Omeros (24 page)

Their own faces as brown as gourds. Mine felt as strange

as those at the counter feeling their bodies change.

III

Change lay in our silence. We had come to that bend

where the trees are warped by wind, and the cliffs, raw,

shelve surely to foam.

                                       “Is right here everything end,”

the driver said, and rammed open the transport door

on his side, then mine.

                                          “Anyway, chief, the view nice.”

I joined him at the gusting edge.

                                                          “His name was Hector.”

The name was bent like the trees on the precipice

to point inland. In its echo a man-o’-war

screamed on the wind. The driver moved off for a piss,

then shouted over his shoulder:

                                                         “A road-warrior.

He would drive like a madman when the power took.

He had a nice woman. Maybe he died for her.”

For her and tourism, I thought. The driver shook

himself, zipping then hoisting his crotch.

                                                                          “Crazy, but

a gentle fellow anyway, with a very good brain.”

Cut to a leopard galloping on a dry plain

across Serengeti. Cut to the spraying fans

drummed by a riderless stallion, its wild mane

scaring the Scamander. Cut to a woman’s hands

clenched towards her mouth with no sound. Cut to the wheel

of a chariot’s spiked hubcap. Cut to the face

of his muscling jaw, then flashback to Achille

hurling a red tin and a cutlass. Next, a vase

with a girl’s hoarse whisper echoing “Omeros,”

as in a conch-shell. Cut to a shield of silver

rolling like a hubcap. Rewind, in slow motion,

myrmidons gathering by a village river

with lances for oars. Cut to the surpliced ocean

droning its missal. Cut. A crane hoisting a wreck.

A horse nosing the surf, then shuddering its neck.

He’d paid the penalty of giving up the sea

as graceless and as treacherous as it had seemed,

for the taxi-business; he was making money,

but all of that money was making him ashamed

of the long afternoons of shouting by the wharf

hustling passengers. He missed the uncertain sand

under his feet, he sighed for the trough of a wave,

and the jerk of the oar when it turned in his hand,

and the rose conch sunset with its low pelicans.

Castries was corrupting him with its roaring life,

its littered market, with too many transport vans

competing. Castries had been his common-law wife

who, like Helen, he had longed for from a distance,

and now he had both, but a frightening discontent

hollowed his face; to find that the sea was a love

he could never lose made every gesture violent:

ramming the side-door shut, raking the clutch. He drove

as if driven by furies, but furies paid the rent.

A man who cursed the sea had cursed his own mother.

Mer
was both mother and sea. In his lost canoe

he had said his prayers. But now he was in another

kind of life that was changing him with his brand-new

stereo, its endless garages, where he could not

whip off his shirt, hearing the conch’s summoning note.

Chapter XLVI

I

Hector was buried near the sea he had loved once.

Not too far from the shallows where he fought Achille

for a tin and Helen. He did not hear the sea-almond’s

moan over the bay when Philoctete blew the shell,

nor the one drumbeat of a wave-thud, nor a sail

rattling to rest as its day’s work was over,

and its mate, gauging depth, bent over the gunwale,

then wearily sounding the fathoms with an oar,

the same rite his shipmates would repeat soon enough

when it was their turn to lie quiet as Hector,

lowering a pitch-pine canoe in the earth’s trough,

to sleep under the piled conchs, through every weather

on the violet-wreathed mound. Crouching for his friend to hear,

Achille whispered about their ancestral river,

and those things he would recognize when he got there,

his true home, forever and ever and ever,

forever,
compère.
Then Philoctete limped over

and rested his hand firmly on a shaking shoulder

to anchor his sorrow. Seven Seas and Helen

did not come nearer. Achille had carried an oar

to the church and propped it outside with the red tin.

Now his voice strengthened. He said: “Mate, this is your spear,”

and laid the oar slowly, the same way he had placed

the parallel oars in the hull of the gommier

the day the African swift and its shadow raced.

And this was the prayer that Achille could not utter:

“The spear that I give you, my friend, is only wood.

Vexation is past. I know how well you treat her.

You never know my admiration, when you stood

crossing the sun at the bow of the long canoe

with the plates of your chest like a shield; I would say

any enemy so was a compliment. ’Cause no

African ever hurled his wide seine at the bay

by which he was born with such beauty. You hear me? Men

did not know you like me. All right. Sleep good. Good night.”

Achille moved Philoctete’s hand, then he saw Helen

standing alone and veiled in the widowing light.

Then he reached down to the grave and lifted the tin

to her. Helen nodded. A wind blew out the sun.

II

Pride set in Helen’s face after this, like a stone

bracketed with Hector’s name; her lips were incised

by its dates in parenthesis. She seemed more stern,

more ennobled by distance as she slowly crossed

the hot street of the village like a distant sail

on the horizon. Grief heightened her. When she smiled

it was with such distance that it was hard to tell

if she had heard your condolence. It was the child,

Ma Kilman told them, that made her more beautiful.

III

The rites of the island were simplified by its elements,

which changed places. The grooved sea was Achille’s garden,

the ridged plot of rattling plantains carried their sense

of the sea, and Philoctete, on his height, often heard, in

a wind that suddenly churned the rage of deep gorges,

the leafy sound of far breakers plunging with smoke,

and for smoke there were the bonfires which the sun catches

on the blue heights at sunrise, doing the same work

as Philoctete clearing his plot, just as, at sunset,

smoke came from the glowing rim of the horizon as if

from his enamel pot. The woodsmoke smelt of a regret

that men cannot name. On the charred field, the massive

sawn trunks burnt slowly like towers, and the great

indigo dusk slowly plumed down, devouring the still leaves,

igniting the firefly huts, lifting the panicky egret

to beat its lagoon and shelve in the cage of the mangroves,

take in the spars of its sails, then with quick-pricking head

anchor itself shiftingly, and lift its question again.

