Omeros
Page 17
Muse of our age’s Omeros, undimmed Master
and true tenor of the place! So where was my gaunt,
cane-twirling flaneur? I blest myself in his voice,
and climbed up the wooden stairs to the restaurant
with its brass spigots, its glints, its beer-brightened noise.
“There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s stream”
was one of the airs Maud Plunkett played, from Moore
perhaps, and I murmured along with them; its theme,
as each felted oar lifted and dipped with hammer-
like strokes, was that of an adoring sunflower
turning bright hair to her Major. And then I saw him.
The Dead were singing in fringed shawls, the wick-low shade
leapt high and rouged their cold cheeks with vermilion
round the pub piano, the air Maud Plunkett played,
rowing her with felt hammer-strokes from my island
to one with bright doors and cobbles, and then Mr. Joyce
led us all, as gently as Howth when it drizzles,
his voice like sun-drizzled Howth, its violet lees
of moss at low tide, where a dog barks “Howth! Howth!” at
the shawled waves, and the stone I rubbed in my pocket
from the Martello brought one-eyed Ulysses
to the copper-bright strand, watching the mail-packet
butting past the Head, its wake glittering like keys.
Chapter XL
I
A snail gnawing a leaf, the mail-packet nibbles
the Aegean coast, its wake a caterpillar’s
accordion. Then, becalmed by its own ripples,
sticks like a butterfly to its branch. The pillars,
the lizard-crossed terraces on the ruined hills
are as quiet as the sail. Storks crest the columns.
Gulls chalk the blue enamel and a hornet drills
the pink blossoms of the oleander and hums
at its work. In white villages with cracked plaster
walls, shawled women lean quietly on their shadows,
remembering statues in their alabaster
manhood, when their oiled hair was parted like the crow’s
folded wings. The flutes in the square and the sea-lace
of bridal lilac; sawing fiddles that outlast
the cicadas. On the scorched deck Odysseus
hears the hill music through the wormholes of the mast.
The sail clings like a butterfly to the elbow
of an olive branch. A bride on her father’s arm
scared of her future. On its tired shadow,
the prow turns slowly, uncertain of its aim.
He peels his sunburnt skin in maps of grey parchment
which he scrolls absently between finger and thumb.
The crew stare like statues at that feigned detachment
whose heart, in its ribs, thuds like the galley-slaves’ drum.
II
Hunched on their oars, they smile; “This is we Calypso,
Captain, who treat we like swine, you ain’t seeing shore.
Let this sun burn you black and blister your lips so
it hurt them to give orders, fuck you and your war.”
The mattock rests, idle. No oar lifts a finger.
Blisters flower on palms. The bewildered trireme
is turning the wrong way, like the cloud-eyed singer
whose hand plucked the sea’s wires, back towards the dream
of Helen, back to that island where their hunched spine
bristled and they foraged the middens of Circe,
when her long white arm poured out the enchanting wine
and they bucked in cool sheets. “Cap’n, boy? Beg mercy
o’ that breeze for a change, because sometimes your heart
is as hard as that mast, you dream of Ithaca,
you pray to your gods. May they be as far apart
from your wandering as ours in Africa.
Island after island passing. Still we ain’t home.”
The boatswain lifted the mattock, and the metre
of the long oars slowly settled on a rhythm
as the prow righted. He saw a limestone palace
over his small harbour, he saw a sea-swift skim
the sun-harped water, and felt the ant of a breeze
crossing his forehead, and now the caterpillar’s
strokes of the oars lifted the fanning chrysalis
of the full sails as a wake was sheared by the bow.
The quick mattock beat like the heart of Odysseus;
and if you have seen a butterfly steer its shadow
across a hot cove at noon or a rigged canoe
head for the horns of an island, then you will know
why a harbour-mouth opens with joy, why black crew,
slaves, and captain at the end of their enterprise
shouted in response as they felt the troughs lifting
and falling with their hearts, why rowers closed their eyes
and prayed they were headed home. They knew the drifting
Caribbean currents from Andros to Castries
might drag them to Margarita or Curaçao,
that the nearer home, the deeper our fears increase,
that no house might come to meet us on our own shore,
and fishermen fear this as much as Ulysses
until they see the single eye of the lighthouse
winking at them. Then the strokes match heartbeat to oar,
their blistered palms weeping for palms or olive trees.
III
And Istanbul’s spires, each dome a burnoosed Turk,
swathed like a Saracen, with the curved scimitar
of a crescent moon over it, or the floating muck
of a lowering Venice probed by a gondolier,
rippling lines repeating some pilgrim’s journals,
the weight of cities that I found so hard to bear;
in them was the terror of Time, that I would march
with columns at twilight, only to disappear
into a past whose history echoed the arch
of bridges sighing over their ancient canals
for a place that was not mine, since what I preferred
was not statues but the bird in the statue’s hair.
