Omeros

  crammed on a tray to please implacable Caesars,

  slaves head-down on a hook, the gutted carcasses

  of crucified rebels, from orange-tiled villas,

  from laurels of watercress, and now it passes

  the small hearts of peppers, nippled sapodillas

  of virgins proffered to the Conquistadores.

  The stalls of the market contained the Antilles’

  history as well as Rome’s, the fruit of an evil,

  where the brass scales swung and were only made level

  by the iron tear of the weight, each brass basin

  balanced on a horizon, but never equal,

  like the old world and new, as just as things might seem.

  They came out of the iron market. Achille gave

  Helen back the filled basket. Helen said: “Ba moin!”

  “Give it to me!”

  Achille said: “Look! I not your slave!

  You bound to show off for people?” Of course, she laughed

  with that loud ringing laugh of hers, then walked ahead

  of him. And he, feeling like a dog that is left

  to nose the scraps of her footsteps, suddenly heard

  his own voice ringing over the street. People turned

  their heads at the shout. Achille saw the yellow dress

  fold into the closing crowd. Helen never turned,

  carrying the basket with both hands. Her stubbornness

  made him crazy. He caught up with her. Then he tried

  retrieving the basket, but she yanked it from him.

  “You not my slave!” she said.

  He said, “My hands tired.”

  He followed her to that part of the harbour’s rim,

  past the charcoal vendors, where the transports were ranged

  like chariots, blunt-nosed and glaring, with the hum

  of idling motors. She stopped, and in her deranged

  fury screamed: “Leave me, little boy!”

  Achille rammed her

  against a van. He had startled a panther. Claws

  raked his face in a flash; when he gripped an arm, her

  fine teeth sawed his knuckles, she clawed at his good clothes,

  so he, in turn, ripped the yellow dress in his rage.

  Hector, whose transport this was, led her inside it,

  a trainer urging a panther back to its cage.

  Achille felt his body drained of all the pride it

  contained, as the crowd came between him and Hector.

  Achille had tears in his eyes. He could not hide it.

  Her elbow moved when Hector climbed in next to her.

  The van raced the harbour. Achille picked up the fruit.

  II

  She was not home. He remembered the morning when

  he lost faith in her, and almost lost his reason

  on the clearest of days. He had not told Helen

  they needed quick money. Lobsters was off-season,

  or diving for coral; shells was not to be sold

  to tourists, but he had done this before without

  getting catch himself, he knew that his luck would hold.

  He was diving conchs under the lower redoubt

  of the fort that ridged the lion-headed islet,

  on a breezy morning, chopping the anchored skiff,

  piling the conchs aboard with their frilled violet

  palates, and sometimes a starfish like a stone leaf.

  One elbow hooked on the tilted hull of the boat,

  he saw, along the high wall, a yellow dress whipped

  like a sail in the wind when the wind comes about,

  then a fellow at the parapet’s end. He slipped

  slowly from the thudding hull. Helen and Hector.

  He stayed underwater, the keel bumping his head,

  then to the lee side, using one arm for an oar,

  knowing from their height the clicking shells could be heard

  because sounds travel for miles over calm water.

  He tugged up the rope and eased its anchor aboard.

  He paddled alongside the hull, hearing the shells

  rattling on the floorboards, as his own teeth chattered.

  He unwound the bow-rope and clenched it in his teeth,

  with frog-shadow strokes, In God We Troust overhead,

  the fast foam-flowers circling his head with a wreath,

  and is God only to trust now, his shadow said,

  because now he was horned like the island; the shells

  with their hard snail-like horns were devils, their red grin

  as they rolled in the salt heat over him, were hell’s

  lovely creatures, and his wound was Philoctete’s shin.

  For a long time he had sensed this thing with Hector,

  now he must concentrate on carrying the conchs

  safely. On certain days it had an inspector

  from the Tourist Board watching the boats, and if once

  they catch you, they could fine you and seize your license.

  Now, when he felt he was a sufficient distance

  from the redoubt, he hauled himself up with both hands.

  Then, one by one, he lifted the beautiful conchs,

  weighed each in his palm, considering the deep pain

  of their silence, their palates arched like the sunrise,

  delicate as vulvas when their petals open,

  and as the fisherman drowned them he closed his eyes,

  because they sank to the sand without any cries

  from their parted, bubbling mouths. They were not his

  property any more than Helen, but the sea’s.

  The thought was noble. It did not bring him any peace.

  III

  In this boat we were shipmates. Something had begun

  to gnaw the foundations, like surf nibbling a pier,

  of a love whose breezy vows assured me again

  that never in my life had I been happier.

  Look past that wire fence: we had said the word there,

  in the shade of rattling almonds by the airport,

  as if the noise of the leaves came from her blown hair,

  and the salt light gusted, furrowing the waves apart,

  and, three bays beyond this, in a calm cove at noon,

  we swayed together in that metamorphosis

  that cannot tell one body from the other one,

  where a barrier reef is vaulted by white horses,

  by a stone breakwater which the old slaves had built.

