Omeros (25 page)

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 signs, 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.