then ruddering straight. The dry sea-flakes whitened her
breast, her feathers thinned. Then, one dawn the day-star
rose slowly from the wrong place and it frightened her
because all the breakers were blowing from the wrong
east. She saw the horned island and uncurled her claws
with one frail cry, since swifts are not given to song,
and fluttered down to a beach, ejecting the seed
in grass near the sand. She nestled in dry seaweed.
In a year she was bleached bone. All of that motion
a pile of fragile ash from the fire of her will,
but the vine grew its own wings, out of the ocean
it climbed like the ants, the ancestors of Achille,
the women carrying coals after the dark door
slid over the hold. As the weed grew in odour
so did its strength at the damp root of the cedar,
where the flower was anchored at the mottled root
as a lizard crawled upwards, foot by sallow foot.
Chapter XLVIII
I
Under the thick leaves of the forest, there’s a life
more intricate than ours, with our vows of love,
that seethes under the spider’s veil on the wet leaf.
There’s a race of beetles whose nature is to bleed
the very source that nourishes them, till the host
is a rattling carapace; slowly they proceed
to a fecund partner, mounting the dry one’s ghost.
No, there is no such insect, but there are creatures
with two legs only, but with pincers in their eyes,
and arms that clinch and stroke us; they hang like leeches
on the greenest vines, from the veins of paradise.
And often, in the female, what may seem wilful
will seem like happiness, that spasmic ecstasy
which ejects the fatal acid, from which men fall
like a desiccated leaf; and this natural history
is not confined to the female of the species,
it all depends on who gains purchase, since the male,
like the dung-beetle storing up its dry feces,
can leave its exhausted mate hysterical, pale.
This is succession, it hides underneath a log,
it crawls on a shaken flower, and then both mates
embrace, and forgive; then the usual epilogue
occurs, where one lies weeping, which the other hates.
All I had gotten I deserved, I now saw this,
and though I had self-contempt for my own deep pain,
I lay drained in bed, like the same dry carapace
I had made of others, till my turn came again.
It could not lift the heavy agonies I felt
for the fatherless wanderings of my own sons,
but some sorrows are like stones, and they never melt,
though our tears rain and groove them, and the other ones,
the marriages dissolved like sand through the fingers,
the per mea culpa that had emptied all hope
from cupboards where some scent of happiness lingers
in camphor, in a lost hairpin crusted with soap;
the love I was good at seemed to have been only
the love of my craft and nature; yes, I was kind,
but with such certitude it made others lonely,
and with such bent industry it had made me blind.
It was a cry that called from the rock, some water
that the sea-swift crossed alone, and the calling stayed
like the hoarse echo in the conch; it called me from daughter
and son, it called me from my bed at dawn in darkness
like a fisherman walking towards the white noise
of paper, then in its hollow craft sets his oars.
It is what Achille learnt under the dark ceiling
of sea-grapes dripping with rain that puckered the sand:
that there is no error in love, of feeling
the wrong love for the wrong person. The still island
seasoned the wound with its salt; he scooped the bucket
and emptied the bilge with its leaves of manchineel,
thinking of the stitched, sutured wound that Philoctete
was given by the sea, but how the sea could heal
the wound also. And that was what Ma Kilman taught.
She glimpsed gods in the leaves, but, their features obscured
by the restless shade and light, those momentary
guardians, unlike the logwood thorns of her Lord,
or that golden host named for her mother, Mary,
thronging around her knees, with some soldiery crushed
by the weight of a different prayer, had lost their names
and, therefore, considerable presence. They had rushed
across an ocean, swifter than the swift, numerous
in loud migration as the African swallows
or bats that circle a cotton-tree at sunset
when their sight is strong and branches uphold the house
of heaven; so the deities swarmed in the thicket
of the grove, waiting to be known by name; but she
had never learnt them, though their sounds were within her,
subdued in the rivers of her blood. Erzulie,
Shango, and Ogun; their outlines fading, thinner
as belief in them thinned, so that all their power,
their roots, and their rituals were concentrated
in the whorled corolla of that stinking flower.
All the unburied gods, for three deep centuries dead,
but from whose lineage, as if her veins were their roots,
her arms ululated, uplifting the branches
of a tree carried across the Atlantic that shoots
fresh leaves as its dead trunk wallows on our beaches.
They were there. She called them. They had knotted the shouts
in her throat like a vine. They were the bats whose screeches
are shriller than what a dog hears. Ma Kilman heard
and saw them when their wings with crisscrossing stitches
blurred in the leaf-breaks, building a web overhead,
a net that entered her nerves, and her skin itches
as if flailed with a nettle. She foraged for some sign
of the stinging bush, and thrashed herself for the sin
of doubting their names before the cure could begin.
