Omeros

  grooved the Republic towards her. A spike hammered

  into the heart of their country as the Sioux looked on.

  The spike for the Union Pacific had entered

  my heart without cheers for her far gentler weapon.

  I could not believe it was over any more

  than they did. Their stunned, anachronistic faces

  moved through the crowd, or stood, with the same expression

  that I saw in my own when I looked through the glass,

  for a land that was lost, a woman who was gone.

  III

  The elegies of summer sighed in the marram,

  to bending Virgilian reeds. Languid meadows

  raised their natural fly-screens around the Parkin farm.

  Larks arrowed from the goldenrod into soft doors

  of enclosing thunderheads, and the rattled maize

  threshed like breaking surf to Catherine Weldon’s ears.

  Ripe grain alchemized the pheasant, the pelt of mice

  nibbling the stalks was unctuous as the beaver’s,

  but the sky was scribbled with the prophetic cries

  of multiplying hawks. The grass by the rivers

  shone silvery green whenever its nub of felt

  was chafed between the thumb and finger of the wind;

  rainbow trout leapt arching into canoes and filled

  their bark bodies while a clear wake chuckled behind

  the gliding hunter. An immensity of peace

  across which the thunderheads rumbled like waggons,

  to which the hawk held the rights, a rolling excess

  from knoll and pasture concealed the wound of her son’s

  death from a rusty nail. It returned the image

  when the goldenrod quivered, from a golden past:

  Flushed wings. A shot. Her husband hoisting a partridge,

  still flapping, towards her. That summer did not last,

  but time wasn’t treacherous. What would not remain

  was not only the season but the tribes themselves,

  as Indian summer raced the cloud-galloping plain,

  when their dust would blow like maize from the furrowed shelves,

  which the hawks prophesied to mice cowering in grain.

  Chapter XXXV

  I

  “Somewhere over there,” said my guide, “the Trail of Tears

  started.” I leant towards the crystalline creek. Pines

  shaded it. Then I made myself hear the water’s

  language around the rocks in its clear-running lines

  and its small shelving falls with their eddies, “Choctaws,”

  “Creeks,” “Choctaws,” and I thought of the Greek revival

  carried past the names of towns with columned porches,

  and how Greek it was, the necessary evil

  of slavery, in the catalogue of Georgia’s

  marble past, the Jeffersonian ideal in

  plantations with its Hectors and Achilleses,

  its foam in the dogwood’s spray, past towns named Helen,

  Athens, Sparta, Troy. The slave shacks, the rolling peace

  of the wave-rolling meadows, oak, pine, and pecan,

  and a creek like this one. From the window I saw

  the bundles of women moving in ragged bands

  like those on the wharf, headed for Oklahoma;

  then I saw Seven Seas, a rattle in his hands.

  A huge thunderhead was unclenching its bruised fist

  over the county. Shadows escaped through the pines

  and the pecan groves and hounds were closing in fast

  deep into Georgia, where history happens

  to be the baying echoes of brutality,

  and terror in the oaks along red country roads,

  or the gibbet branches of a silk-cotton tree

  from which Afolabes hung like bats. Hooded clouds

  guarded the town squares with their calendar churches,

  whose white, peaked belfries asserted that pastoral

  of brooks with leisurely accents. On their verges,

  like islands reflected on windscreens, Negro shacks

  moved like a running wound, like the rusty anchor

  that scabbed Philoctete’s shin, I imagined the backs

  moving through the foam of pods, one arm for an oar,

  one for the gunny sack. Brown streams tinkled in chains.

  Bridges arched their spines. Led into their green pasture,

  horses sagely grazed or galloped the plantations.

  II

  “Life is so fragile. It trembles like the aspens.

  All its shadows are seasonal, including pain.

  In drizzling dusk the rain enters the lindens

  with its white lances, then lindens enclose the rain.

  So that day isn’t far when they will say, ‘Indians

  bowed under those branches, which tribe is not certain.’

  Nor am I certain I lived. I breathed what the farm

  exhaled. Its soils, its seasons. The swayed goldenrod,

  the corn where summer hid me, pollen on my arm,

  sweat tickling my armpits. The Plains were fierce as God

  and wide as His mind. I enjoyed diminishing,

  I exalted in insignificance after

  the alleys of Boston, in the unfinishing

  chores of the farm, alone. Once, from the barn’s rafter

  a swift or a swallow shot out, taking with it

  my son’s brown, whirring soul, and I knew that its aim

  was heaven. More and more we learn to do without

  those we still love. With my father it was the same.

  The bounty of God pursued me over the Plains

  of the Dakotas, the pheasants, the quick-volleyed

  arrows of finches; smoke bound me to the Indians

  from morning to sunset when I have watched its veiled

  rising, because I am a widow, barbarous

  and sun-cured in the face, I loved them ever since

  I worked as a hand in Colonel Cody’s circus,

  under a great canvas larger than all their tents,

  when they were paid to ride round in howling circles,

  with a dime for their glory, and boys screamed in fright

  at the galloping braves. Now the aspens enclose

  the lances of rain, and the wet leaves shake with light.”

