but carrying its own death inside it, wearily.
Red god gone with autumn and white winter early.
Chapter XLIII
I
Flour was falling on the Plains. Her hair turned grey
carrying logs from the woodpile. The tiny turret
of the fort in the snow pointed like a chalet
in a child’s crystal and Catherine remembered
the lights on all afternoon in a Boston street,
the power of the globe that lay in a girl’s palm
to shake the world to whiteness and obliterate
it the way the drifts were blurring the Parkin farm,
the orange twilight cast by the feverish grate
at the carpet’s edge on arrows of andirons
in a brass quiver. She felt the light marking lines
on her warm forehead, reddening the snow mountains
above the chalet with their green crepe-paper pines;
then she would shake the crystal and all would be snow,
the Ghost Dance, assembling then, as it was now.
Work made her wrists cold iron. She rested the axe
down in its white echo. No life was as hard as
the Sioux’s, she thought. But a pride had stiffened their backs.
Hunger could shovel them up like dried cicadas
into the fiery pit like that in the hearth,
when she stared round-eyed in the flames. They were not meek,
and she had been taught the meek inherit the earth.
The flour kept falling. Inedible manna
fell on their children’s tongues, from dribbling sacks
condemned by the army. The crow’s flapping banner
flew over the homes of the Braves. They stood like stakes
without wires: the Crows, the Sioux, the Dakotas.
The snow blew in their wincing faces like papers
from another treaty which a blind shaman tears
to bits in the wind. The pines have lifted their spears.
Except that the thick, serrated line on the slope
was rapidly growing more pine-trees. A faint bugle
sounded from the chalet. She watched the pine-trees slip
in their white smoke downhill to the hoot of an owl
and yapping coyotes answering the bugle,
as the pines lowered their lances in a gallop,
and she heard what leapt from the pine-logs as a girl,
the crackle of rifle-fire from the toy fort,
like cicadas in drought; then she heard the cannon—
the late muffled echo after it was fired
and the dark blossom it made, its arch bringing down
lances and riders with it. The serrated sea
of pines spread out on the plain, their own avalanche
whitening them, but they screamed in the ecstasy
of their own massacre, since this was the Ghost Dance,
and the blizzard slowly erased their swirling cries,
the horses and spinning riders with useless shields,
in the white smoke, the Sioux, the Dakotas, the Crows.
The flour basting their corpses on the white fields.
The absence that settled over the Dakotas
was contained in the globe. Its pines, its tiny house.
II
“I pray to God that I never share in man’s will,
which widened before me. I saw a chain of men
linked by wrists to our cavalry. I watched until
they were a line of red ants. I let out a moan
as the last ant disappeared. Then I rode downhill
away from the Parkin farm to the Indian camp.
I entered the camp in the snow. A starved mongrel
and a papoose sat in the white street, with a clay
vessel in the child’s hands, and the dog’s fanged growl
backed off from my horse, then lunged. Then I turned away
down another street through the tents to more and more
silence. There were hoof-marks frozen in the flour dust
near a hungry tent-mouth. I got off. Through its door
I saw white-eyed Omeros, motionless. He must
be deaf too, I thought, as well as blind, since his head
never turned, and then he lifted the dry rattle
in one hand, and it was the same sound I had heard
in Cody’s circus, the snake hiss before battle.
There was a broken arrow, and others in the quiver
around his knees. Those were our promises. I stared
a long while at his silence. It was a white river
under black pines in winter. I was only scared
when my horse snorted outside, perhaps from the sound
of the rattler. I went back outside. Where were the
women and children? I walked on the piebald ground
with its filthy snow, and stopped. I saw a warrior
frozen in a drift and took him to be a Sioux
and heard the torn war flags rattling on their poles,
then the child’s cry somewhere in the flour of snow,
but never found her or the dog. I saw the soles
of their moccasins around the tents, and a horse
ribbed like a barrel with flies circling its teeth.
I walked like a Helen among their dead warriors.
III
“This was history. I had no power to change it.
And yet I still felt that this had happened before.
I knew it would happen again, but how strange it
was to have seen it in Boston, in the hearth-fire.
I was a leaf in the whirlwind of the Ordained.
Then Omeros’s voice came from the mouth of the tent:
‘We galloped towards death swept by the exaltation
of meeting ourselves in a place just like this one:
The Ghost Dance has tied the tribes into one nation.
As the salmon grows tired of its ladder of stone,
so have we of fighting the claws of the White Bear,
dripping red beads on the snow. Whiteness is everywhere.’”