At night, the island reversed its elements, the heron

of a quarter-moon floated from Hector’s grave, rain

rose upwards from the sea, and the corrugated iron

of the sea glittered with nailheads. Ragged

plantains bent and stepped with their rustling powers

over the furrows of Philoctete’s garden, a chorus of aged

ancestors and straw, and, rustling, surrounded every house

in the village with its back garden, with its rank midden

of rusted chamber pots, rotting nets, and the moon’s cold basin.

They sounded, when they shook, after the moonlit meridian

of their crossing, like the night-surf; they gazed in

silence at the shadows of their lamplit children.

At Philoctete, groaning and soaking the flower on his shin

with hot sulphur, cleaning its edges with yellow Vaseline,

and, gripping his knee, squeezing rags from the basin.

At night, when yards are asleep, and the broken line

of the surf hisses like Philo, “
Bon Dieu, aie, waie,
my sin

is this sore?” the old plantains suffer and shine.

Chapter XLVII

I

Islands of bay leaves in the medicinal bath

of a cauldron, a sibylline cure. The citron

sprig of a lime-tree dividing the sky in half

dipped its divining rod. The white spray of the thorn,

which the swift bends lightly, waited for a black hand

to break it in bits and boil its leaves for the wound

from the pronged anchor rusting in clean bottom-sand.

Ma Kilman, in a black hat with its berried fringe,

eased herself sideways down the broken concrete step

of the rumshop’s back door, closed it, and rammed the hinge

tight. The bolt caught a finger and with that her instep

arch twisted and she let out a soft Catholic

curse, then crossed herself. She closed the gate. The asphalt

sweated with the heat, the limp breadfruit leaves were thick

over the fence. Her spectacles swam in their sweat.

She plucked an armpit. The damn wig was badly made.

She was going to five o’clock Mass, to
la Messe,

and sometimes she had to straighten it as she prayed

until the wafer dissolved her with tenderness,

the way a raindrop melts on the tongue of a breeze.

In the church’s cool cave the sweat dried from her eyes.

She rolled down the elastic bands below the knees

of her swollen stockings. It was then that their vise

round her calves reminded her of Philoctete. Then,

numbering her beads, she began her own litany

of berries, Hail Mary marigolds that stiffen

their aureoles in the heights, mild anemone

and clear watercress, the sacred heart of Jesus

pierced like the anthurium, the thorns of logwood,

called the tree of life, the aloe good for seizures,

the hole in the daisy’s palm, with its drying blood

that was the hole in the fisherman’s shin since he was

pierced by a hook; there was the pale, roadside tisane

of her malarial childhood. There was this one

for easing a birth-breach, that one for a love-bath,

before the buds of green sugar-apples in the sun

ripened like her nipples in girlhood. But what path

led through nettles to the cure, the furious sibyl

couldn’t remember. Mimosa winced from her fingers,

shutting like jalousies at some passing evil

when she reached for them. The smell of incense lingers

in her clothes. Inside, the candle-flames are erect

round the bier of the altar while she and her friends

old-talk on the steps, but the plant keeps its secret

when her memory reaches, shuttering in its fronds.

II

The dew had not yet dried on the white-ribbed awnings

and the nodding palanquins of umbrella yams

where the dark grove had not heat but early mornings

of perpetual freshness, in which the bearded arms

of a cedar held council. Between its gnarled toes

grew the reek of an unknown weed; its pronged flower

sprang like a buried anchor; its windborne odours

diverted the bee from its pollen, but its power,

rooted in bitterness, drew her bowed head by the nose

as a spike does a circling bull. To approach it

Ma Kilman lowered her head to one side and screened

the stench with a cologned handkerchief. The mulch it

was rooted in carried the smell, when it gangrened,

of Philoctete’s cut. In her black dress, her berried

black hat, she climbed a goat-path up from the village,

past the stones with dried palms and conchs, where the buried

suffer the sun all day Sunday, while goats forage

the new wreaths. Once more she pulled at the itch in her

armpits, nearly dropping her purse. Then she climbed hard

up the rain-cracked path, the bay closing behind her

like a wound, and rested. Everything that echoed

repeated its outline: a goat’s doddering bleat,

a hammer multiplying a roof, and, through the back yards,

a mother cursing a boy too nimble to beat.

Ma Kilman picked up her purse and sighed on upwards

to the thread of the smell, one arm behind her back,

passing the cactus, the thorn trees, and then the wood

appeared over her, thick green, the green almost black

as her dress in its shade, its border of flowers

flecking the pasture with spray. Then she staggered back

from the line of ants at her feet. She saw the course

they had kept behind her, following her from church,

signalling a language she could not recognize.

III

A swift had carried the strong seed in its stomach

centuries ago from its antipodal shore,

skimming the sea-troughs, outdarting ospreys, her luck

held to its shadow. She aimed to carry the cure

that precedes every wound; the reversible Bight

of Benin was her bow, her target the ringed haze

of a circling horizon. The star-grains at night

made her hungrier; the leafless sea with no house

for her weariness. Sometimes she dozed in her flight

for a swift’s second, closing the seeds of her stare,

then ruddering straight. The dry sea-flakes whitened her