as far as the Grenadines, though supplies were tight.
II
They spent the whole night on the beach in Soufrière,
talking to other fishermen under the horned,
holy peaks, where Achille built up a bonfire
to keep off the mosquitoes, where as the dry palms burned
he felt like the phantom of a vanishing race
of heroes, some toothless, some scarred, many of them turned
drunkards in the empty season, but in each face
by the cracking sparks there was that obvious wound
made from loving the sea over their own country.
Then he and Philoctete spoke till a hooked moon waned
and the twin horns sharpened out of a quiet sea.
They slept in the beached canoe till the sunlit wind
woke them and the other pirogues were setting out.
They washed and shat in the depot; they tried to find
a shop with some coffee, but all the doors were shut.
III
They saw what they thought were reefs wet with the morning
level light, seven miles nearer the Grenadines,
till they began passing the sail, and then a warning
cry from Philoctete, who was hauling in the lines
from the bow, showed him that the reefs were travelling
faster than they were, and begged him to shorten sail.
Exultant with terror, Philo kept ravelling
the line round his fist, and then both gasped as one whale—
“Baleine,” said Achille—lifted its tapering wedge
as a bouquet of spume hissed from its splitting pod,
as it slowly heightened the island of itself,
then sounded, the tail sliding, till it disappeared
into a white hole whose trough, as it came, lifted
In God We Troust with its two men high off the shelf
of the open sea, then set it back down under
a swell that swamped them, while the indifferent shoal
foamed northward. He has seen the shut face of thunder,
he has known the frightening trough dividing the soul
from this life and the other, he has seen the pod
burst into spray. The bilge was bailed out, the sail
turned home, their wet, salted faces shining with God.
Chapter LXI
I
She was framed forever in the last century,
as was much of Ireland with its lace-draped parlours,
its shawled pianos, her antique maroon settee
(on auction after the Raj); it was not all hers,
this formal affection for candlelight on the
brass buttons of his Regimental mess-jacket,
those of an R.S.M., not a proper major,
since he loved it when she swirled her hair and packed it
in a bun spiked with a silver pin; when she wore
a frock with frothing collar and, like an oval
cameo, posed with one palm nesting the other
on the maroon couch with its parenthetical,
rhyming armrests—a daguerreotype of Mother—
which he studied as he wiggled one polished pump.
And sometimes she sang a capella, to the squeak
of his patent leather on the elephant stump
of the Indian hassock. It was so fin de siècle!
He often wondered if he’d fought the wrong war in
the wrong century. That swan-bowed, Victorian neck,
made whiter by its black-ribboned medallion,
would make him rise from his armchair and sail her hand
around the lances of the candles where Helen
waited in the shadows in that madras head-tie
that whitened her tolerant and enormous eyes.
It was all a lark. Like something out of Etty
or Alma-Tadema, those gold-framed memories,
stroking the tom in the dark with an ageing hand.
All her county shone in her face when the power
was cut, and the wick in the lamp would leap, as live
as the russet glints of her proud hair when she wore
it long and spread it over the wild grass to give
all that a girl could, with the camouflaged troop-ships
below them in the roadstead, with gulls buzzing the cliff
and screeching above us when she parted both lips
and searched for his soul with her tongue, her wild grey eyes
as flecked with light as the sea; then she was urging
me to go in, port of entry, with my fingers,
and I could not. Angry at being a virgin,
she turned her neck and I brushed the soft downy hair
from her ear’s shelled perfection with archaic respect;
she steered my hand through the froth of her underwear,
sobbing, but with a firmness I didn’t expect
from such a small wrist, but I couldn’t. And then she
sat up and stared at the roots of the grass and smiled
faintly back at me. I said it was unlucky,
that I needed something to wait for, and perhaps
that was the nineteenth-century part, Tom. To be
more like an officer, and not one of those chaps
who knocked up beer-headed barmaids, got them with child,
and I told her that, stroking her huddled shoulders.
I wanted to believe in her more than the war;
it was like an old novel, with shawls and soldiers,
that’s how it was, Tom. She said, “I feel like a whore,”
bending her white neck, stabbing her bun with a pin.
“Trying to trap you.” I said, “We’ll have a son, yes.
But this isn’t the way you want this to happen
either.” She took my fist and rubbed it with her tears.
They lay back on the grass, and after a while, her
tears stopped. He told her of an island he had seen
in an advert. An island where he could retire
if he lived through the war. She would give him a son.
Gnats were rising from the grass, and they watched the path
of the bent lances surrendering to the sun,
and the shining drops of the drizzle’s aftermath
glittered like the letters by which she would be known
from that day forth, on that dragonfly afternoon.
