that it was dying in its change, the way it whored
away a simple life that would soon disappear
while its children writhed on the sidewalks to the sounds
of the DJ’s fresh-water-Yankee-cool-Creole.
He sat on In God We Troust under black almonds,
listening to the Soul Brothers losing their soul;
the sandy alleys would go and their simple stores,
the smell of fresh bread drawn from its Creole oven,
its flour turned into cocaine, its daughters to whores,
while the DJs screamed,
“WE MOVIN’, MAN! WE MOVIN’!”
but towards what? Those stars were too fixed in heaven
to care, but sometimes he wished that he was as far
as they were. The young took no interest in canoes.
That was longtime shit. Once it came from Africa.
And the sea would soon get accustomed to the noise.
He watched a falling star singe the arc of its zone
and traced the comet as its declining vector
hissed out like a coal in the horizon’s basin
over the islet, and he trembled for Hector,
the title he gave his transport. Bright Helen
was like a meteor too, and her falling arc
crossed over the village, over some moonlit lane
with its black breadfruit leaves. Every life was a spark,
but her light remained unknown in this backward place,
falling unobserved, the way he watched the meteor
at one in the morning track the night of her race,
then fade, forgotten, as sunrise forgets a star.
II
Dominus illuminatio mea, Egypt delivered
back to itself. India crumpling on its knees
like a howdah’d elephant, all of the empowered
tide and panoply of lances, Gurkhas, Anzacs, Mounties
drained like a bath from the bunghole of Eden’s Suez,
or a back-yard canal. In Alexandria, at the raven’s hour,
clouds of the faithful hunch at the muezzin’s prayers,
with the hymn of mosquitoes, deserts whence our power
withdrew, Himalayan hill-stations where the millipede
enters and coils, like a lanyard around a flagpole,
and the rat scuttles in straw, jungles where a leopard
narrows its gaze to sleep on a crumbling uphol-
stered sofa, while chickens climb the stairs. The crest
of the bookmark was under his thumb, the frontispiece
signed by a boy’s hand. D. Plunkett. He laid him to rest
between the water-stained pages as he shut the book.
Dominus illuminatio mea, O Lord, light of my life.
He turned his head towards Maud, but she did not look
up from her needle. He fiddled with the paper-knife
on the blotter. He had won the prize for an essay
on the Roman Empire. In those days, history was easy.
He arched like the cat, and went to the verandah
as Maud looked up once. The Major counted the stars
like buttons through the orchids; they were the usual wonder.
He heard the contending music, on one side from the bars
of the village, thudding; on the other, across black water,
the hotel’s discotheque. At that very moment Achille was
studying a heaven whose cosmology had been erased
by the crossing. He was trying to trace the armature
of studs and rivets where the constellations are placed,
but for him they were beads on an abacus, no more.
From night-fishing he knew the necessary ones,
the one that sparkled at dusk, and at dawn, the other.
All in a night’s work he saw them simply as twins.
He knew others but would not call them by their given
names, forcing a silvery web to link their designs,
neither the Bear nor the Plough, to him there was heaven
and earth and the sea, but Ursa or Plunkett Major,
or the Archer aiming? He tried but could not distinguish
their pattern, nor call one Venus, nor even find
the pierced holes of Pisces, the dots named for the Fish;
he knew them as stars, they fitted his own design.
III
“What?”
She was draping the silk slip on a hanger,
twisting it skillfully. She turned her breasts away.
Down the deep ravine of her shoulders, his anger
drained like the soapy water over the pathway
of stones he had placed there, where her small footprints dried.
It was still moonlight, and the moonlight filled the sheen
of the nightgown she entered like water as her pride
shook free of the neck. He saw the lifted wick shine
on the ebony face, and the shadow she made
on the wall. Now the shadow unpinned one earring,
its head tilted, and smiled. It was in a good mood.
It checked its teeth in a mirror, he watched it bring
the mirror close to its eyes. The blocko was done.
It was so quiet in the village, he heard the stars
click like its earrings when the shadow put them down.
He turned his face to the wall. Whoever she was,
however innocent her joy, he couldn’t take it
anymore. A transport passed, and in the silence
he felt his heart sicken, watching her as she brushed
her hair slowly and stopped. And Achille saw Helen’s
completion for the first time. He saw how she wished
for a peace beyond her beauty, past the tireless
quarrel over a face that was not her own fault
any more than the full moon’s grace sailing dark trees,
and for that moment Achille was angrily filled
with a pity beyond his own pain. There was peace
in the clouds, and the moon in a silk-white nightgown
stood over him.