II
The wild, wire-haired, and generously featured
apotheosis of the caverned prophetess
began. Ma Kilman unpinned the black, red-berried
straw-hat with its false beads, lifted the press
of the henna wig, made of horsehair, from the mark
on her forehead. Carefully, she set both aside
on the coiled green follicles of moss in the dark
wood. Her hair sprung free as the moss. Ants scurried
through the wiry curls, barring, then passing each other
the same message with scribbling fingers and forehead
touching forehead. Ma Kilman bent hers forward,
and as her lips moved with the ants, her mossed skull heard
the ants talking the language of her great-grandmother,
the gossip of a distant market, and she understood,
the way we follow our thoughts without any language,
why the ants sent her this message to come to the wood
where the wound of the flower, its gangrene, its rage
festering for centuries, reeked with corrupted blood,
seeped the pustular drops instead of sunlit dew
into the skull, the brain of the earth, in the mind
ashamed of its flesh, its hair. On the varnished pew
of the church, she remembered the frantic messenger
that had paused, making desperate sign
s, its oars
lifted, but she had ignored the deaf-mute anger
of the insect signing a language that was not hers,
but now Ma Kilman, her hair wild, followed the vine
of the generations of silent black workers, their hands
passing stones so quickly against the white line
of breakers, with coal-baskets, with invisible sounds,
and the cries of the insects led her where she bowed
her bare head and unbuttoned the small bone buttons
of her church dress. Ma Kilman, in agony, bayed
up at the lights moving in the high leaves, like aeons,
like atoms, her dugs shifting like the sow’s in a shift
of cheap satin. She rubbed dirt in her hair, she prayed
in the language of ants and her grandmother, to lift
the sore from its roots in Philoctete’s rotting shin,
from the flower on his shin-blade, puckering inwards;
she scraped the earth with her nails, and the sun
put the clouds to its ears as her screech reeled backwards
to its beginning, from the black original cave
of the sibyl’s mouth, her howl made the emerald lizard
lift one clawed leg, remembering the sound.
Philoctete shook himself up from the bed of his grave,
and felt the pain draining, as surf-flowers sink through sand.
III
See her there, my mother, my grandmother, my great-great-
grandmother. See the black ants of their sons,
their coal-carrying mothers. Feel the shame, the self-hate
draining from all our bodies in the exhausted sleeping
of a rumshop closed Sunday. There was no difference
between me and Philoctete. One wound gibbers in the weeping
mouth of the sibyl, the obeah-woman, in the swell
of the huge white satin belly, the dark gust that bent her
limbs till she was a tree of snakes, the spidery sibyl
hanging in a sack from the cave at Cumae, the obeah
that possessed her that the priests considered evil
in their white satin frocks, because ants had lent her
their language, the flower that withered on the floor
of moss smelt sweet and spread its antipodal odour
from the seed of the swift; now through a hot meadow
of unnamed flowers, a large woman in a red-berried
hat is walking. She comes down the broken brown road
past the first houses, past the sun-stricken yards, the bed
of a rivulet, past the crunching goats, where the buried
lie under the cement stones at whose base the moss
is evergreen, then the galvanized fences of rusted
tin-covers, as if she had stopped off after Mass
to gossip with neighbours, like ants at the end of a log,
or the end of a street. Where Seven Seas, and a dog
coiled in the dial’s shade of the pharmacy,
closed for Sunday, senses her black, passing shape,
and the only sound is the hot, lazy drum of the sea.
Chapter XLIX
I
She bathed him in the brew of the root. The basin
was one of those cauldrons from the old sugar-mill,
with its charred pillars, rock pasture, and one grazing
horse, looking like helmets that have tumbled downhill
from an infantry charge. Children rang them with stones.
Wildflowers sprung in them when the dirt found a seam.
She had one in her back yard, close to the crotons,
agape in its crusted, agonized O: the scream
of centuries. She scraped its rusted scabs, she scoured
the mouth of the cauldron, then fed a crackling pyre
with palms and banana-trash. In the scream she poured
tin after kerosene tin, its base black from fire,
of seawater and sulphur. Into this she then fed
the bubbling root and leaves. She led Philoctete
to the gurgling lava. Trembling, he entered
his bath like a boy. The lime leaves leeched to his wet
knuckled spine like islands that cling to the basin
of the rusted Caribbean. An icy sweat
glazed his scalp, but he could feel the putrescent shin
drain in the seethe like sucked marrow, he felt it drag
the slime from his shame. She rammed him back to his place
as he tried climbing out with: “Not yet!” With a rag
sogged in a basin of ice she rubbed his squeezed face
the way boys enjoy their mother’s ritual rage,
and as he surrendered to her, the foul flower
on his shin whitened and puckered, the corolla
closed its thorns like the sea-egg. What else did it cure?
