring up a devalued empire
as the coins of their wake passed the Houses of Parliament.
But the shadows keep multiplying from the Outer
Provinces, their dialects light as the ginkgo’s leaf, their
fingers plucking their saris as wind picks at water,
and the statues raising objections; he sees a wide river
with its landing of pier-stakes flooding Westminster’s
flagstones, and traces the wake of dugouts in the frieze
of a bank’s running cornice, and whenever the ginkgo stirs
the wash of far navies settles in the bargeman’s eyes.
A statue swims upside down, one hand up in response
to a question raised in the House, and applause rises
from the clapping Thames, from benches in the leaves.
And the sunflower sets after all, retracting its irises
with the bargeman’s own, then buds on black, iron trees
as a gliding fog hides the empires: London, Rome, Greece.
III
Who decrees a great epoch? The meridian of Greenwich.
Who doles out our zeal, and in which way lies our
hope? In the cobbles of sinister Shoreditch,
in the widening rings of Big Ben’s iron flower,
in the barges chained like our islands to the Thames.
Where is the alchemical corn and the light it yields?
Where, in which stones of the Abbey, are incised our names?
Who defines our delight? St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
After every Michaelmas, its piercing soprano steeple
defines our delight. Within whose palatable vault
will echo the Saints’ litany of our island people?
St. Paul’s salt shaker, when we are worth their salt.
Stand by the tilted crosses of well-quiet Glen-da-Lough.
Follow the rook’s crook’d finger to the ivied grange.
As black as the rook is, it comes from a higher stock.
Who screams out our price? The crows of the Corn Exchange.
Where are the pleasant pastures? A green baize-table.
Who invests in our happiness? The Chartered Tour.
Who will teach us a history of which we too are capable?
The red double-decker’s view of the Bloody Tower.
When are our brood, like the sparrows, a public nuisance?
When they screech at the sinuous swans on the Serpentine.
The swans are royally protected, but in whose hands
are the black crusts of our children? In the pointing sign
under the harps of the willows, to the litter of Margate Sands.
What has all this to do with the price of fish, our salary
tidally scanned with the bank-rate by waxworks tellers?
Where is the light of the world? In the National Gallery.
In Palladian Wren. In the City that can buy and sell us
the packets of tea stirred with our crystals of sweat.
Where is our sublunar peace? In that sickle sovereign
peeling the gilt from St. Paul’s onion silhouette.
There is our lunar peace: in the glittering grain
of the coined estuary, our moonlit, immortal wheat,
its white sail cresting the gradual swell of the Downs,
startling the hare from the pillars on Salisbury Plain,
sharpening the grimaces of thin-lipped market towns,
whitewashing the walls of Brixton, darkening the grain
when coal-shadows cross it. Dark future down darker street.
Chapter XXXIX
I
The great headstones lifted like the keels of curraghs
from Ireland’s groundswell and spray foamed on the walls
of the broken abbey. That silver was the lake’s,
a salver held by a tonsured hill. The old well’s
silence increased as gravel was crunched by pilgrims
following the monks’ footpath. Silence was in flower.
It widened the furrows like a gap between hymns,
if that pause were protracted hour after hour
by century-ringed oaks, by a square Celtic cross,
by wafers of snowdrops from the day webbed mortar
had cinched the stone to the whisk of a sorrel horse
grazing its station. In it, a paper aspen
rustled its missal. Its encircling power
lifted the midges in vertiginous Latin,
then sailed a rook into the slit of a tower
like a card in a post-box. It waxed a tea-van,
draped a booth with sweaters, then it crossed the dry road
to hear a brook talk the old language of Ireland.
There it filled a bucket and carried the clear load
for the sorrel to nuzzle with ruffling nostrils.
The weight of the place, its handle, its ancient name
for “wood with a lake,” or “abbey with hooded hills,”
rooted in the bucket’s clang, echoed the old shame
of disenfranchisement. I had no oasis,
no pebbled language to drink from like a calm horse
or pilgrim lapping up soul-watering places;
the grass was brighter with envy, then my remorse
was a clouding sun. The sorrel swaying its whisk,
the panes of blue sky in the abbey were all set
in a past as old as Glen-da-Lough’s obelisk,
when alder and aspen aged in one alphabet.
The child-voiced brook repeated History’s lesson
as an elder clapped its leaves in approbation
until others swayed to the old self-possession
for which faith is known; but which faith, in a nation
split by a glottal scream, by a sparrow’s chirrup,
where a prayer incised in a cross, a Celtic rune
could send the horse circling with empty stirrup
from a sniper’s bolt? Here, from this abbey’s ruin,
if the rook flew north with its funereal caw,
far from this baptismal font, this silver weir,
too high for inspection as it crossed the border,
it would see a street that ended in wreaths of wire
while a hearse with drizzling lights waits for an order
in a sharp accent, making the black boots move on
in scraping syllables, the gun on its shoulder,
still splitting heirs, dividing a Shem from a Shaun,
an Ireland no wiser as it got older.
II
Though all its wiry hedgerows startle the spirit,
when the ancient letters rise to a tinker’s spoon,
banging a saucepan, those fields which they inherit
hide stones white-knuckled with hatred. A pitted moon
mounted the green pulpit of Sugar Loaf Mountain
in its wax-collar. Along a yew-guarded road,
a cloud hung from a branch in the orange hour,
like a shirt that was stained with poetry and with blood.
The wick of the cypress charred. Glen-da-Lough’s tower.
III
I leant on the mossed embankment just as if he
bloomed there every dusk with eye-patch and tilted hat,
rakish cane on one shoulder. Along the Liffey,
the mansards dimmed to one indigo silhouette;
then a stroke of light brushed the honey-haired river,
and there, in black cloche hat and coat, she scurried faster
to the changing rose of a light. Anna Livia!
Omeros Page 16
