and sucking faces that argued Necessity
in rapid zeroes which no one else understood
for the island’s profit. One had rented the sea
to offshore trawlers, whose nets, if hoisted, would show
for thrice the length of its coast, while another thief
turned his black head like a ball in a casino
when the roulette wheel slowed down like his clicking teeth
in the pool’s sluggish circle. It screamed in contempt
that choked in its bile at black people’s laziness
whenever it leapt from the lava and then went
under again, then the shooting steam shot its price
from a fissure, as they went on making their deals
for the archipelago with hot, melting hands
before the price of their people dropped. The sandals
led me along the right path, around the fierce sands,
round the circle of speculation, where others
kept making room for slaves to betray their brothers,
till the eyes in the stone head were cursing their tears.
II
Just as the nightingales had forgotten his lines,
cameras, not chimeras, saw his purple sea
as a postcard archipelago with gnarled pines
and godless temples, where the end of poetry
was a goat bleating down from the theatre steps
while the myrtles rustled like the dry sails of ships.
“You ain’t been nowhere,” Seven Seas said, “you have seen
nothing no matter how far you may have travelled,
cities with shadowy spires stitched on a screen
which the beak of a swift has ravelled and unravelled;
you have learnt no more than if you stood on that beach
watching the unthreading foam you watched as a youth,
except your skill with one oar; you hear the salt speech
that your father once heard; one island, and one truth.
Your wanderer is a phantom from the boy’s shore.
Mark you, he does not go; he sends his narrator;
he plays tricks with time because there are two journeys
in every odyssey, one on worried water,
the other crouched and motionless, without noise.
For both, the ‘I’ is a mast; a desk is a raft
for one, foaming with paper, and dipping the beak
of a pen in its foam, while an actual craft
carries the other to cities where people speak
a different language, or look at him differently,
while the sun rises from the other direction
with its unsettling shadows, but the right journey
is motionless; as the sea moves round an island
that appears to be moving, love moves round the heart—
with encircling salt, and the slowly travelling hand
knows it returns to the port from which it must start.
Therefore, this is what this island has meant to you,
why my bust spoke, why the sea-swift was sent to you:
to circle yourself and your island with this art.”
Helmets of mud-caked skulls. Out of the spectres
that the forge of the Malebolge was bubbling with,
a doubled shape stood up. Its grin was like Hector’s.
Hector in hell, shouldering the lance of an oar!
In this place he had put himself in full belief
of an afterlife; a shadow in the geyser
that arched like a comet with its fountaining steam,
since for me not to have seen him there would question
a doctrine with more conviction than my own dream.
His charred face seemed to be travelling to the sun,
when its light broke through the changeable smoke once more,
since hell was certain to him as much as heaven;
now he was helmeted, and the borrowed visor
had slitted his face like an iguana’s pods,
his shield a spiked hubcap, for the road-warrior
had paused in the smoke, not for Omeros’s gods
nor the masks of his origins, the god-river,
the god-snake, but for the One that gathered his race
in the shoal of a net, a confirmed believer
in his own hell, that his spectre’s punishment was
a halt in its passage towards a smokeless place.
There were Bennett & Ward! The two young Englishmen
in dirty pith-helmets crouched by the yellow sand
dribbling from the volcano’s crust. Both were condemned
to pass a thermometer like that ampersand
which connected their names on a blackboard, its sign
coiled like a constrictor round the tree of Eden.
III
The stone heels guided me. I followed close behind
through the veils of stinking sulphur, filthy and frayed,
till I was as blind as it was, steering with one hand
in front of my face, beating webs from my forehead,
through the fool’s gold of the yellow rocks, the thin sand
running from their fissures. But in such things, the guide
needs the trust of the wounded one to begin with;
he could feel my doubt behind him. That was no good.
I had lost faith both in religion and in myth.
In one pit were the poets. Selfish phantoms with eyes
who wrote with them only, saw only surfaces
in nature and men, and smiled at their similes,
condemned in their pit to weep at their own pages.
And that was where I had come from. Pride in my craft.
Elevating myself. I slid, and kept falling
towards the shit they stewed in; all the poets laughed,
jeering with dripping fingers; then Omeros gripped
my hand in enclosing marble and his strength moved
me away from that crowd, or else I might have slipped
to that backbiting circle, mockers and self-loved.
The blind feet guided me higher as the crust sloped.