The honeyed twilight cupped in long, shadowed squares,
the dripping dungeons, the idiot dukes, were all
redeemed by the creamy strokes of a Velázquez,
like the scraping cellos in concentration camps,
with art next door to the ovens, the fluting veil
of smoke soaring with Schubert? The cracked glass of Duchamp’s
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors; did Dada
foresee the future of Celan and Max Jacob
as part of the cosmic midden? What my father
spiritedly spoke of was that other Europe
of mausoleum museums, the barber’s shelf
of The World’s Great Classics, with a vanity whose
spires and bells punctually pardoned itself
in the absolution of fountains and statues,
in writhing, astonishing tritons; their cold noise
brimming the basin’s rim, repeating that power
and art were the same, from some Caesar’s eaten nose
to spires at sunset in the swift’s half-hour.
Tell that to a slave from the outer regions
of their fraying empires, what power lay in the work
of forgiving fountains with naiads and lions.
Chapter XLI
I
Service. Under my new empire. The Romans
acquired Greek slaves as aesthetics instructors
of their spoilt children, many from obscure islands
of their freshly acquired archipelago. But those tutors,
curly-haired, served a state without equestrians
tiered only on wealth, and eaten with prejudice
from its pillared base, the Athenian demos,
its demos demonic and its ocracy crass,
corrupting the blue-veined marble with its disease,
stillborn as a corpse, for all those ideals went cold
in the heat of its hate. And not only in tense
Southern towns and plantations, where it often killed
the slaves it gave Roman names for dumb insolence,
small squares with Athenian principles and pillars
maintained by convicts and emigrants who had fled
persecution and gave themselves fasces with laws
to persecute slaves. A wedding-cake Republic.
Its domes, museums, its ornate institutions,
its pillared façade that looked down on the black
shadows that they cast as an enraging nuisance
which, if it were left to its Solons, with enough luck
would vanish from its cities, just as the Indians
had vanished from its hills. Leaves on an autumn rake.
II
I re-entered my reversible world. Its opposite
lay in the autumnal lake whose trees kept still
perfectly, but where my disembodied trunk split
along the same line of reflection that halved Achille,
since men’s shadows are not pieces moved by a frown,
by the same hand that opens the willow’s fan to the light,
indifferent to who lifts us up once we are put down,
fixed in hierarchical postures, pawn, bishop, knight,
nor are we simply chameleons, self-dyeing our skins
to each background. The widening mind can acquire
the hues of a foliage different from where it begins
in the low hills of Gloucester running with smokeless fire.
There Iroquois flashed in the Indian red, in the sepias
and ochres of leaf-mulch, the mind dyed from the stain
on their sacred ground, the smoke-prayer of the tepees
pushed back by the Pilgrim’s pitchfork. All over again,
diaspora, exodus, when the hills in their piebald ranges
move like their ponies, the tribes moving like trees
downhill to the lowland, a flag-fading smoke-wisp estranges
them. First men, then the forests. Until the earth
lies barren as the dusty Dakotas. Men take their colours
as the trees do from the native soil of their birth,
and once they are moved elsewhere, entire cultures
lose the art of mimicry, and then, where the trees were,
the fir, the palm, the olive, the cedar, a desert place
widens in the heart. This is the first wisdom of Caesar,
to change the ground under the bare soles of a race.
This was the groan of the autumn wind in the tamaracks
which I shared through Catherine’s body, coming in waves
through the leaves of the Shawmut, the ochre hands of the Aruacs.
Here too, at Concord, the contagious vermilion
advanced with the maples, like red poinciana
under the fort of that lion-headed island,
spreading the stain on a map under the banner
of a cloud-wigged George. Under the planks of its bridge
the mossed logs lay with black shakos like dead Hussars.
The shot heard round the world entered the foliage
of Plunkett’s redoubt, when the arc of an empire was
flung over both colonies, wider than the seine
a fisherman hurls over a bay at sunrise,
but all colonies inherit their empire’s sin,
and these, who broke free of the net, enmeshed a race.
Cicadas exchanged musket-volleys in the wood.
A log held fire. To orders from an insane
cloud, battalions of leaves kept falling in their blood.
III
Flare fast and fall, Indian flags of October!