  They joined with the slithery coupling of porpoises,

  then the zebra-streaked afternoon on a white quilt,

  hearing breadfruit palms scraping the roof, the noises

  of the town below them, and the little crab-cries

  of her parting shell, her forehead glazed with the sweat

  of the bride-sleep that soothed Adam in paradise,

  before it gaped into a wound, like Philoctete,

  and pale slugs crawl from the sand with their newborn eyes.

  And now I would wake up, troubled and inexact,

  from that shallow sleep in which dreams precede sunrise,

  as the vague mind cautiously acknowledges the fact

  of another’s outline, watching the fall and rise

  of suspiring linen, like a skiff at anchor,

  nodding in the dawn swell, while a sea-swift takes off

  from the bow-rope, twittering, for some other shore.

  And a quiet canoe is drawn, gently, with love

  as one leans over and draws the wrapped shape nearer

  by an invisible rope, and she parts one eye

  and smiles, tapping your knuckles, and you leave her there

  and stand on the morning boards of the verandah

  and see between the broad leaves the small white town

  below it, and a liner, and on the Morne, the

  rust-roofed barracks, and insect cars crawling d
own.

  Chapter VIII

  I

  In the islet’s museum there is a twisted

  wine-bottle, crusted with fool’s gold from the iron-

  cold depth below the redoubt. It has been listed

  variously by experts: one, that a galleon

  blown by a hurricane out of Cartagena,

  this far east, had bled a trail of gold bullion

  and wine from its hold (a view held by many a

  diver lowering himself); the other was nonsense

  and far too simple: that the gold-crusted bottle

  came from a flagship in the Battle of the Saints,

  but the glass was so crusted it was hard to tell.

  Still, the myth widened its rings every century:

  that the Ville de Paris sank there, not a galleon

  crammed with imperial coin, and for her sentry,

  an octopus-cyclops, its one eye like the moon.

  Deep as a diver’s faith but never discovered,

  their trust in the relic converted the village,

  who came to believe that circling frigates hovered

  over the relic, that gulls attacked them in rage.

  They kept their faith when the experts’ ended in doubt.

  The galleon’s shadow rode over the ruled page

  where Achille, rough weather coming, counted his debt

  by the wick of his kerosene lamp; the dark ship

  divided his dreams, while the moon’s octopus eye

  climbed from the palms that lifted their tentacles’ shape.

  It glared like a shilling. Everything was money.

  Money will change her, he thought. Is this bad living

  that make her come wicked. He had mocked the belief

  in a wrecked ship out there. Now he began diving

  in a small shallop beyond the line of the reef,

  with spear-gun and lobster-pot. He had to make sure

  no sail would surprise him, feathering the oars back

  without clicking the oarlocks. He fed the anchor

  carefully overside. He tied the cinder-block

  to one heel with a slip-knot for faster descent,

  then slipped the waterproof bag around his shoulders

  for a money-pouch. She go get every red cent,

  he swore, crossing himself as he dived. Wedged in boulders

  down there was salvation and change. The concrete, tied

  to his heel, pulled him down faster than a lead-

  weighted, canvas-bound carcass, the stone heart inside

  his chest added its poundage. What if love was dead

  inside her already? What good lay in pouring

  silver coins on a belly that had warmed him once?

  This weighed him down even more, so he kept falling

  for fathoms towards his fortune: moidores, doubloons,

  while the slow-curling fingers of weeds kept calling;

  he felt the cold of the drowned entering his loins.

  II

  Why was he down here, from their coral palaces,

  pope-headed turtles asked him, waving their paddles

  crusted with rings, nudged by curious porpoises

  with black friendly skins. Why? asked the glass sea-horses,

  curling like questions. What on earth had he come for,

  when he had a good life up there? The sea-mosses

  shook their beards angrily, like submarine cedars,

  while he trod the dark water. Wasn’t love worth more

  than the coins of light pouring from the galleon’s doors?

  In the corals’ bone kingdom his skin calcifies.

  In that wavering garden huge fans on hinges

  swayed, while fingers of seaweed pocketed the eyes

  of coins with the profiles of Iberian kings;

  here the sea-floor was mud, not corrugating sand

  that showed you its ribs; here, the mutating fishes

  had goggling eye-bulbs; in that world without sound,

  they sucked the white coral, draining it like leeches,

  and what looked like boulders sprung the pincers of crabs.

  This was not a world meant for the living, he thought.

  The dead didn’t need money, like him, but perhaps

  they hated surrendering things their hands had brought.

