Omeros (8 page)

But then we all trust in Him, and that’s why we know

the peace of a wandering heart when it is housed.

Chapter XII

I

Our house with its bougainvillea trellises,

the front porch gone, was a printery. In its noise

I was led up the cramped stair to its offices.

I saw the small window near which we slept as boys,

how close the roof was. The heat of the galvanize.

A desk in my mother’s room, not that bed, sunlit,

with its rose quilt where we were forbidden to sit.

Pink handbills whirred under their spinning negative

and two girls stacked them from their retractable bed

as fast as my own images were reprinted

as I remembered them in an earlier life

that made the sheets linen, the machines furniture,

her wardrobe her winged, angelic mirror. The hum

of the wheel’s elbow stopped. And there was a figure

framed in the quiet window for whom this was home,

tracing its dust, rubbing thumb and middle finger,

then coming to me, not past, but through the machines,

clear as a film and as perfectly projected

as a wall cut by the jalousies’ slanted lines.

He had done a self-portrait, it was accurate.

In his transparent hand was a book I had read.

“In this pale blue notebook where you found my verses”—

my father smiled—“I appeared to make your life’s choice,

and the calling that you practise both reverses

and honours mine from the moment it blent with yours.

Now that you are twice my age, which is the boy’s,

which the father’s?”

                                    “Sir”—I swallowed—“they are one voice.”

In the printery’s noise, and as we went downstairs

in that now familiar and unfamiliar house,

he said, in an accent of polished weariness,

“I was raised in this obscure Caribbean port,

where my bastard father christened me for his shire:

Warwick. The Bard’s county. But never felt part

of the foreign machinery known as Literature.

I preferred verse to fame, but I wrote with the heart

of an amateur. It’s that Will you inherit.

I died on his birthday, one April. Your mother

sewed her own costume as Portia, then that disease

like Hamlet’s old man’s spread from an infected ear,

I believe the parallel has brought you some peace.

Death imitating Art, eh?”

                                              At the door to the yard,

he said, “I grew grapes here. Small, a little sour,

still, grapes all the same.”

                                              “I remember them,” I said.

“I thought they died before you were born. Are you sure?”

“Yes.” The furred nap like nettles, their globes’ green acid.

“What was Warwick doing, transplanting Warwickshire?”

I saw him patterned in shade, the leaves in his hair,

the vines of the lucent body, the swift’s blown seed.

II

Out on the sidewalk the sunlight drained like the print

of a postcard flecked with its gnawing chemical

in which there was light, but with a sepia tint,

even on Grass Street with our Methodist chapel.

We passed under uprights with fretworks on their eaves,

mansards with similar woodwork, their verandahs

shuttered at both corners by half-cranked jalousies

through which pale cousins peered or a half-cracked aunt, as

if from the madhouse or a convent. Windows

framed their unshifting lives. During the hot, long day

they kept changing posts near which they leant, their elbows

jutting from a ledge, elbows as well known as they

were, or with a white head dipping in a rocker

while the black town walked barefoot and deafening bells

pounded the Angelus; but none saw the walker

in his white suit, their reveries were somewhere else,

they looked on their high-brown life as a souvenir

with a dried Easter palm, its amber sweets, its carts

horse-drawn, rubbing their beads and muttering
Veni,

Creator
to velvet cushions with embroidered hearts.

As iron bells ruled the town, and the poui flowers fell.

III

It was one. We passed the brown phantoms in white-drill

suits, some with pith-helmets whom the Angelus sent

back to work after lunch, suits rippled by the grille

of shade made by the long-stemmed pillars as we went

past them, the asphalt so hot that it was empty.

Heat waves rippled over it and one or two cars

pumped their bulb-horns and waved as they rattled by.

Then we came to a green square cut in smaller squares.

And the light from a bluer postcard filled its sky,

and it seemed, from his steps, that water sprang in plumes

from the curled, iron-green fountain at its centre,

though its gates were shut under pluming cabbage-palms,

a paradise I had to believe to enter.

But I did not ask him about the other life,

because the white shadow I had made from my mind

was vague in its origin and thin as belief,

unsinged as an Easter lily, fresh as the wind,

its whisper as soft as a pavement-scratching leaf.

Chapter XIII

I

“I grew up where alleys ended in a harbour

and Infinity wasn’t the name of our street;

where the town anarchist was the corner barber

with his own flagpole and revolving Speaker’s seat.

There were rusted mirrors in which we would look back

on the world’s events. There, toga’d in a pinned sheet,

the curled hairs fell like commas. On their varnished rack,

The World’s Great Classics
read backwards in his mirrors

where he doubled as my chamberlain. I was known

for quoting from them as he was for his scissors.

I bequeath you that clean sheet and an empty throne.”

We’d arrived at that corner where the barber-pole

angled from the sidewalk, and the photographer,

who’d taken his portrait, and, as some think, his soul,

leant from a small window and scissored his own hair

in a mime, suggesting a trim was overdue

to my father, who laughed and said “Wait” with one hand.

Then the barber mimed a shave with his mouth askew,

and left the window to wait by his wooden door

framed with dead portraits, and he seemed to understand

something in the life opposite not seen before.

“The rock he lived on was nothing. Not a nation

or a people,” my father said, and, in his eyes,

this was a curse. When he raged, his indignation

jabbed the air with his scissors, a swift catching flies,

as he pumped the throne serenely round to his view.

