Omeros

  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