Omeros (32 page)

S for serpent. He had turned his head away once;

but that was enough time for the apparition’s

back to be sealed in bush, trembling at his return.

III

His wound healed slowly. He discovered the small joys

that lay in a life patterned like those on the quilt,

and he would speak to her in his normal voice

without feeling silly. Soon he lost any guilt

for her absence. Her absence was far, yet closer

than the blue hills of Saltibus in their cool light.

His memories opened the shutters of mimosa

like the lilies that widened in her pond at night

secretly, like angels, in the faith that was hers.

In the lion-clawed tub he idled in his bath,

he loved the nap of fresh towels, he scrubbed his ears

the way she insisted, he liked taking orders

from her invisible voice. He learned how to pause

in the shade of the stone arch watching the bright red

flowers of the immortelle, he forgot the war’s

history that had cost him a son and wife. He read

calmly, and he began to speak to the workmen

not as boys who worked with him, till every name

somehow sounded different; when he thought of Helen

she was not a cause or a cloud, only a name

for a local wonder. He liked being alone

sometimes, and that was the best sign. He knew that Maud

was proud of him whenever the squared sunlight shone

on the taut comforter, that it was so well made.

Chapter LXII

I

Behind lace Christmas bush, the season’s red sorrel,

what seemed a sunstruck stasis concealed a ferment

of lives behind tin fences, an endless quarrel

which Seven Seas recorded with no instrument

except ears sharper than his mongrel’s; gardening

in his plot of old tires with violets, he’d hear them

over the roofs. He could hear the priest pardoning

their sins at vespers, the penitential anthem

of a Sunday in which no serious sins occurred.

The fishermen in black, rusty suits passed by him.

The helm of their turning week had come to a stop.

Seven Seas at his window heard their faint anthem:

“Salve Regina”
in the pews of a stone ship,

which the black priest steered from his pulpit like a helm,

making the swift’s sign from brow to muttering lip.

The village was surrendering a life besieged

by the lances of yachts in the white marina,

where egrets had hidden in the feathering reeds

of the lagoon. It had become a souvenir

of itself, and from the restaurant tables

with settings white as the yachts you could look towards

the marina’s channel to the old weathered gables

of upstairs houses over the fishermen’s yards

with biscuit-tin palings and cracked asphalt streets;

old tires wreathing a pier, vine-burdened fences,

an old woman pinning white, surrendering sheets

on a line. Its life adjusted to the lenses

of cameras that, perniciously elegiac,

took shots of passing things—Seven Seas and the dog

in the pharmacy’s shade, every comic mistake

in spelling, like
In God We Troust
on a pirogue,

BLUE GENES, ARTLANTIC CITY, NO GABBAGE DUMPED HERE
.

The village imitated the hotel brochure

with photogenic poverty, with atmosphere.

Those who were “people” lovers also have

a snapshot of Philoctete showing you his shin,

not saying how it was healed; some have Hector’s grave

heaped with its shells, and an oar. All were welcomed in

the No Pain Café with its bamboo beads, then some

proceeded to the islet where a warped bottle

crusted with fool’s gold in the amusing museum

shone like a false chalice, engravings of the Battle,

then a log with its entry,
Plunkett,
in lilac

ink. And, over and over again, the name Helen

of the West Indies, until they all turned their back

on the claim. They crushed the immortelle’s vermilion

platoons under their sandals climbing to the redoubt,

from where they shot the humped island with its blue horns

and hazed Africa windward. None saw a swift dart

over the cactus on the cliff or heard it cry once.

Lizards emerged like tongues from the mouths of cannons.

II

In the lion-coloured grass of the dry season

cannon gape at the sea from the windy summit,

their holes out of breath in the heat. If you rest one

palm on the hot iron barrel it will burn it,

but a lizard crawls there and raises its question:

“If this place is hers, did that empty horizon

once flash its broadsides with their inaudible rays

in her honour? Was that immense enterprise on

the baize tables of empires for one who carries

cheap sandals on a hooked finger with the Pitons

for breasts? Were both hemispheres the split breadfruit of

her African ass, her sea the fluted chitons

of a Greek frieze? And is she the Helen they love,

instead of a carved mouth with the almond’s odour?

She walked on this parapet in a stolen dress,

she stood in a tilted shack with its open door.

Who gives her the palm? Did sulking Achille grapple

with Hector to repeat themselves? Exchange a spear

for a cutlass; and when Paris tosses the apple

from his palm to Venus, make it a
pomme-Cythère,

make all those parallels pointless. Names are not oars

that have to be laid side by side, nor are legends;

slowly the foaming clouds have forgotten ours.

You were never in Troy, and, between two Helens,

yours is here and alive; their classic features

were turned into silhouettes from the lightning bolt

of a glance. These Helens are different creatures,

one marble, one ebony. One unknots a belt

of yellow cotton slowly from her shelving waist,

one a cord of purple wool, the other one takes

a bracelet of white cowries from a narrow wrist;

one lies in a room with olive-eyed mosaics,

another in a beach shack with its straw mattress,

but each draws an elbow slowly over her face

and offers the gift of her sculptured nakedness,

parting her mouth. The sanderlings lift with their cries.

And those birds Maud Plunkett stitched into her green silk

with sibylline steadiness were what islands bred:

brown dove, black grackle, herons like ewers of milk,

pinned to a habitat many had adopted.

The lakes of the world have their own diaspora

of birds every winter, but these would not return.