The heat was hellish in the back of the rumshop.
The Major leant forward. The cane-bottom chair creaked.
Sweat clammed his khaki shirt. The sibyl closed her eyes
and removed her cracked lenses. The candle peaked
and the flame bent from one of those cavernous sighs
that came from the bowels of the earth. He waited.
She buried the sprig of croton to the brass bell’s
tinkle in the open Bible, and he hated
the smell of fuming incense and everything else—
the lace doilies, the beads, his doubt.
“I see flat
water, like silver. I see your wife walking there
in a white dress with frills and pressing her white hat
with one hand in the breeze by a lake.”
Glen-da-Lough.
But she could get that from any cheap calendar.
The Major smiled. She didn’t have that far to look.
Close to Maud on the bed’s shambles, he’d imagined
her soul as a small whirring thing that instantly
shot from its crumpled sheath, from its nest of dry vine,
to cross the tin roofs that furrowed into a sea
till, like a curlew lowering in the grey wind,
it saw the knolls and broken castles of Ireland.
Plunkett never thought he would ask the next question.
“Heaven?” He smiled.
“Yes. If heaven is
a green place.”
And her shut eyes watered while his own were open.
That moment bound him for good to another race.
Then the Major said, “Tell her something for me, please.”
“She can hear you,” the gardeuse said, “Just like in life.”
“Tell her,” said the Major, clearing his throat, “the keys …
that time when I slammed them, I’m sorry that I caused her
all that pain. Tell her”—he stopped—“that no other wife
would have borne so much.” He lifted the small saucer
where the candle had shrunk to a stub, and he edged
a twenty-dollar bill under it, near the Bible.
II
Ma Kilman opened her eyes, took her spectacles
off, and rubbed their cracked lenses. She was no sibyl
without them.
“She happy, sir.” Like you oracles,
so would I be, he thought. A twenty-dollar bill
as an extra. He was rising from her table
of sweaty plastic when a white hand divided
the bamboo-bead curtain, and calm as Glen-da-Lough’s
vision, Maud smiled, to let him through. The wound in his
head froze him in the scorched street. Innumerable flocks
of birds screamed from her guidebook over the shacks
of the village, their shadows like enormous fans,
all those she had sewn to the silken quilt, with tags
pinned to their spurs, and he knew her transparent hands
had unstitched them as he watched them flying over
the grooved roofs till they were simply the shadow of …
of a cloud on the hills. He sat in the Rover
and looked back at the No Pain Café. Maud closed the door
and sat next to him with the bread, beaming with love.
There was the same contentment in her demeanour
as when they had seen the old man with his grey bag
carrying the serpents’ heads. He had not seen the
old labourer emerge from the unrolling flag
of smoke from his charcoal pit. The archangel showed
her how far he lived: in a cleft of green mountains
ridged like an iguana’s spine. Under the old road
with its storm-echoing leaves, steady mountain winds
made the valley churn like wake at a liner’s stern
and bent the green bamboos like archers; the old ones
creaking in their yellow joints. The track snaked through
ferns, wriggling up from the hidden river with the sign
S for serpent. He had turned his head away once;
but that was enough time for the apparition’s
back to be sealed in bush, trembling at his return.
III
His wound healed slowly. He discovered the small joys
that lay in a life patterned like those on the quilt,
and he would speak to her in his normal voice
without feeling silly. Soon he lost any guilt
for her absence. Her absence was far, yet closer
than the blue hills of Saltibus in their cool light.
His memories opened the shutters of mimosa
like the lilies that widened in her pond at night
secretly, like angels, in the faith that was hers.
In the lion-clawed tub he idled in his bath,
he loved the nap of fresh towels, he scrubbed his ears
the way she insisted, he liked taking orders
from her invisible voice. He learned how to pause
in the shade of the stone arch watching the bright red
flowers of the immortelle, he forgot the war’s
history that had cost him a son and wife. He read
calmly, and he began to speak to the workmen
not as boys who worked with him, till every name
somehow sounded different; when he thought of Helen
she was not a cause or a cloud, only a name
for a local wonder. He liked being alone
sometimes, and that was the best sign. He knew that Maud
was proud of him whenever the squared sunlight shone
on the taut comforter, that it was so well made.
Chapter LXII
I
Behind lace Christmas bush, the season’s red sorrel,
what seemed a sunstruck stasis concealed a ferment
of lives behind tin fences, an endless quarrel
which Seven Seas recorded with no instrument
except ears sharper than his mongrel’s; gardening
in his plot of old tires with violets, he’d hear them
over the roofs. He could hear the priest pardoning
their sins at vespers, the penitential anthem
of a Sunday in which no serious sins occurred.