As I, contemptuously, turned my head away,
a fist of ice gripped it from the soul-shaping forge,
and it wrenched my own head bubbling its half-lies,
crying out its name, but each noun stuck in its gorge
as it begged for pardon, willing to surrender
if another chance were given it at language.
But the ice-matted head hissed,
“You tried to render
their lives as you could, but that is never enough;
now in the sulphur’s stench ask yourself this question,
whether a love of poverty helped you
to use other eyes, like those of that sightless stone?”
My own head sank in the black mud of Soufrière,
while it looked back with all the faith it could summon.
Both heads were turned like the god of the yawning year
on whose ridge I stood looking back where I came from.
The nightmare was gone. The bust became its own past,
I could still hear its white lines in the far-off foam.
I woke to hear blackbirds bickering at breakfast.
Chapter LIX
I
My light was clear. It defined the fallen schism
of a starfish, its asterisk printed on sand,
its homage to Omeros my exorcism.
I was an ant on the forehead of an atlas,
the stroke of one spidery palm on a cloud’s page,
an asterisk only. Achille with his cutlass
rattling into the hold shared the same privilege
of an archipelago’s dawn, a fresh language
salty and shared by the bittern’s caw, by a frieze
of low pelicans. The sea was my privilege.
And a f
resh people. The roar of famous cities
entered the sea-almond’s branches and then tightened
into silence, and my crab’s hand came out to write—
and down the January beach as it brightened
came bent sibyls sweeping the sand, then a hermit
waist-high in the empty bay, still splashing his face
in that immeasurable emptiness whose war
was between the clouds only. In that blessèd space
it was so quiet that I could hear the splutter
Philoctete made with his ablutions, and that deep “Ah!”
for the New Year’s benediction. Then Philoctete
waved “Morning” to me from far, and I waved back;
we shared the one wound, the same cure. I felt the wet
sand under my soles, and the beach close like a book
behind me with every footmark. The morning’s gift
was enough, but holier than that was the crab’s lift-
ed pincer with its pen like the sea-dipping swift.
All the thunderous myths of that ocean were blown
up with the spray that dragged from the lacy bulwarks
of Cap’s bracing headland. The sea had never known
any of them, nor had the illiterate rocks,
nor the circling frigates, nor even the white mesh
that knitted the Golden Fleece. The ocean had
no memory of the wanderings of Gilgamesh,
or whose sword severed whose head in the Iliad.
It was an epic where every line was erased
yet freshly written in sheets of exploding surf
in that blind violence with which one crest replaced
another with a trench and that heart-heaving sough
begun in Guinea to fountain exhaustion here,
however one read it, not as our defeat or
our victory; it drenched every survivor
with blessing. It never altered its metre
to suit the age, a wide page without metaphors.
Our last resort as much as yours, Omeros.
II
Why waste lines on Achille, a shade on the sea-floor?
Because strong as self-healing coral, a quiet culture
is branching from the white ribs of each ancestor,
deeper than it seems on the surface; slowly but sure,
it will change us with the fluent sculpture of Time,
it will grip like the polyp, soldered by the slime
of the sea-slug. Below him, a parodic architecture
re-erected the earth’s crusted columns, its porous
temples, stoas through which whipping eels slide,
over him the tasselled palanquins of Portuguese man-o’-wars
bobbed like Asian potentates, when ribbed dunes hide
the spiked minarets, and the waving banners of moss
are the ghosts of motionless hordes. The crabs’ anabasis
scuttles under his wake, because this is the true element,
water, which commemorates nothing in its stasis.
From that coral and crystalline origin, a simply decent
race broke from its various pasts, from howling sand
to a track in a forest, torn from the farthest places
of their nameless world. With nothing more in his hand
than the lance of a spear-gun, fishes keep shifting
direction like schools of philosophers,
and cautious plankton, who wait till darkness is lifting
from the Antillean seabed, burst into phosphorus,
meadows of stuttering praise. History has simplified
him. Its elegies had blinded me with the temporal
lament for a smoky Troy, but where coral died
it feeds on its death, the bones branch into more coral,
and contradiction begins. It lies in the schism
of the starfish reversing heaven; the mirror of History
has melted and, beneath it, a patient, hybrid organism
grows in his cruciform shadow. For a city
it had coral parthenons. No needling steeple
magnetized pilgrims, but it grew a good people.
God’s light ripples over them as it does the Troumasse
River in the morning, as it does over me, when
the palm-wheel threshes its spokes, and my ecstasy
of privilege lifts me with the man-o’-war’s wing
in that fear of happiness I have never shed,
pierced by a lance of sunlight flung over the sea.