The African swallow, the finch from India

now spoke the white language of a tea-sipping tern,

with the Chinese nightingales on a shantung screen,

while the Persian falcon, whose cry leaves a scar

on the sky till it closes, saw the sand turn green,

the dunes to sea, understudying the man-o’-war,

talking the marine dialect of the Caribbean

with nightjars, finches, and swallows, each origin

enriching the islands to which their cries were sewn.

Across the bay the ridge bristled once with a fort,

then the inner promontory itself; its shipping

was martial then, its traffic in masts the swift fleet

of both navies; sails soared to the boatswain’s piping,

like Seven Seas’s kettle, squadrons would slowly surge

from volcanic inlets. Its map, riddled with bays

like an almond leaf, provided defence or siege,

but its cannons, set in their spiked circle, could blaze

like the forehead of Mars. Now French, now British yards

fluttered from its mornes; no sooner was one flag set

than another battle unravelled its lanyards

and a bugle hoisted the other. Each sunset,

with its charred flagships, its smouldering fires, its coals

fanned by the breeze at landfall, dilated and died,

every Redcoat an ember, its garrisoned souls

shouldering their muskets like palm-fronds until Parade

marched into night’s black oblivion that vizored

Mars’ brow. Along the horizon in a green flash

a headland swallowed the sun’s leaf like a lizard

to the thudding cannonballs of a calabash.

Then long shadows alternated like the keyboard

of Plunkett’s piano to the fringed lamp of the moon,

as the siege and battles were changed to its shawled song

crossing the sea. Now there were hundreds of Frenchmen

and British listening in their separate cemeteries,

who died for a lizard, for red leaves to belong

to their ranks, for that green flash that was History’s.

III

Galleons of clouds are becalmed, waiting for a wind.

The lizard spins on its tripod, panning, to find

the boulders below where slaves built the breakwater.

The Battle of the Saints moves through the surf of trees.

School-texts rustle to the oval portrait of a

cloud-wigged Rodney, but the builders’ names are not there,

not Hector’s ancestor’s, Philoctete’s, nor Achille’s.

The blue sky is a French tunic, its Croix de Guerre

the sunburst of a medal. The engraved ovals

of both admirals fit, when a schoolbook closes,

into one locket. Screaming only in vowels,

the children burst out of History. Some classes

race past the breakwater, the anonymous cairn

carried by a line of black ants, some up the street

to crouch under the window-ledge by Ma Kilman,

to shout at his elbow and frighten Philoctete,

then yell: “Aye! Seven Seas!” in their American

accent. One stalks near the growling dog on a bet.

Their books are closed like the folded wings of a moth.

The lizard leaps into the grass. You bend your head

to hear “Iounalo” from the cannon’s mouth.

Chapter LXIII

I

Seven Seas sat anchored in the rumshop window,

the khaki dog stretched at his feet clicking at flies.

The Saturday sunlight laid a map on the floor

and smaller maps on his shades. Hefting the empties

from the blocko, the girl took them out the back door

to stack them near the gate. She was Ma Kilman’s niece

fresh from the country, and the village was for her

a startling city, its music widening her eyes

like a new Helen. The dog’s tail thudded the floor.

The hot deck of the rumshop idled like a ship

becalmed in Saturday’s doldrums. In the rocker

Ma Kilman yawned, steering them into deep gossip.

“Statics is her uncle, the girl. He went Florida,

after the election, as a migrant-picker.

You know Maljo. Didier? That man worried her,

yes, with his outside children plus what he stick her

with, but this one, my godchild, is legitimate.

She very obedient. She will make a good maid.”

“I know Florida,” Seven Seas said. “The life better

there, but not good. That is the trouble with the States.”

“Statics change,” she said. “Somebody bring a letter

home from him. Christine, you go and sit by those crates

in the yard and call me when the sweet-drink truck come.”

The girl went out to the yard.

                                                     “A long letter home.

His job is to put the oranges in a sack

one by one, as if they is islands.”

                                                         “In the South,”

Seven Seas said, “the Deep South, you musn’t talk back.

You do what the white man give you and shut your mouth.”

“Anyway,” she sighed, “Statics meet this Cherokee

woman, a wild Indian, you know, and they live well

together. ‘Good electricity,’ he say. He

send her photo to his wife, so his wife could tell

people she know a real Indian, not a West

Indian. I see the picture and she look real wild,

not with feathers and so on, but with big, big breast

like she ready! Which is why I send out the child.

Aye, aye! Statics send to say one night at a bar,

a true-true Indian come in and next thing he know

this Choctaw truck-driver lift him by the collar

and start choking him, and he tell the woman, ‘Let’s blow,

babe,’ and leave Statics high and dry like a canoe.

Statics write to say his woman now is the dollar.”

II

Helen came into the shop, and she had that slow

feline smile of a pregnant woman, the slow grace

that can go with it. Sometimes the gods will hallow

all of a race’s beauty in a single face.

She wanted some margarine. Ma Kilman showed her where

the tubs were kept in the freezer. Helen chose one,

then she paid Ma Kilman and left. The dividing air

closed in her wake, and the shop went into shadow,

with the map on the floor, as if she were the sun.

“She making child,” she said. “Achille want to give it,

even is Hector’s, an African name. Helen

don’t want no African child. He say he’ll leave it

till the day of the christening. That Helen must learn

where she from. Philo standing godfather. You see?

Standing, Philo, standing straight! That sore used to burn

that man till he bawl,
songez?
”

                                                      “I heard his agony

from the yam garden,” Seven Seas said. “They doing well,

the white yams. The sea-breeze does season them with salt.”