Look, Catherine! There are no more demons outside the door.
The white wolf drags its shawled tail into the high snow
through the pine lances, the blood dried round its jaw;
it is satisfied. Come, come to the crusted window,
blind as it is with the ice, through the pane’s cataract;
see, it’s finished. It’s over, Catherine, you have been saved.
But she sat on a chair in the parlour while the cracked
window spread its webs, and for days and nights starved
and thinned in her rocker. The maddened wind runs
around the still farm. Bread greened, and like a carved
totem her body hardened to wood. Apples dried, onions
curled with green sprouts, and rats, growing bolder,
with eyes like berries, moved like the burial lanterns
of the cavalry. Her shawl slipped from one shoulder
but she left it there, in peace, since this was peace now,
the winter of the Ghost Dance. “I’m one year older,”
she said to the feathery window. “I loved snow
once, but now I dread its white siege outside my door.”
Years severed in half by winter! By a darkness
through which branches groped, paralyzed in their distress.
Which flocks betrayed. Wild geese with their own honking noise
over jammed highways, the Charles’s slow-moving ice.
No twilight, but lamps turned on in mid-afternoon,
my humped shadow like a bear entering its cave,
clawing at the frozen lock, as every noun
became its muffled echo, every street a grave
with snow on both sides. I caught the implications
of a traffic-light winking on an iron s
ky
that I could, since the only civilizations
were those with snow, whiten to anonymity.
Turn the page. Blank winter. The obliteration
of nouns fading into echoes, the alphabet
of scribbling branches. Boots stamp the trolley station.
Dead cars foam at the mouth with icicles. The boat
of the streetcar’s light divides the frozen breakers,
then steaming passengers scratch at the webbed windows’
quickly stitched lace. Swaying in black coats and parkas,
every face is a lantern wincing when the doors
part their rubber accordion, their tears like glass.
The name I had mispronounced was as muffled now
as any white noun outside the spectral stations
along the line, where the faces were flecked with snow
when the full car passed them, resigned in their patience
like statues in their museum. Her old address
enlarged with the next stop. The passengers staggered
on the straps, the doors in a blast of malice
grinned open, the bell rang, and suddenly I stood
in bewildering whiteness, flakes clouding my eyes.
The streets were white as her studio, huge boulders
of sculptured coral, the blinding limestone of Greece
like frozen breakers on the path between closed doors.
The panes of ice in the gutters were as grey as
those of the houses. I climbed steps, I read buzzers,
searched from the pavement again for that attic where
a curved statue had rolled black stockings down its knees,
unclipped and then shaken the black rain of its hair,
and “Omeros” echoed from a white-throated vase.
But no door opened to show me her startled eyes
behind its brass chain, no light linked the Asian bones
of the axe-blade cheek. The glaucous windows were blind.
I had lost the address. I walked through coral stones
that whined like a cemetery in the sunlit wind,
then waited for the trolley’s eye as we did once
on the other side of that year. One came. Its doors
yawned and rattled shut. Its hull slid past the combers.
Houses passed like a wharf. Hers. Or some other house.
BOOK SIX
Chapter XLIV
I
In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez,
the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane
down the archipelago’s highways. The first breeze
rattled the spears and their noise was like distant rain
marching down from the hills, like a shell at your ears.
In the cool asphalt Sundays of the Antilles
the light brought the bitter history of sugar
across the squared fields, heightening towards harvest,
to the bleached flags of the Indian diaspora.
The drizzling light blew across the savannah
darkening the racehorses’ hides; mist slowly erased
the royal palms on the crests of the hills and the
hills themselves. The brown patches the horses had grazed
shone as wet as their hides. A skittish stallion
jerked at his bridle, marble-eyed at the thunder
muffling the hills, but the groom was drawing him in
like a fisherman, wrapping the slack line under
one fist, then with the other tightening the rein
and narrowing the circle. The sky cracked asunder
and a forked tree flashed, and suddenly that black rain
which can lose an entire archipelago
in broad daylight was pouring tin nails on the roof,
hammering the balcony. I closed the French window,
and thought of the horses in their stalls with one hoof
tilted, watching the ropes of rain. I lay in bed
with current gone from the bed-lamp and heard the roar
of wind shaking the windows, and I remembered
Achille on his own mattress and desperate Hector
trying to save his canoe, I thought of Helen
as my island lost in the haze, and I was sure
I’d never see her again. All of a sudden
the rain stopped and I heard the sluicing of water
down the guttering. I opened the window when
the sun came out. It replaced the tiny brooms
of palms on the ridges. On the red galvanized
roof of the paddock, the wet sparkled, then the grooms
led the horses over the new grass and exercised
them again, and there was a different brightness
in everything, in the leaves, in the horses’ eyes.