“What?” he said. “What make you this whore?
Why you don’t leave me alone and go fock Hector?
More men plough that body than canoe plough the sea.”
The lance of his hatred entered her with no sound,
yet she came and lay next to him, and they lay quietly
as two logs laid parallel on moonlit sand.
He heard the fig-trees embracing and he smiled
when the first cock cuckolded him. She found his hand
and held it. He turned. She was asleep. Like a child.
Chapter XXII
I
Shortly after, she moved in with Hector. She moved
everything while he was fishing but a hairpin
stuck in her soap-dish. To him this proved
that she would come back. Stranger things than that happen
every day, Ma Kilman assured him, in places
bigger than Gros Îlet. When he walked up a street,
he stuck close to the houses, avoiding the faces
that called out to him from doorways. He passed them straight.
Gradually he began to lose faith in his hands.
He believed he smelt as badly as Philoctete
from the rotting loneliness that drew every glance
away from him, as stale as a drying fishnet.
He avoided the blind man with his black, knotted hands
resting on the cane; he avoided looking at
a transport when it approached him, in case, by chance,
it was Hector driving and should in case she sat
on the front seat by him; the van that Hector bought
from his canoe’s sale had stereo, leopard seat.
II
The Comet, a sixteen-seater passenger-van,
was the chariot
that Hector bought. Coiled tongues of flame
leapt from its sliding doors. Each row was a divan
of furred leopardskin. Because of its fiery name
under an arching rocket painted on its side,
the Space Age had come to the island. Passengers
crammed next to each other on its animal hide
were sliding into two worlds without switching gears.
One, atavistic, with its African emblem
that slid on the plastic seats, wrinkling in a roll
when the cloth bunched, and the other world that shot them
to an Icarian future they could not control.
Many accepted their future. Most were prepared
for the Comet’s horizontal launching
of its purring engine, part rocket, part leopard,
while Hector, arms folded, leant against the bonnet
like a gum-chewing astronaut. He would park it
first in rank. Every old woman who got on it—
there was always one quarrelling from the market—
would pause and look at the painted flames with “Bon Dieu!
Déjà?”—meaning “Hell? Already?” Once, one remarked,
“All I see is tiger-skin, yes. So let us prey.”
And pray they did, when Hector rammed the flaming door
shut, then his own side harder as he touched the charm
of a fur monkey over the dashboard altar
with its porcelain Virgin in flowers and one arm
uplifted like a traffic signal to halt. Her
statue lurched, swaying, the passengers clutched the skins
as Hector pedalled the clutch in roaring reverse,
and the wharf flashed past them quicker than all their sins
as the old woman clawed the rosary in her purse
and begged the swaying Virgin not to forget her
at the hour of our death, and sudden silence
descended on the passengers and on Hector,
because it was here he had stepped between Helen’s
fight with Achille. Why he had bought this chariot
and left the sea. He believed she still loved Achille,
and that is why, through palm-shadows, the leopard shot
with its flaming wound that speed alone could not heal.
He was making no money. The trips were too short.
He liked wide horizons. Soon the Comet was known
through the sea of banana fields to the airport,
making four trips a day when most transports made one,
hearing his fame shouted on the way to Vieuxfort,
and sometimes, just for a change, coming back empty,
he leant back on the leopardskin, the stereo on
his favourite station: Country. He liked the falling
scarves of the sunset saying goodbye to the sea
the way he had left it. Curving around Praslin
he thought of his camerades hauling their canoes
and the dusk thatching their sheds without any noise.
III
The months revolved slowly like the silk parasols
at college cricket-matches; sometimes cicadas
past the edge of the pavilion burst into applause
for a finished stroke. By five, the fielders’ shadows
on the slanted field were history, and the light
for that moment turned as tea-tinted as the prose
of old London journals, The Sphere, The Tatler, The
Illustrated London News; then quietly, the white
languid dominion of the water-lily in the heat
behind the reed-barred gates of Maud Plunkett’s pond
was floating into darkness, the clouds were dying,
the field sparked with green fireflies, like sparks flying
from an evening coalpot, the singeing stars.
Low over the mangoes, close over the hills, like fire
under a tin, the sun went out, and the horizon
enclosed the schooners, the canoes, and an empire
faded with one last, spastic green flash, but so soon
they hardly noticed. The Plunketts quietly continued,
parades continued, cricket resumed, and the white feathers
of the proconsul’s pith-helmet, and the brass and red
of the fire engines. Everything that was once theirs
was given to us now to ruin it as we chose,
but in the bugle of twilight also, something unexpected.