O Sun, the one eye of heaven, O Force, O Light,
my heart kneels to you, my shadow has never changed
since the salt-fresh mornings of encircling delight
across whose cities the wings of the frigate ranged
freer than any republic, gliding with ancient
ease! I praise you not for my eyes. That other sight.
III
By the bay’s cobalt, to that inaudible thud
that hits the forehead with its stunning width and hue,
the rage of Achille at being misunderstood
by a camera for the spelling on his canoe
was the same process by which men are simplified
as if they were horses, muscles made beautiful
by working the sea; by the deep clefts that divide
the plates of their chests, the iron wrists that can pull
a dead log up the wash alone, or, when the trench
of a breaker crests, how their soles turn into rocks,
though they are blurred for a while in the bursting drench
shifting a little for purchase. So an anchor
had hooked its rust in one sufferer, and the scar shows
on the slit bone still; so work was the prayer of anger
for a cursing Achille, who refused to strike a pose
for crouching photographers. So, if at the day’s end
when they hauled with aching tendons the logged net,
their palms stinging dry with salt cuts from the stubborn seine,
the tourists came flying to them to capture the scene
like gulls fighting over a catch, Achille would howl
at their clacking cameras, and hurl an imagined lance!
It was the scream of a warrior losing his only soul
to the click of a Cyclops, the eye of its globing lens,
till they scuttered from his anger as a khaki mongrel
does from a kick. It was the last form of self-defence,
it was the scream of gangrene, and the vine round his heel
with its thorns. Waiters in bow-ties on the terrace
laughed at his anger. They too had been simplified.
They were like Lawrence crossing the sand with his trays.
They laughed at simplicities, the laugh of a wounded race.
Chapter LX
I
He had never seen such strange weather; the surprise
of a tempestuous January that churned
the foreshore brown with remarkable, bursting seas
convinced him that “somewhere people interfering
with the course of nature”; the feathery mare’s tails
were more threateningly frequent, and its sunsets
the roaring ovens of the hurricane season,
while the frigates hung closer inland and the nets
starved on their bamboo poles. The rain lost its reason
and behaved with no sense at all. What had angered
the rain and made the sea foam? Seven Seas would talk
bewilderingly that man was an endangered
species now, a spectre, just like the Aruac
or the egret, or parrots screaming in terror
when men approached, and that once men were satisfied
with destroying men they would move on to Nature.
And those were the omens. He must not be afraid
once he kept his
respect; the scarves of the sibyl
were those mare’s tails over the island. Their changing
was beyond his strength and he was responsible
only to himself. The wisdom was enraging.
In fury, he sailed south, away from the trawlers
who were dredging the banks the way others had mined
the archipelago for silver. New silver was
the catch threshing the cavernous hold till each mound
was a pyramid; banks robbed by thirty-mile seines,
their refrigerated scales packed tightly as coins,
and no more lobsters on the seabed. All the signs
of a hidden devastation under the cones
of volcanic gorges. Every dawn made his trade
difficult and empty, sending him farther out
than he wanted to go, until he felt betrayed
by his calling, by a greed that had never banned
the voracious, insatiable nets. Fathoms where
he had seen the marlin buckle and leap were sand
clean at the bottom; the steely blue albacore
no longer leapt to his line, questioning dolphins,
yes, but the shrimp were finished, their bodies were curled
like exhausted Caribs in the deep silver mines;
was he the only fisherman left in the world
using the old ways, who believed his work was prayer,
who caught only enough, since the sea had to live,
because it was life? So he sailed down to Soufrière
along and close to the coast. He might have to leave
the village for good, its hotels and marinas,
the ice-packed shrimps of pink tourists, and find someplace,
some cove he could settle like another Aeneas,
founding not Rome but home, to survive in its peace,
far from the discos, the transports, the greed, the noise.
So he and Philoctete loaded the canoe and went
searching down the coastline, Anse La Raye, Canaries,
past cliffs pinned with birds, past beaches still innocent
where he saw a small boy alone, riding a log
and fishing with a twine, and the memory sent
a spear into his chest; he waved from the pirogue
but the small boy ignored him, just as Achille had
other boats long ago. Lean, supple, stark-naked.
But he found no cove he liked as much as his own
village, whatever the future brought, no inlet
spoke to him quietly, no bay parted its mouth
like Helen under him, so he told Philoctete
that until they found it they would keep going south,