Omeros

  of the stone porch, and Helen was starting to walk

  towards her, then stopped and turned. “Morning,” Helen said.

  Morning. No “Madam.” No “Good.” All in a day’s work.

  Maud stopped. In midstream the liner now hovered

  over Helen’s tautly brushed hair. Maud nodded

  as amiably as she could, but with one palm covered

  over an excessive squint.

  “So, how are you, Helen?”

  “I dere, Madam.”

  At last. You dere. Of course you dare,

  come back looking for work after ruining two men,

  after trying on my wardrobe, after driving Hector

  crazy with a cutlass, you dare come, that what you mean?

  “We’ve no work, Helen.”

  “Is not work I looking for.”

  Pride edged that voice; she’d honed her arrogance

  on Maud’s nerves when she worked here, but there was sorrow

  in the old rudeness. Helen tore the stalk in her hands.

  “What I come for this morning is see if you can borrow

  me five dollars. I pregnant. I will pay you next week.”

  Maud went as purple as one of her orchids. “I see.

  How’ll you pay me back, Helen, if you’re out of work?

  It’s none of my business, but what happened to Achille?

  Hector not working?”

  “I am vexed with both of them, oui.”

  What was it in men that made such beauty evil?

  She was as beautiful as a liner, but like it, she

  changed her course, she turned her back on her friends.

  “I’ll fetch my purse,” Maud said. Helen turned her back

  and stared out to sea. This is how all beauty ends.

  When Maud came with the money, she was down the track

  with the arrogant sway of that hip, stern high in the line

  of the turned liner. Maud stood, enraged, in the sun.

  Then she picked up the flowers Helen had wrenched from the vine.

  The allamandas lasted three days. Their trumpets would bend

  and their glory pass. But she’d last forever, Helen.

  Chapter XXIV

  I

  From his heart’s depth he knew she was never coming

  back, as he followed the skipping of a sea-swift

  over the waves’ changing hills, as if the humming

  horizon-bow had made Africa the target

  of its tiny arrow. When he saw the swift flail

  and vanish in a trough he knew he’d lost Helen.

  The mate was cleaning the bilge with the rusted pail

  when the swift reappeared like a sunlit omen,

  widening the joy that had vanished from his work.

  Sunlight entered his hands, they gave that skillful twist

  that angled the blade for the next stroke. Half-awake

  from last night’s blocko, the mate waveringly pissed

  over the side, keeping his staggering balance.

  “Fish go get drunk.” Achille grinned. The mate cupped his hands

  in the sea and lathered his head. “All right. Work start!”

  He fitted the trawling rods. Achille felt the rim

  of the brimming morning being brought like a gift

  by the handles of the headland. He was at home.

  This was his garden. God bless the speed of the swift,

  God bless the wet head of the mate sparkling with foam,

  and his heart trembled with enormous tenderness

  for the purple-blue water and the wilting shore

  tight and thin as a fishline, and the hill’s blue smoke,

  his muscles bulging like porpoises from each oar,

  but the wrists wrenched deftly after the lifted stroke,

  mesmerizing him with their incantatory

  metre. The swift made a semicircular turn

  over the hills, then, like a feathery lure, she

  bobbed over the wake, the same distance from the stern.

  He felt she was guiding and not following them

  ever since she’d leapt from the blossoms of the froth

  hooked to his heart, as if her one, arrowing aim

  was his happiness and that was blessing enough.

  Steadily she kept her distance. He said the name

  that he knew her by—l’hirondelle des Antilles,

  the tag on Maud’s quilt. The mate jigged the bamboo rods

  from which the baits trawled. Then it frightened Achille

  that this was no swallow but the bait of the gods,

  that she had seen the god’s body torn from its hill.

  II

  The horned island sank. This meant they were far out,

  perhaps twenty miles, over the unmarked fathoms

  where the midshipman watched the frigate come about,

  where no anchor has enough rope and no plummet plumbs.

  His cold heart was heaving in the ancestral swell

  of the ocean that had widened around the last

  point where the Trades bent the almonds like a candle-

  flame. He stood as the swift suddenly shot past

  the hull, so closely that he thought he heard a cry

  from the small parted beak, and he saw the whole world

  globed in the passing sorrow of her sleepless eye.

  The mate never saw her. He watched as Achille furled

  both oars into one oar and laid them parallel

  in the grave of In God We Troust, like man and wife,

  like grandmother and grandfather with ritual

  solicitude, then stood balancing with a knife

  as firm as a gommier rooted in its own ground.

  “You okay?” he said, speaking to the swaying mast.

  And these were the noble and lugubrious names

  under the rocking shadow of In God We Troust:

  Habal, swept in a gale overboard; Winston James,

  commonly know as “Toujours Sou” or “Always Soused,”

  whose body disappeared, some claimed in a vapour

  of white rum or l’absinthe; Herald Chastenet, plaiter

  of lobster-pots, whose alias was “Fourmi Rouge,”

  i.e., “Red Ant,” who was terrified of water

  but launched a skiff one sunrise with white-rum courage

  to conquer his fear. Some fishermen could not swim.

