Omeros (18 page)

                                                     “Warwick’s son,” she said.

“Nature’s gentleman.” His vine-leaves haloed her now.

II

I left her on the verandah with her white hair,

to buckets clanging in the African twilight

where two girls at the standpipe collected water,

and children with bat-like cries seemed trapped behind bright

galvanized fences, and down the thickening road

as bulbs came on behind curtains, the shadows crossed

me, signing their black language. I felt transported,

past shops smelling of cod to a place I had lost

in the open book of the street, and could not find.

It was another country, whose excitable

gestures I knew but could not connect with my mind,

like my mother’s amnesia; untranslatable

answers accompanied these actual spirits

who had forgotten me as much as I, too, had

forgotten a continent in the narrow streets.

Now, in night’s unsettling noises, what I heard

enclosed my skin with an older darkness. I stood

in a village whose fires flickered in my head

with tongues of a speech I no longer understood,

but where my flesh did not need to be translated;

then I heard patois again, as my ears unclogged.

The bay was black in starlight. The reek of the beach

was rimmed with a white noise. The beam of the lighthouse

revolved over trees and skipped what it couldn’t reach.

The fronds were threshing over the lit bungalows,

and a breaker arched with a sound like tearing cloth

ripped down the stitched seam, a sound Mama made sewing

when, in disgust, she’d rip the stitches with her mouth.

As I closed the door I felt the surf-noise going

far out back to sea, from each window, one by one,

and yet, inside the rooms was this haze of motion,

above the taut sheet still fragrant from the iron,

and I watched, enlarged by the lamp, a stuttering moth.

III

The moth’s swift shadow rippled on an emerald

lagoon that clearly showed the submerged geography

of the reef’s lilac shelf, where a lateen sail held

for Gros Îlet village like a hooked butterfly

on its flowering branch: a canoe, nearing the island.

Soundless, enormous breakers foamed across the pane,

then broke into blinding glare. Achille raised his hand

from the drumming rudder, then watched our minnow plane

melt into cloud-coral over the horned island.

BOOK FOUR

Chapter XXXIII

I

With the stunned summer going, with the barrel-organ

oaks, the fiddles of gnats, with the surrendering groan

of a carousel by Long Island Sound, the lake with a moon

adrift there in daylight like an unstrung balloon,

with the cold in your palm like a statue’s on

your girlfriend’s knee, from the wooden croak of a loon

from the summer-theatre, the picnic tents of New London,

by the tidal rock-pools, from the broiled prawn

of faces in salad landscapes, to the folding accordion

of fin-de-siècle wave swells, the circuses came down

along the coast of my new empire; the carousels stiffen,

and pegs are pulled from grass that is going brown

in the early cold. They live by an unceasing

self-deceit in an eternal republic, by the vernal sin

in the blue distance, as summer widens its increasing

pardon. Clouds unbutton their bodices,

and butterflies sail in their yellow odysseys,

and shadows everywhere wear the same size.

But the horizon is closer as the awnings fold

and the flags and guywires are pulled down, and the field

is left to its broad scar. Now the bleachers are too cold

except for stubborn lovers who think that the night

will say its stars for the first time. It is late

for us to measure our footfall. And the dark slate

Sound that is scratched with chalk lines, the lighthouses

squinting in the fog, the slowly buttoned blouses

make us walk slowly, Mayakovsky’s clouds in trousers.

From the provincial edge of an atlas, from the hem

of a frayed empire, a man stops. Not for another anthem

trembling over the water—he has learnt three of them—

but for that faint sidereal drone interrupted by the air

gusting over black water, or so that he can hear

the surf in the pores of wet sand wince and pucker.

II

Back in a Brookline of brick and leaf-shaded lanes

I lived like a Japanese soldier in World War

II, on white rice and spare ribs, and, just for a change,

spare ribs and white rice, until the Chinese waiter

setting my corner-table muttered my order,

halfheartedly flashing the bedragonned menu.

Like a Jap soldier on his Pacific island

who prefers solitude to the hope of rescue,

I could blend with the decor of its bamboo grove

and read my paper in peace. I knew they all knew

about my abandonment in the war of love:

the busboys, the couples, their eyes turned from the smell

of failure, while my own eyes had turned Japanese

looking for a letter, for its rescuing sail,

till I grew tired, like wounded Philoctetes,

the hermit who did not know the war was over,

or refused to believe it. The late summer light

squared the carpet, moved from the floor to the sofa,

moved from the sofa, which turned to a hill at night.

But even at night the heat stayed in the concrete

pavements while the fan whirred its steel blades like a palm’s,

as I brushed imaginary sand off from my feet,

turned off the light, and pillowed her waist with my arms,

then tossed on my back. The fan turned, rustling the sheet.

I reached from my raft and reconnected the phone.

In its clicking oarlocks, it idled, my one oar.

But castaways make friends with the sea; living alone

they learn to survive on fistfuls of rainwater

and windfall sardines. But a house which is unblest

by familiar voices, startled by the clatter

of cutlery in a sink with absence for its guest,

as it drifts, its rooms intact, in doldrum summer,

is less a mystery than the
Marie Celeste.

Hot concrete pavements, storefronts with watery glass,

in supermarkets her back steering a basket,

same hair, same shoulders, same compact, cynical ass

rounding the aisle, afraid of things I might ask it.