  III

  From the fort another waltz drifted on the lake

  past the pier’s paper lanterns, swayed by violins

  in the brass-buttoned night. Catherine Weldon,

  like Achille on the river, watched the worried lines

  made by the boathouse lanterns. Then she heard a loon’s

  wooden cry over black water. Lights draped the coigns

  of the pierhead, then a scream as round as the moon’s

  circled her scalp. The nausea stirring her loins

  was not from war, but from the treachery that came after

  war, the white peace of paper so ornately signed

  that perhaps that sound was really the loon’s laughter

  at treaties changing like clouds, their ink faded like wind.

  Empires practised their abstract universals

  of deceit: treaties signed with a wink of a pen’s

  eye dipped in an inkhorn, but this was not Versailles

  with painted cherubs, but on the Dakota Plains.

  She had believed in the redemptions of History,

  that the papers the Sioux had folded to their hearts

  would be kept like God’s word, that each signatory,

  after all that suffering, had blotted out their hates,

  and that peace would break out as widely as the moon

  through the black smoke of clouds that made the lake-water

  shine stronger than the lanterns. Then she heard the loon,

  no pain in the cry this time, but wooden laughter.

&n
bsp; The clouds turned blank pages, the book I was reading

  was like Plunkett charting the Battle of the Saints.

  The New World was wide enough for a new Eden

  of various Adams. A smell of innocence

  like that of the first heavy snow came off the page

  as I inhaled the spine. She walked past the lanterns

  where some bark canoes were moored to the landing stage,

  then paused to look at the waltzers in their ghost dance,

  then stood at the window clapping transparent hands.

  When one grief afflicts us we choose a sharper grief

  in hope that enormity will ease affliction,

  so Catherine Weldon rose in high relief

  through the thin page of a cloud, making a fiction

  of my own loss. I was searching for characters,

  and in her shawled voice I heard the snow that would be blown

  when the wind covered the tracks of the Dakotas,

  the Sioux, and the Crows; my sorrow had been replaced.

  Like a swift over water, her pen’s shadow raced.

  “I have found, in bleached grass, the miniature horror

  of a crow’s skull. When dry corn rattles its bonnet,

  does it mean the Blackfoot is preparing for war?

  When the Crow sets his visage on Death, and round it

  circles his eyes with moons, each one is a mirror

  foretold by his palm. So, the bird’s skull in the grass

  transfixed me, parting the spears of dry corn, just as

  it would your blond soldiers. As for the herds that graze

  through lance-high grasses, drifting with the Dakotas,

  are not the Sioux as uncertain of paradise,

  when the grass darkens, as your corn-headed soldiers?

  Doubt isn’t the privilege of one complexion.

  I look to the white church spire and often think,

  Is the cross for them also? The resurrection

  of their bodies? The snow and the blood that we drink

  for our broken Word? Ask your wheat-headed soldiers.

  The charm that rattles in the fists of the shamans

  is a god, not a writhing snake, with its severed tail.

  They believe a Great Wind will whirl them in its hands

  by grasses that never die, springs that never fail,

  that restore their souls like the clear-running Hebron.”

  Lantern light shines through the skin of an army tent

  where her shadow asked its question. Catherine Weldon,

  in our final letter to the Indian agent.

  Chapter XXXVI

  I

  Museums endure; but sic transit gloria

  agitates the leaf-light on their concrete benches

  in the sculpture garden, where frock-tailed sparrows are

  tagging notes to a pediment while finches

  debate on a classic façade. Art has surrendered

  to History with its whiff of formaldehyde.

  Over a glass-case a scholarly beard renders

  a clouding judgement. The freckle-faced sun outside

  mugs through a window, and so I retrieve my breath

  from a varnished portrait, take back my irises

  from glaring insomniac Caesar, for whom death

  by marble resolved the conspirator’s crisis,

  past immortal statues inviting me to die.

  Out in fresh air, close to a Bayeux of ivy,

  I smoked on the steps and read the calligraphy

  of swallows. Behind me, reverential mourners

  whispered like people in banks or terminal wards;

  Art is immortal and weighs heavily on us,

  and museums leave us at a loss for words.

  Outside becomes a museum: its ornate frames

  square off a dome, a few trees, a brace of sparrows;

  till every view is a postcard signed by great names:

  that sky Canaletto’s, that empty bench Van Gogh’s.