  Dorcas Henry could not, but they learnt this later

  searching the pronged rocks for whelks, where they found him,

  for some reason clutching a starfish. There were others

  whom Achille had heard of, mainly through Philoctete,

  and, of course, the nameless bones of all his brothers

  drowned in the crossing, plus a Midshipman Plunkett.

  He stood like a mast amidships, remembering them,

  in the lace wreaths of the Caribbean anthem.

  Achille looked up at the sun, it was vertical

  as an anchor-rope. Its ring ironed his hot skull

  like a flat iron, singeing his cap with its smell.

  No action but stasis. He is riding the swell

  of the line now. He lets the angling oars idle

  in their wooden oarlocks. He sprinkles the scorched sail

  stitched from old flour sacks and tied round the middle

  with seawater from the calabash to keep it supple,

  scooping with one hand over the rocking gunwale

  with the beat of habit, a hand soaked in its skill,

  or the stitches could split the seams, and the ply

  of its knots rot from this heat. Then, as Achille

  sprinkles the flour sack, he watches it dry rapidly

  in a sun like a hot iron flattening his skull,

  and staggers with the calabash. The tied bundle

  huddles like a corpse. Oui, Bon Dieu! I go hurl

  it overside. Out of the depths of
his ritual

  baptism something was rising, some white memory

  of a midshipman coming up close to the hull,

  a white turning body, and this water go fill

  with them, turning tied canvases, not sharks, but all

  corpses wrapped like the sail, and ice-sweating Achille

  in the stasis of his sunstroke looked as each swell

  disgorged them, in tens, in hundreds, and his soul

  sickened and was ill. His jaw slackened. A gull

  screeched whirling backwards, and it was the tribal

  sorrow that Philoctete could not drown in alcohol.

  It was not forgetful as the sea-mist or the crash

  of breakers on the crisp beaches of Senegal

  or the Guinea coast. He reached for the calabash

  and poured it streaming over his boiling skull,

  then sat back and tried to settle the wash

  of bilge in his stomach. Then he began to pull

  at the knots in the sail. Meanwhile, that fool

  his mate went on quietly setting the fishpot.

  Time is the metre, memory the only plot.

  His shoulders are knobs of ebony. The back muscles

  can bulge like porpoises leaping out of this line

  from the gorge of our memory. His hard fists enclose

  its mossed rope as bearded as a love-vine

  or a blind old man, tight as a shark’s jaws,

  wrenching the weight, then loosening it again

  as the line saws his palms’ sealed calluses,

  the logwood thighs anchor against the fast drain

  of the trough, and here is my tamer of horses,

  our only inheritance that elemental noise

  of the windward, unbroken breakers, Ithaca’s

  or Africa’s, all joining the ocean’s voice,

  because this is the Atlantic now, this great design

  of the triangular trade. Achille saw the ghost

  of his father’s face shoot up at the end of the line.

  Achille stared in pious horror at the bound canvas

  and could not look away, or loosen its burial knots.

  Then, for the first time, he asked himself who he was.

  He was lured by the swift the way trolling water

  mesmerizes a fisherman who stares at the

  fake metal fish as the lace troughs widen and close.

  III

  Outrunner of flying fish, under the geometry

  of the hidden stars, her wire flashed and faded

  taut as a catch, this mite of the sky-touching sea

  towing a pirogue a thousand times her own weight

  with a hummingbird’s electric wings, this engine

  that shot ahead of each question like an answer,

  once Achille had questioned his name and its origin.

  She touched both worlds with her rainbow, this frail dancer

  leaping the breakers, this dart of the meridian.

  She could loop the stars with a fishline, she tired

  porpoises, she circled epochs with her outstretched span;

  she gave a straight answer when one was required,

  she skipped the dolphin’s question, she stirred every spine

  of a sea-egg tickling your palm rank with the sea;

  she shut the ducts of a starfish, she was the mind-

  messenger, and her speed outdarted Memory.

  She was the swift that he had seen in the cedars

  in the foam of clouds, when she had shot across

  the blue ridges of the waves, to a god’s orders,

  and he, at the beck of her beak, watched the bird hum

  the whipping Atlantic, and felt he was headed home.

  Where whales burst into flower and sails turn back

  from a tiring horizon, she shot with curled feet

  close to her wet belly, round-eyed, her ruddering beak

  towing In God We Troust so fast that he felt his feet

  drumming on the ridged keel-board, its shearing motion

  whirred by the swift’s flywheel into open ocean.

  BOOK THREE

  Chapter XXV

  I

  Mangroves, their ankles in water, walked with the canoe.