The blue or grey waves riding in Boston Harbor,
the tide like the cavalry, with its streaming mane
and its cirrus-pennons; ripen the grape-arbour
with its thick trellis; redden the sumac from Maine
to the Finger Lakes, let the hornet keep drilling
forts of firewood and mitred Hussars stand by
in scarlet platoons, signed on for George’s shilling,
let aspens lift their aprons and flutter goodbye,
let the earth fold over from the Pilgrim’s sober
plough, raise pitchforks to scatter your daughters out of
the hayloft, erect your white steeple over
the cowed pews, lift the Book, whose wrinkled cover
is Leviathan’s hide; damn them and their love, or
hurl the roped lance in the heart of Jehovah!
That was Catherine’s terror; the collar, the hay-rake,
the evening hymn in the whalehouse, its starched ribs
white as a skeleton. The nightmare cannot wake
from a Sunday where the mouse-claw of ivy grips
the grooved brick of colleges, while a yellow tractor
breaks the Sabbath and the alchemical plateau
of the Transcendental New England character,
sifting wit from the chaff, the thorn out of Thoreau,
the mess from Emerson, where a benefactor
now bronzed in his unshifting principles can show
us that any statue is a greater actor
than its original by its longer shadow.
Privileges did not separate me, instead
they linked me closer to them by that mental chain
whose eyes interlocked with mine, as if we all stood
at a lectern or auction block. Their condition
the same, without manacles. The chains were subtler,
but they were still hammered out of the white-hot forge
that made every captor a blacksmith. The river
had been crossed, but the chain-links of eyes in each face
still flashed submission or rage; I saw distance
in them, and it wearied me; I saw what Achille
had seen and heard: the metal eyes joining their hands
to wrists adept with an oar or a “special skill.”
Chapter XLII
I
Acres of synonymous lights, black battery cells
and terminals coiling with traffic, winked out. Sunrise
reddened the steel lake. Downstairs, in the hotel’s
Canadian-fall window, a young Polish waitress with eyes
wet as new coal and a pageboy haircut was pouring him
coffee, the maples in glass as yellow as orange juice.
Her porcelain wrist tilted, filling his gaze to the brim.
He hoped adoration unnerved her; the sensible shoes
skirting the bare tables, her hand aligning the service
with finical clicks. As if it had tapped her twice
on the back for her papers, she turned with that nervous
smile of the recent immigrant that borders on tears.
A Polish Sunday enclosed it. A Baroque square, its age
patrolled by young soldiers, the flag of their sagging regime
once bright as her lipstick, the consonants of a language
crunched by their boot soles. In it was the scream
of a kettle leaving a freightyard, then the soft farms
with horses and willows nodding past a train window,
the queues in the drizzle. Then the forms
where her name ran over the margin, then a passport photo
where her scared face waited when she opened its door.
She was part of that pitiless fiction so common now
that it carried her wintry beauty into Canada,
it lined
her eyelashes with the snow’s blue shadow,
it made her slant cheekbones flash like the cutlery
in the hope of a newer life. At the cashier’s machine
she stood like a birch at the altar, and, very quietly,
snow draped its bridal lace over the raven’s-wing sheen.
Her name melted in mine like flakes on a river
or a black pond in which the wind shakes packets of milk.
When she stood with the cheque, I tried reading the glow
of brass letters on her blouse. Her skin, shaded in silk,
smelt fresh as a country winter before the first snow.
Snow brightened the linen, the pepper, salt domes, the gables
of the napkin, silencing Warsaw, feathering quiet Cracow;
then the raven’s wing flew again between the white tables.
There are days when, however simple the future, we do not go
towards it but leave part of life in a lobby whose elevators
divide and enclose us, brightening digits that show
exactly where we are headed, while a young Polish waitress
is emptying an ashtray, and we are drawn to a window
whose strings, if we pull them, widen an emptiness.
We yank the iron-grey drapes, and the screeching pulleys
reveal in the silence not fall in Toronto
but a city whose language was seized by its police,
that other servitude Nina Something was born into,
where under gun-barrel chimneys the smoke holds its voice
till it rises with hers. Zagajewski. Herbert. Milosz.
II
November. Sober month. The leaves’ fling was over.
Willows harped on the Charles, their branches would blacken.
Drizzles gusted on bridges, lights came on earlier,
twigs clawed the clouds, the hedges turned into bracken,
the sky raced like a shaggy wolf with a rabbit pinned
in its jaws, its fur flying with the first snow,
then gnawed at the twilight with its incisors skinned;
the light bled, flour flew past the grey window.
I saw Catherine Weldon running in the shawled wind.
III
The ghost dance of winter was about to start.
The snowflakes pressed their patterns on the crusting panes,
lakes hardened with ice, a lantern lit the wolf’s heart,
the grass hibernated under obdurate pines,
light sank in the earth as the growing thunderhead
in its army blanket travelled the Great Plains,
with lightning lance, flour-faced, crow-bonneted,