Her wrist yanking the trolley cord and the trolley

gliding with its bell to a stop, as she gets off

to her fixed appointments. Down some chic side-alley

with its bakery and boutiques, the dead-end of love—

all taken in stride as the car picks up slowly

and passes her confident hair, gathering speed,

past faces frowning at the sunlight as she,

walking backwards with the crowd, begins to recede

with shapes on a wharf; or her elbow in the shade

of a florist’s awning, that, as I grew closer

to the sprinkled shelves, disappeared like a lizard,

while I stood there, in the aisles of Vallombrosa,

drugged by the perfume of flowers I didn’t need.

Then, back to the sunstruck pavement, where passers-by

avoided my dewy gaze with a cautious nod,

when they were the busy, transparent ones, not I.

I had nowhere to go but home. Yet I was lost.

Like them I could jiggle keys in purse or pocket.

Like them I fiddled with the door, hoping a ghost

would rise from her chair and help me to unlock it.

III

House of umbrage, house of fear,

house of multiplying air

House of memories that grow

like shadows out of Allan Poe

House where marriages go bust,

house of telephone and lust

House of caves, behind whose door

a wave is crouching with its roar

House of toothbrush, house of sin,

of branches scratching, “Let me in!”

House whose rooms echo with rain,

of wrinkled clouds with Onan’s stain

House that creaks, age fifty-seven,

wooden earth and plaster heaven

House of channelled CableVision

whose dragonned carpets sneer derision

Unlucky house that I uncurse

by rites of genuflecting verse

House I unhouse, house that can harden

as cold as stones in the lost garden

House where I look down the scorched street

but feel its ice ascend my feet

I do not live in you, I bear

my house inside me, everywhere

until your winters grow more kind

by the dancing firelight of mind

where knobs of brass do not exist,

whose doors dissolve with tenderness

House that lets in, at last, those fears

that are its guests, to sit on chairs

feasts on their human faces, and

takes pity simply by the hand

shows her her room, and feels the hum

of wood and brick becoming home.

Chapter XXXIV

I

The Crow horseman pointed his lance at the contrail

high over the Dakotas, over Colorado’s

palomino mountains; shapes so edged with detail

I mistook them for lakes. Under the crumbling floes

of a gliding Arctic were dams large as our cities,

and the icy contrails scratched on the Plexiglas

hung like white comets left by their seraphic skis.

Clouds whitened the Crow horseman and I let him pass

into the page, and I saw the white waggons move

across it, with printed ruts, then the railroad track

and the arrowing interstate, as a lost love

narrowed from epic to epigram. Our contracts

were torn like the clouds, like treaties with the Indians,

but with mutual treachery. Through the window,

the breakers burst like the spray on Pacific pines,

and Manifest Destiny was behind me now.

My face frozen in the ice-cream paradiso

of the American dream, like the Sioux in the snow.

II

The wandering smoke below me was like Achille’s

hallucination. Lances, the shattering silver

of cavalry fording a stream, as oxen-wheels

grooved the Republic towards her. A spike hammered

into the heart of their country as the Sioux looked on.

The spike for the Union Pacific had entered

my heart without cheers for her far gentler weapon.

I could not believe it was over any more

than they did. Their stunned, anachronistic faces

moved through the crowd, or stood, with the same expression

that I saw in my own when I looked through the glass,

for a land that was lost, a woman who was gone.

III

The elegies of summer sighed in the marram,

to bending Virgilian reeds. Languid meadows

raised their natural fly-screens around the Parkin farm.

Larks arrowed from the goldenrod into soft doors

of enclosing thunderheads, and the rattled maize

threshed like breaking surf to Catherine Weldon’s ears.

Ripe grain alchemized the pheasant, the pelt of mice

nibbling the stalks was unctuous as the beaver’s,

but the sky was scribbled with the prophetic cries

of multiplying hawks. The grass by the rivers

shone silvery green whenever its nub of felt

was chafed between the thumb and finger of the wind;

rainbow trout leapt arching into canoes and filled

their bark bodies while a clear wake chuckled behind

the gliding hunter. An immensity of peace

across which the thunderheads rumbled like waggons,

to which the hawk held the rights, a rolling excess

from knoll and pasture concealed the wound of her son’s

death from a rusty nail. It returned the image

when the goldenrod quivered, from a golden past:

Flushed wings. A shot. Her husband hoisting a partridge,

still flapping, towards her. That summer did not last,

but time wasn’t treacherous. What would not remain

was not only the season but the tribes themselves,

as Indian summer raced the cloud-galloping plain,

when their dust would blow like maize from the furrowed shelves,

which the hawks prophesied to mice cowering in grain.

Chapter XXXV

I

“Somewhere over there,” said my guide, “the Trail of Tears

started.” I leant towards the crystalline creek. Pines

shaded it. Then I made myself hear the water’s

language around the rocks in its clear-running lines

and its small shelving falls with their eddies, “Choctaws,”

“Creeks,” “Choctaws,” and I thought of the Greek revival

carried past the names of towns with columned porches,

and how Greek it was, the necessary evil

of slavery, in the catalogue of Georgia’s

marble past, the Jeffersonian ideal in

plantations with its Hectors and Achilleses,

its foam in the dogwood’s spray, past towns named Helen,

Athens, Sparta, Troy. The slave shacks, the rolling peace

of the wave-rolling meadows, oak, pine, and pecan,

and a creek like this one. From the window I saw

the bundles of women moving in ragged bands

like those on the wharf, headed for Oklahoma;

then I saw Seven Seas, a rattle in his hands.

A huge thunderhead was unclenching its bruised fist

over the county. Shadows escaped through the pines

and the pecan groves and hounds were closing in fast

deep into Georgia, where history happens