A government that made no difference to Philoctete,
to Achille. That did not buy a bottle of white kerosene
from Ma Kilman, a dusk that had no historical regret
for the fishermen beating mackerel into their seine,
only for Plunkett, in the pale orange glow of the wharf
reddening the vendors’ mangoes, alchemizing the bananas
near the coal market, this town he had come to love.
Chapter XXIII
I
It was a rusted port with serrated ridges
over which clouds carried grey crocus-bags of rain;
past its heyday as a coaling-station. Dredges
deepened its draft and volcanic silt would remain
on its bed, but liners, higher than the iron
lance of the market, whitened the harbour and rose
above the Customs. Every noon, a carillon
sprinkled its yellow petals above a morose
banyan. The Church of Immaculate Conception
was numbering the Angelus. With lace frills on,
balconies stood upright, as did the false pillars
of the Georgian library; each citizen
stood paralyzed as the bell counted the hours.
A dozen halos of sound down through the ages
confirmed the apostles. At store-counters, shoppers
crossed themselves with the shopgirls; tellers in cages
stopped riffling their own notes with one wet fingertip
drying before it moved on to turn the next leaf.
The streets held statues. A traveller off a ship
could have sauntered through that Pompeii of their belief
made by the ash of the Angelus, like St. Pierre,
whose only survivor had been a prisoner
who watched the volcano’s powder mottle the air
across the channel to blacken milk and flour.
Then the statues stirred, iron-shop blinds rippled down,
the banks closed for an hour, the entire town
went home for lunch, to come back on the stroke of one.
II
Maud heard the carillon, faint in the wiry heat
over the hot harbour. She watched a lizard crawl down
the fly screen. She took off her damp gardening hat
and lay on the faded couch, she loosed her bodice
and blew down to her heart. It was cool in the shade
of the stone porch hung with her baskets of orchids.
She stared at the slope of the lawn down to the farm
where grass withered in scabs. Then, a canoe. Headed
for Africa, probably, passing her royal palm.
Shadows were sloping down the desiccated lawn
from the bougainvillea hedge. The morning-glory
was wilting. The sea-grape’s leaves were vermilion,
orange, and rust, their hues a memento mori
as much as autumn’s, when their crisp pile would be raked
by limping Philoctete. Smoke wrote the same story
since the dawn of time. Smoke was time burning. It snaked
itself into a cloud, the wrinkled almond trees
grew older, but lovely, the dry leaves were baked
like clay in a kiln. Their brightness was a disease
like the golden dwarf-coconuts. It was the same
every drought. The sea hot. The sea-almond aflame.
III
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A liner grew from the Vigie promontory,
white as a lily, its pistil an orange stack.
She crept past the orchids. At the morning-glory
she stopped in mid-channel, then slowly turned her back
on the island. By dusk, she’d be a ghost like all
her sisters, a smudge on a cloud. Maud marked their routes:
the cost of a second-class berth from Portugal
to Southampton, then Dublin, but the cheapest rates
staggered Dennis. She soon grew used to the liner
moored to the hedge. A girl was coming up the trace,
pausing for breath, and though the light was behind her
and the garden glaring, by the slow, pelvic pace
that made men rest on their shovels cleaning the pens
and the gardener pause from burning leaves on the lawn,
a heap in his hands, Maud knew that gait was Helen’s,
but the almond eyes were hooded in the smooth face
of arrogant ebony. Maud tugged off a glove
finger by finger, prepared for the coming farce.
Slow as the liner she came up the stone-flagged walk
in her black church dress—a touch of the widow there—
then paused at the morning-glory to wrench a stalk
head-down, stripping its yellow petals tear by tear.
My bloody allamandas! Maud swore. And, naturally,
being you, you want me to leave the verandah,
or maybe I’ll ask you up for a spot of tea.
Oh Mother of God, another allamanda!
She’ll wreck the blooming garden if I don’t come down.
She had timed it well. A little intimacy
between us girls. She’d seen the Land Rover in town
no doubt, but not this time, Miss Helen, non merci.
We aren’t having any confession together;
then hated herself for her rage. Those lissome calves,
that waist swayed like a palm was her island’s weather,
its clouded impulses of doing things by halves,
lowering her voice to match its muttering waves,
the deep sigh of night that came from its starlit leaves.
The cackle of her infuriating laughter
when she joked with the gardener from the kitchen,
but when Maud came to the kitchen to quiet her,
she would suck her teeth and tilt that arrogant chin
and mutter something behind her back in patois,
and when Maud asked her what, she’d smile: “Ma’am, is noffing.”
Maud walked down the steps to the flagged path from the shade