  I ground out my butt and re-entered the dead air,

  down the echoing marble with its waxed air

  of a pharaonic feast. Then round a corridor

  I caught the light on green water as salt and clear

  as the island’s. Then I saw him. Achille! Bigger

  than I remembered on the white sun-splintered deck

  of the hot hull. Achille! My main man, my nigger!

  circled by chain-sawing sharks; the ropes in his neck

  turned his head towards Africa in The Gulf Stream,

  which luffed him there, forever, between our island

  and the coast of Guinea, fixed in the tribal dream,

  in the light that entered another Homer’s hand,

  its breeze lifting the canvas from the museum.

  But those leprous columns thudding against the hull

  where Achille rests on one elbow always circle

  his craft and mine, it needs no redemptive white sail

  from a sea whose rhythm swells like Herman Melville.

  Heah’s Cap’n Melville on de whiteness ob de whale—

  “Having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue …

  giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe.”

  Lawd, Lawd, Massa Melville, what could a nigger do

  but go down dem steps in de dusk you done describe?

  So I stood in the dusk between the Greek columns

  of the museum touched by the declining sun

  on the gilt of the State House dome, on Saint Gaudens’s

  frieze of black soldiers darkening on the Common,

  and felt myself melting in their dusk. My collar

  turned up in a real freeze, I looked for a cab,

  but cabs, like the fall, were a matter of colour,

  and several passed, empty. In the back of one, Ahab

  sat, trying to catch his whaler. I looped a shout

  like a harpoon, like Queequeg, but the only spout

  was a sculptured fountain’s. Sic transit taxi, sport.

  Streetlights came on. The museum windows went out.

  II

  Passing the lamplit leaves I knew I was different

  from them as our skins were different in an empire

  that boasted about its hues, in a New England

  that had raked the leaves of the tribes into one fire

  on the lawn back of the carport, like dead almond

  leaves on a beach, and I saw the alarmed pale look,

  when I stepped out of a streetlight, that a woman

  gave me at a bus-stop, straight out of Melville’s book;

  then the consoling smile, like a shark’s, all the fear

  that had widened between us was incurable,

  as cold as the edge of autumn in the night air

  whose leaves rustled the pages of Melville’s Bible.

  III

  White sanderlings scuttered towards the fraying net

  of the evening surf, then panicked, just out of reach,

  when a wave made another try, although it could not

  exceed the limits set by the scalloping beach

  where the birds were mirrored in slate, their shapes exact

  and nervous, beaks darting, and then the wrinkling glass

  disturbed their reflection. As I steadily walked

  towards them, the clattering flock, to let me pass,

  circled the tilted sea, and then it resettled,

  wave, sand, and bird repeating their process, since they

  had seen so many lovers joined by the hands, led

  by the star that rises first from the darkening bay.

  On the mud-marked seafront people took evening walks,

  letting their dogs sniff the foam from a pewter surf,

  gulls puffed their chests to the medalling sun on rocks

  drying at low tide. Loosened kale heaved in the sough

  of the lobster-yawls.
A dog kept barking, “Hough, hough!”

  at the stiff horizon. Homer (first name Winslow)

  made that white chapel stroke under the mackerel-shoaled

  sky of Marblehead, reframed in the windscreens

  of cars in the parking lot. Summer was bone-cold.

  On the nibbling beach whipped by its wind-machines

  the scarves lifted and rattled with a lifeguard’s flag,

  and a knife that was edged with autumn pressed its blade

  on my cheek, the wind sounded like a paper-bag

  thwacked open, and the crunching sound my shoes made

  on the concrete’s sand enraged me. Tears blurred my sight;

  head lowered, I stopped. White shoes were blocking my path.

  I looked up. My father stood in the white drill suit

  of his eternal summer on another wharf.

  He stood in cold mud watching the curled froth decline

  round Marblehead. Gulls were turning in from the cold.

  He put out his hand. The palm was as cold as mine.

  I said: “This is hardly the place; maybe I called

  but it’s too cold for talk; this happens to old men,

  and I’m nearly there. You could have been my child,

  and the more I live, the more our ages widen.”

  “We could go to a warmer place.” My father smiled.

  “Oh, not where you think, an island close to Eden.

  But before you return, you must enter cities

  that open like The World’s Classics, in which I dreamt

  I saw my shadow on their flagstones, histories

  that carried me over the bridge of self-contempt,

  though I never stared in their rivers, great abbeys

  soaring in net-webbed stone, when I felt diminished

  even by a postcard. Those things I wrote to please

  your mother and our friends, unrevised, unfinished,

  in drawing-room concerts died in their own applause.

  Way back in the days of the barber’s winding sheet,

  I longed for those streets that History had made great,

  but the island became my fortress and retreat,

  in that circle of friends that I could dominate.

  Dominate, Dominus. With His privilege,

  I felt like the “I” that looks down on an island,

  the way that a crested palm looks down from its ridge

  on a harbour warmer than this one, or my hand.

  But there is pride in cities, so remember this:

  Once you have seen everything and gone everywhere,

  cherish our island for its green simplicities,