  The shreds of the ocean’s floor passed him from corpses

  that had perished in the crossing, their hair like weeds,

  their bones were long coral fingers, bubbles of eyes

  watched him, a brain-coral gurgled their words,

  and every bubble englobed a biography,

  no less than the wine-bottle’s mouth, but for Achille,

  treading the mulch floor of the Caribbean Sea,

  no coins were enough to repay its deep evil.

  The ransom of centuries shone through the mossy doors

  that the moon-blind Cyclops counted, every tendril

  raked in the guineas it tested with its soft jaws.

  Light paved the ceiling with silver with every swell.

  Then he saw the galleon. Her swaying cabin-doors

  fanned vaults of silvery mackerel. He caught the glint

  of their coin-packed scales, then the tentacle-shadows

  whose motion was a miser’s harvesting his mint.

  He loosened the block and shot up. Next day, her stealth

  increased, her tentacles calling, until the wreck

  vanished with all hope of Helen. Once more the whelk

  was his coin, his bank the sea-conch’s. Now, every day

  he was clear-headed as the sea, wrenching lace fans

  from the forbidden reef, or tailing a sting-ray

  floating like a crucifix when it sensed his lance,

  and saving the conch-shells he himself had drowned.

  And though he lost faith in any fictional ship,

  an anchor still forked his brow whenever he frowned,

  for she was a spectre now, in her ribbed shape,

  he did not know where she was. She’d never be found.

  He thought of the white skulls rolling out there like dice

  rolled by the hand of the swell, their luck was like his;

  he saw drowned Portuguese captains, their coral eyes

  entered by minnows, as he hauled the lobster-pot,

  bearded with moss, in the cold shade of the redoubt.

  III

  Philoctete tried to make peace between them. He told

  Hector that they were men, that he bore his own wound

  as patiently as God allowed him, that the bad blood

  between them was worse, that they had a common bond

  between them: the sea. The sea that changed the cedars

  into canoes, from the day they had hacked the trees

  in the heights. He said, whatever a woman does,

  that is her business, but men are bound by their work.

  But neither listened. Like Hector. Like Achilles.

  Chapter IX

  I

  In hurricane season, when everything is rough,

  Achille ran out of money. His mate, Philoctete,

  found him land-work. His canoe was a concrete trough

  in Plunkett’s pig-farm. A broom his oar. Through the wet,

  whistling grass near the road, a sack shielding his head,

  he saved money and walked six miles to the estate.

  Rain hissed under black leaves, a white ground mist drifted

  from the torn pastures, the hillside bamboos were broke

  as he was. In the dirty gusts he missed the sea’s

  smell. He was glad that Plunkett still gave him a break

  after Helen and the house. Cows groaned under trees,

  the ochre track to the farm zigzagged in runnels

  of soft, squelchy clay that fretted between his toes.

  There was no sun, he was sure. No scorching gunwales

  wher
e the hot oars idled, no sea with its bleached sails.

  In sucking Wellingtons he shovelled out the mash

  into the steaming troughs of the jostling pen,

  then jumped back from the bristling boulders that would crash

  against his knees as their wooden gate swung open.

  Then Achille scraped the dung-caked cement with a yard

  broom, and the clogged shit spidered out into the drain

  when he swung the galvanized-iron bucket hard

  at the reeking wall, then hurled it harder again

  in repetitious rage, the way that combers hit

  a braced sea-rock, streaming. Inside, he cursed the screams

  of the doomed, panicking swine matted with their shit,

  their skidding trotters entered the gate of his dreams.

  “I miss the light northern rain, I miss the seasons,”

  Maud moaned, implying the climate lacked subtlety.

  Some breeze reported the insult, since the monsoon’s

  anger coarsened the rain, until between the sty

  and water-roped porch grew an impenetrable

  jungle that drummed with increasing monotony,

  its fraying lianas whipping from each gable,

  the galvanized guttering belching with its roar.

  Then, soaked like paper, the hills were a Chinese scroll

  and she saw a subtlety where none was before.

  Bamboo strokes. Wet cloud. Peasant with straw hat and pole.

  Fern spray. White mist. Heron crossing fresh waterfall.

  The map of heaven was breaking up in nations,

  and a soggy nimbus haloed the loaded moon

  when Achille saw the mare’s tails, prognostications

  of a grumbling sky that underlined each omen—

  from the widowed veils of the indigo rainspouts

  to candles of egrets screwed on a swaying branch,

  then the match of lightning; in irascible knots

  freckling the hot glass of the Coleman lanterns

  termites singed their glazed wings and fell away as ants.

  Then, next day, the stillness. And in it, the bitterns

  and the gulls circling inland. Then, in the distance,

  the strange yellow light. He went to buy kerosene

  from Ma Kilman’s crowded shop, and he was on his way back,

  half-blind from her searing gas-lamp, when a blue sheen

  lit the roofs and the street widened with a forked crack

  of lightning igniting the egrets, splashing the palms

  on the cracked plaster sky. Achille dropped the bottle.

  Rain on the galvanized night. Helen in his arms.