II
I smelt the leaves threshing at the top of the year
in green January over the orange villas
and military barracks where the Plunketts were,
the harbour flecked by the wind that comes with Christmas,
edged with the Arctic, that was christened Vent Noël;
it stayed until March and, with luck, until Easter.
It freshened the cedars, waxed the laurier-cannelle,
and hid the African swift. I smelt the drizzle
on the asphalt leaving the Morne, it was the smell
of an iron on damp cloth; I heard the sizzle
of fried jackfish in oil with their coppery skin;
I smelt ham studded with cloves, the crusted accra,
the wax in the varnished parlour: Come in. Come in,
the arm of the Morris chair sticky with lacquer;
I saw a sail going out and a sail coming in,
and a breeze so fresh it lifted the lace curtains
like a petticoat, like a sail towards Ithaca;
I smelt a dead rivulet in the clogged drains.
III
Ah, twin-headed January, seeing either tense:
a past, they assured us, born in degradation,
and a present that lifted us up with the wind’s
noise in the breadfruit leaves with such an elation
that it contradicts what is past! The cannonballs
of rotting breadfruit from the Battle of the Saints,
the asterisks of bulletholes in the brick walls
of the redoubt. I lived there with every sense.
I smelt with my eyes, I could see with my nostrils.
Chapter XLV
I
One side of the coast plunges its precipices
into the Atlantic. Turns require wide locks,
since the shoulder is sharp and the curve just misses
a long drop over the wind-bent trees and the rocks
between the trees. There is a wide view of Dennery,
with its stone church and raw ochre cliffs at whose base
the African breakers end. Across the flecked sea
whose combers veil and unveil the rocks with their lace
the next port is Dakar. The uninterrupted wind
thuds under the wings of frigates, you see them bent
from a force that has crossed the world, tilting to find
purchase in the sudden downdrafts of its current.
The breeze threshed the palms on the cool December road
where the Comet hurtled with empty leopard seats,
so fast a man on a donkey trying to read
its oncoming fiery sign heard only two thudding beats
from the up-tempo zouk that its stereo played
when it screeched round a bridge and began to ascend
away from the palm-fronds and their wickerwork shade
that left the windscreen clear as it locked round the bend,
where Hector suddenly saw the trotting piglet
and thought of Plunkett’s warning as he heard it screel
with the same sound t
hat the tires of the Comet
made rounding the curve from the sweat-greased steering wheel.
The rear wheels spin to a dead stop, like a helm.
The piglet trots down the safer side of the road.
Lodged in their broken branches the curled letters flame.
Hector had both hands on the wheel. His head was bowed
under the swaying statue of the Madonna
of the Rocks, her smile swayed under the blue hood,
and when her fluted robe stilled, the smile stayed on her
dimpled porcelain. She saw, in the bowed man, the calm
common oval of prayer, the head’s usual angle
over the pew of the dashboard. Her lifted palm,
small as a doll’s from its cerulean mantle,
indicated that he had prayed enough to the lace
of foam round the cliff’s altar, that now, if he wished,
he could lift his head, but he stayed in the same place,
the way a man will remain when Mass is finished,
not unclenching his hands or freeing one to cross
forehead, heart, and shoulders swiftly and then kneel
facing the altar. He bowed in endless remorse,
for her mercy at what he had done to Achille,
his brother. But his arc was over, for the course
of every comet is such. The fated crescent
was printed on the road by the scorching tires.
A salt tear ran down the porcelain cheek and it went
in one slow drop to the clenched knuckle that still gripped
the wheel. On the flecked sea, the uninterrupted
wind herded the long African combers, and whipped
the small flag of the island on its silver spearhead.
II
Drivers leant over the rail. One seized my luggage
off the porter’s cart. The rest burst into patois,
with gestures of despair at the lost privilege
of driving me, then turned to other customers.
In the evening pastures horses grazed, their hides wet
with light that shot its lances over the combers.
I had the transport all to myself.
“You all set?
Good. A good pal of mine died in that chariot
of his called the Comet.”
He turned in the front seat,
spinning the air with his free hand. I sat, sprawled out
in the back, discouraging talk, with my crossed feet.
“You never know when, eh? I was at the airport
that day. I see him take off like a rocket.
I always said that thing have too much horsepower.