The fishermen in black, rusty suits passed by him.
The helm of their turning week had come to a stop.
Seven Seas at his window heard their faint anthem:
“Salve Regina” in the pews of a stone ship,
which the black priest steered from his pulpit like a helm,
making the swift’s sign from brow to muttering lip.
The village was surrendering a life besieged
by the lances of yachts in the white marina,
where egrets had hidden in the feathering reeds
of the lagoon. It had become a souvenir
of itself, and from the restaurant tables
with settings white as the yachts you could look towards
the marina’s channel to the old weathered gables
of upstairs houses over the fishermen’s yards
with biscuit-tin palings and cracked asphalt streets;
old tires wreathing a pier, vine-burdened fences,
an old woman pinning white, surrendering sheets
on a line. Its life adjusted to the lenses
of cameras that, perniciously elegiac,
took shots of passing things—Seven Seas and the dog
in the pharmacy’s shade, every comic mistake
in spelling, like In God We Troust on a pirogue,
BLUE GENES, ARTLANTIC CITY, NO GABBAGE DUMPED HERE.
The village imitated the hotel brochure
with photogenic poverty, with atmosphere.
Those who were “people” lovers also have
a snapshot of Philoctete showing you his shin,
not saying how it was healed; some have Hector’s grave
heaped with its shells, and an oar. All were welcomed in
the No Pain Café with its bamboo beads, then some
proceeded to the islet where a warped bottle
crusted with fool’s gold in the amusing museum
shone like a false chalice, engravings of the Battle,
then a log with its entry, Plunkett, in lilac
ink. And, over and over again, the name Helen
of the West Indies, until they all turned their back
on the claim. They crushed the immortelle’s vermilion
platoons under their sandals climbing to the redoubt,
from where they shot the humped island with its blue horns
and hazed Africa windward. None saw a swift dart
over the cactus on the cliff or heard it cry once.
Lizards emerged like tongues from the mouths of cannons.
II
In the lion-coloured grass of the dry season
cannon gape at the sea from the windy summit,
their holes out of breath in the heat. If you rest one
palm on the hot iron barrel it will burn it,
but a lizard crawls there and raises its question:
“If this place is hers, did that empty horizon
once flash its broadsides with their inaudible rays
in her honour? Was that immense enterprise on
the baize tables of empi
res for one who carries
cheap sandals on a hooked finger with the Pitons
for breasts? Were both hemispheres the split breadfruit of
her African ass, her sea the fluted chitons
of a Greek frieze? And is she the Helen they love,
instead of a carved mouth with the almond’s odour?
She walked on this parapet in a stolen dress,
she stood in a tilted shack with its open door.
Who gives her the palm? Did sulking Achille grapple
with Hector to repeat themselves? Exchange a spear
for a cutlass; and when Paris tosses the apple
from his palm to Venus, make it a pomme-Cythère,
make all those parallels pointless. Names are not oars
that have to be laid side by side, nor are legends;
slowly the foaming clouds have forgotten ours.
You were never in Troy, and, between two Helens,
yours is here and alive; their classic features
were turned into silhouettes from the lightning bolt
of a glance. These Helens are different creatures,
one marble, one ebony. One unknots a belt
of yellow cotton slowly from her shelving waist,
one a cord of purple wool, the other one takes
a bracelet of white cowries from a narrow wrist;
one lies in a room with olive-eyed mosaics,
another in a beach shack with its straw mattress,
but each draws an elbow slowly over her face
and offers the gift of her sculptured nakedness,
parting her mouth. The sanderlings lift with their cries.
And those birds Maud Plunkett stitched into her green silk
with sibylline steadiness were what islands bred:
brown dove, black grackle, herons like ewers of milk,
pinned to a habitat many had adopted.
The lakes of the world have their own diaspora
of birds every winter, but these would not return.
The African swallow, the finch from India
now spoke the white language of a tea-sipping tern,
with the Chinese nightingales on a shantung screen,
while the Persian falcon, whose cry leaves a scar
on the sky till it closes, saw the sand turn green,
the dunes to sea, understudying the man-o’-war,
talking the marine dialect of the Caribbean
with nightjars, finches, and swallows, each origin
enriching the islands to which their cries were sewn.
Across the bay the ridge bristled once with a fort,
then the inner promontory itself; its shipping
was martial then, its traffic in masts the swift fleet