  The swift, racing its browner shadow, screeched, then veered

  into a dark inlet. It was the last sound Achille knew

  from the other world. He feathered the paddle, steered

  away from the groping mangroves, whose muddy shelves

  slipped warted crocodiles, slitting the pods of their eyes;

  then the horned river-horses rolling over themselves

  could capsize the keel. It was like the African movies

  he had yelped at in childhood. The endless river unreeled

  those images that flickered into real mirages:

  naked mangroves walking beside him, knotted logs

  wriggling into the water, the wet, yawning boulders

  of oven-mouthed hippopotami. A skeletal warrior

  stood up straight in the stern and guided his shoulders,

  clamped his neck in cold iron, and altered the oar.

  Achille wanted to scream, he wanted the brown water

  to harden into a road, but the river widened ahead

  and closed behind him. He heard screeching laughter

  in a swaying tree, as monkeys swung from the rafter

  of their tree-house, and the bared sound rotted the sky

  like their teeth. For hours the river gave the same show

  for nothing, the canoe’s mouth muttered its lie.

  The deepest terror was the mud. The mud with no shadow

  like the clear sand. Then the river coiled into a bend.

  He saw the first signs of men, tall sapling fishing-stakes;

  he came into his own beginning and his end,

  for the swiftness of a second is all that memory takes.

  Now the strange, inimical river surrenders its stealth

  to the sunlight. And a light inside him wakes,

  skipping centuries, ocean and river, and Time itself.

  And God said to Achille, “Look, I giving you permission

  to come home. Is I send the sea-swift as a pilot,

  the swift whose wings is the sign of my crucifixion.

  And thou shalt have no God should in case you forgot

  my commandments.” And Achille felt the homesick shame

  and pain of his Africa. His heart and his bare head

  were bursting as he tried to remember the name

  of the river- and the tree-god in which he steered,

  whose hollow body carried him to the settlement ahead.

  II

  He remembered this sunburnt river with its spindly

  stakes and the peaked huts platformed above the spindles

  where thin, naked figures as he rowed past looked unkindly

  or kindly in their silence. The silence an old fence kindles

  in a boy’s heart. They walked with his homecoming

  canoe past bonfires in a scorched clearing near the edge

  of the soft-lipped shallows whose noise hurt his drumming

  heart as the pirogue slid its raw, painted wedge

  towards the crazed sticks of a vine-fastened pier.

  The river was sloughing its old skin like a snake

  in wrinkling sunshine; the sun resumed its empire

  over this branch of the Congo; the prow found its stake

  in the river and nuzzled it the way that a piglet

  finds its favourite dug in the sweet-grunting sow,

  and now each cheek ran with its own clear rivulet

  of tears, as Achille, weeping, fastened the bow

  of the dugout, wiped his eyes with one dry palm,

  and felt a hard hand help him up the shaking pier.

  Half of me was with him. One half with the midshipman

  by a Dutch canal. But now, neither was happi
er

  or unhappier than the other. An old man put an arm

  around Achille, and the crowd, chattering, followed both.

  They touched his trousers, his undershirt, their hands

  scrabbling the texture, as a kitten does with cloth,

  till they stood before an open hut. The sun stands

  with expectant silence. The river stops talking,

  the way silence sometimes suddenly turns off a market.

  The wind squatted low in the grass. A man kept walking

  steadily towards him, and he knew by that walk it

  was himself in his father, the white teeth, the widening hands.

  III

  He sought his own features in those of their life-giver,

  and saw two worlds mirrored there: the hair was surf

  curling round a sea-rock, the forehead a frowning river,

  as they swirled in the estuary of a bewildered love,

  and Time stood between them. The only interpreter

  of their lips’ joined babble, the river with the foam,

  and the chuckles of water under the sticks of the pier,

  where the tribe stood like sticks themselves, reversed

  by reflection. Then they walked up to the settlement,

  and it seemed, as they chattered, everything was rehearsed

  for ages before this. He could predict the intent

  of his father’s gestures; he was moving with the dead.

  Women paused at their work, then smiled at the warrior

  returning from his battle with smoke, from the kingdom

  where he had been captured, they cried and were happy.

  Then the fishermen sat near a large tree under whose dome

  stones sat in a circle. His father said:

  “Afo-la-be,”

  touching his own heart.

  “In the place you have come from

  what do they call you?”

  Time translates.

  Tapping his chest,

  the son answers:

  “Achille.” The tribe rustles, “Achille.”

  Then, like cedars at sunrise, the mutterings settle.

  AFOLABE

  Achille. What does the name mean? I have forgotten the one

  that I gave you. But it was, it seems, many years ago.

  What does it mean?

  ACHILLE

  Well, I too have forgotten.

  Everything was forgotten. You also. I do not know.

  The deaf sea has changed around every name that you gave

  us; trees, men, we yearn for a sound that is missing.

  AFOLABE

  A name means something. The qualities desired in a son,

  and even a girl-child; so even the shadows who called