He gestured like Shylock: “Hath not a Jew eyes?”

making his man a negative. An Adventist,

he’s stuck on one glass that photograph of Garvey’s

with the braided tricorne and gold-fringed epaulettes,

and that is his other Messiah. His paradise

is a phantom Africa. Elephants. Trumpets.

And when I quote Shylock silver brims in his eyes.

II

“Walk me down to the wharf.”

                                                       At the corner of Bridge

Street, we saw the liner as white as a mirage,

its hull bright as paper, preening with privilege.

“Measure the days you have left. Do just that labour

which marries your heart to your right hand: simplify

your life to one emblem, a sail leaving harbour

and a sail coming in. All corruption will cry

to be taken aboard. Fame is that white liner

at the end of your street, a city to itself,

taller than the Fire Station, and much finer,

with its brass-ringed portholes, mounting shelf after shelf,

than anything Castries could ever hope to build.”

The immaculate hull insulted the tin roofs

beneath it, its pursers were milk, even the bilge

bubbling from its stern in quietly muttering troughs

and its humming engines spewed expensive garbage

where boys balanced on logs or, riding old tires,

shouted up past the hull to tourists on the rails

to throw down coins, as cameras caught their black cries,

then jackknife or swan-dive—their somersaulting tails

like fishes flipped backwards—as the coins grew in size

in the wobbling depth; then, when they surfaced, fights

for possession, their heads butting like porpoises,

till, like a city leaving a city, the lights

blazed in its moving rooms, and the liner would glide

over its own phosphorus, and wash hit the wharves

long after stewards had set the service inside

the swaying chandeliered salons, and the black waves

settle down to their level. The stars would renew

their studded diagrams over Achille’s canoe.

From here, in his boyhood, he had seen women climb

like ants up a white flower-pot, baskets of coal

balanced on their torchoned heads, without touching them,

up the black pyramids, each spine straight as a pole,

and with a strength that never altered its rhythm.

He spoke for those Helens from an earlier time:

“Hell was built on those hills. In that country of coal

without fire, that inferno the same colour

as their skins and shadows, every labouring soul

climbed with her hundredweight basket, every load for

one copper penny, balanced erect on their necks

that were tight as the liner’s hawsers from the weight.

The carriers were women, not the fair, gentler sex.

Instead, they were darker and stronger, and their gait

was made beautiful by balance, in their ascending

the narrow wooden ramp built steeply to the hull

of a liner tall as a cloud, the unending

line crossing like ants without touching for the whole

day. That was one section of the wharf, opposite

your grandmother’s house where I watched the silhouettes

of these women, while every hundredweight basket

was ticked by two tally clerks in their white pith-helmets,

and the endless repetition as they climbed the

infernal anthracite hills showed you hell, early.”

III

“Along this coal-blackened wharf, what Time decided

to do with my treacherous body after this,”

he said, watching the women, “will stay in your head

as long as a question you have no right to ask,

only to doubt, not hate our infuriating

silence. I am only the shadow of that task

as much as their work, your pose of a question waiting,

as you crouch with a writing lamp over a desk,

remains in the darkness after the light has gone,

and whether night is palpable between dawn and dusk

is not for the living; so you mind your business,

which is life and work, like theirs, but I will say this:

O Thou, my Zero, is an impossible prayer,

utter extinction is still a doubtful conceit.

Though we pray to nothing, nothing cannot be there.

Kneel to your load, then balance your staggering feet

and walk up that coal ladder as they do in time,

one bare foot after the next in ancestral rhyme.

Because Rhyme remains the parentheses of palms

shielding a candle’s tongue, it is the language’s

desire to enclose the loved world in its arms;

or heft a coal-basket; only by its stages

like those groaning women will you achieve that height

whose wooden planks in couplets lift your pages

higher than those hills of infernal anthracite.

There, like ants or angels, they see their native town,

unknown, raw, insignificant. They walk, you write;

keep to that narrow causeway without looking down,

climbing in their footsteps, that slow, ancestral beat

of those used to climbing roads; your own work owes them

because the couplet of those multiplying feet

made your first rhymes. Look, they climb, and no one knows them;

they take their copper pittances, and your duty

from the time you watched them from your grandmother’s house

as a child wounded by their power and beauty

is the chance you now have, to give those feet a voice.”

We stood in the hot afternoon. My father took

his fob-watch from its pocket, replaced it, then said,

lightly gripping my arm,

                                             “He enjoys a good talk,

a serious trim, and I myself look ahead

to our appointment.” He kissed me. I watched him walk

through a pillared balcony’s alternating shade.

BOOK TWO

Chapter XIV

I

The midshipman swayed in the coach, trying to read.

He knew that the way to fortify character

was by language and observation: the Dutch road

striped with long poplar shadows in the late after-

noon, the weight of the man in his coach, a sunbeam

changing sides on the cushion, a spire’s fishhook

luring a low shoal of clouds like silvery bream

towards it; the light gilding the spine of his book,

the stale smell of canals in the red-thatched farmer

who glowered and swung like a lantern on the seat

opposite, with the marsh-breath of an embalmer,

a wire-coop of white chickens between his feet,

each boot as capacious as those barges crossing

the Lowland reaches at dusk. The Dutch were grossing

a fortune in the Northern Antilles, and he