II
The bow leapt back to the palm of the warrior.
The yoke of the wrong name lifted from his shoulders.
His muscles loosened like those of a brown river
that was dammed with silt, and then silkens its boulders
with refreshing strength. His ribs thudded like a horse
cantering on a beach that bursts into full gallop
while a boy yanks at its rein with terrified “Whoas!”
The white foam unlocked his coffles, his ribbed shallop
broke from its anchor, and the water, which he swirled
like a child, steered his brow into the right current,
as calm as In God We Troust to that other world,
and his flexed palm enclosed an oar with the ident-
ical closure of a mouth around its own name,
the way a sea-anemone closes slyly
into a secrecy many mistake for shame.
Centuries weigh down the head of the swamp-lily,
its tribal burden arches the sea-almond’s spine,
in barracoon back yards the soul-smoke still passes,
but the wound has found her own cure. The soft days spin
the spittle of the spider in webbed glasses,
as she drenches the burning trash to its last flame,
and the embers steam and hiss to the schoolboys’ cries
when he’d weep in the window for their tribal shame.
A shame for the loss of words, and a language tired
of accepting that loss, and then all accepted.
That was why the sea stank from the frothing urine
of surf, and fish-guts reeked from the government shed,
and why God pissed on the village for months of rain.
But now, quite clearly the tears trickled down his face
like rainwater down a cracked carafe from Choiseul,
as he stood like a boy in his bath with the first clay’s
innocent prick! So she threw Adam a towel.
And the yard was Eden. And its light the first day’s.
III
And I felt the wrong love leaving me where I stood
on the café balcony facing the small square
and the tower with its banyan. I heard my blood
echoing the lifted leaves of the hills, and fear
leaving them like the rain; I felt her voice draining
from mine. A drizzle passed, but the sprinkled asphalt,
since the rain was shining and the sun was raining,
dried quickly with the smell of a singeing iron,
and whipped up the wet in sheets. My eyes were so clear
that I counted the barrack-arches on the Morne,
and traced the gauze of fine rain towards Soufrière
and imagined it cooling the bubbling pits of
the Malebolge, and beading its volcanic ferns
with clear, sliding drops. The roofs glittered with that love
which loses the other; clearer when it returns.
The
process, the proof of a self-healing island
whose every cove was a wound, from the sibyl’s art
renewed my rain-washed eyes. I felt an elation
opening and closing the valves of my panelled heart
like a book or a butterfly. The drying roofs
glittered with an interior light like Lucia’s
and my joy was pounding like a stallion’s hooves
on a morning beach scattering the crabbed wrestlers
near Helen’s wall to this thudding metre it loves.
Of course we had loved each other, but differently,
as we loved the island. My braceleted Circe
was gone, like the shining drizzle, far now, at sea,
but the Caribbean ringed me with infinite mercy
as it did the island. In her white pillared house
I looked down from the wrong height, not like Philoctete
limping among his yams and the yam flowers.
My love was common as dirt; brown sheep bayed at it,
as it sang an old hymn and scraped a yard with a broom,
a yard with a bunioned plum-tree and old tires
under the bunioned plum-tree. It was rusted from
heat like a galvanized roof, it writhed from blue fires
of garbage, hens pecked its eyes out, smoke made it cry
for a begging breadfruit, an old head-scarfed woman
in the bible of an open window, a boy
steered it like a bicycle rim; like an onion
it wept openly. In a shop, with its felt hat,
it smelt of old age. It was carrying Hector’s child,
and taking a break from the heat outside, it sat
fanning its parted thighs, and whenever it smiled,
it smiled for the island. It looked out on a street
of small, fretwork uprights. It yelped when a mongrel
skittered from a transport. All night, it sucked the sweet
of an Extra-Strong moon till it melted. The smell
of asphalt drying from rain was the breeze that shone
on Philoctete’s skin, opening her gate with its bell,
then turning to fit the hook, closing that question.
Chapter L
I
Latticework shadows diamonded the verandah,
crossing out plans for the Plunketts’ cruise. Brochures. Dates.
“Time, time,” swayed the brass bells of the allamanda.
“Cheap! Cheap!” the sparrows chirruped round the breakfast plates.
On their last trip home he’d been shaken by it all:
England cashing in on decayed gentility
like the sneering portraits in their three-star hotel,
Omeros Page 20
