Omeros (2 page)

placed them parallel in the grave of the gunwales

like man and wife. They scooped the leaf-bilge from the planks,

loosened knots from the bodies of flour-sack sails,

while Hector, at the shallows’ edge, gave a quick thanks,

with the sea for a font, before he waded, thigh-in.

The rest walked up the sand with identical stride

except for foam-haired Philoctete. The sore on his shin

still unhealed, like a radiant anemone. It had come

from a scraping, rusted anchor. The pronged iron

peeled the skin in a backwash. He bent to the foam,

sprinkling it with a salt hiss. Soon he would run,

hobbling, to the useless shade of an almond,

with locked teeth, then wave them off from the shame

of his smell, and once more they would leave him alone

under its leoparding light. This sunrise the same

damned business was happening. He felt the sore twitch

its wires up to his groin. With his hop-and-drop

limp, hand clutching one knee, he left the printed beach

to crawl up the early street to Ma Kilman’s shop.

She would open and put the white rum within reach.

His shipmates watched him, then they hooked hands like anchors

under the hulls, rocking them; the keels sheared dry sand

till the wet sand resisted, rattling the oars

that lay parallel amidships; then, to the one sound

of curses and prayers at the logs jammed as a wedge,

one after one, as their tins began to rattle,

the pirogues slid to the shallows’ nibbling edge,

towards the encouraging sea. The loose logs swirled

in surf, face down, like warriors from a battle

lost somewhere on the other shore of the world.

They were dragged to a place under the manchineels

to lie there face upward, the sun moving over their brows

with the stare of myrmidons hauled up by the heels

high up from the tide-mark where the pale crab burrows.

The fishermen brushed their palms. Now all the canoes

were riding the pink morning swell. They drew their bows

gently, the way grooms handle horses in the sunrise,

flicking the ropes like reins, pinned them by the nose—

Praise Him, Morning Star, St. Lucia, Light of My Eyes,

threw bailing tins in them, and folded their bodies across

the tilting hulls, then sculled one oar in the slack

of the stern. Hector rattled out his bound canvas

to gain ground with the gulls, hoping to come back

before that conch-coloured dusk low pelicans cross.

II

Seven Seas rose in the half-dark to make coffee.

Sunrise was heating the ring of the horizon

and clouds were rising like loaves. By the heat of the

glowing iron rose he slid the saucepan’s base on-

to the ring and anchored it there. The saucepan shook

from the weight of water in it, then it settled.

His kettle leaked. He groped for the tin chair and took

his place near the saucepan to hear when it bubbled.

It would boil but not scream like a bosun’s whistle

to let him know it was ready. He heard the dog’s

morning whine under the boards of the house, its tail

thudding to be let in, but he envied the pirogues

already miles out at sea. Then he heard the first breeze

washing the sea-almond’s wares; last night there had been

a full moon white as his plate. He saw with his ears.

He warmed with the roofs as the sun began to climb.

Since the disease had obliterated vision,

when the sunset shook the sea’s hand for the last time—

and an inward darkness grew where the moon and sun

indistinctly altered—he moved by a sixth sense,

like the moon without an hour or second hand,

wiped clean as the plate that he now began to rinse

while the saucepan bubbled; blindness was not the end.

It was not a palm-tree’s dial on the noon sand.

He could feel the sunlight creeping over his wrists.

The sunlight moved like a cat along the palings

of a sandy street; he felt it unclench the fists

of the breadfruit tree in his yard, run the railings

of the short iron bridge like a harp, its racing

stick rippling with the river; he saw the lagoon

behind the church, and in it, stuck like a basin,

the rusting enamel image of the full moon.

He lowered the ring to sunset under the pan.

The dog scratched at the kitchen door for him to open

but he made it wait. He drummed the kitchen table

with his fingers. Two blackbirds quarrelled at breakfast.

Except for one hand he sat as still as marble,

with his egg-white eyes, fingers recounting the past

of another sea, measured by the stroking oars.

O open this day with the conch’s moan, Omeros,

as you did in my boyhood, when I was a noun

gently exhaled from the palate of the sunrise.

A lizard on the sea-wall darted its question

at the waking sea, and a net of golden moss

brightened the reef, which the sails of their far canoes

avoided. Only in you, across centuries

of the sea’s parchment atlas, can I catch the noise

of the surf lines wandering like the shambling fleece

of the lighthouse’s flock, that Cyclops whose blind eye

shut from the sunlight. Then the canoes were galleys

over which a frigate sawed its scythed wings slowly.

In you the seeds of grey almonds guessed a tree’s shape,

and the grape leaves rusted like serrated islands,

and the blind lighthouse, sensing the edge of a cape,

paused like a giant, a marble cloud in its hands,

to hurl its boulder that splashed into phosphorous

stars; then a black fisherman, his stubbled chin coarse

as a dry sea-urchin’s, hoisted his flour-sack

sail on its bamboo spar, and scanned the opening line

of our epic horizon; now I can look back

to rocks that see their own feet when light nets the waves,

as the dugouts set out with ebony captains,

since it was your light that startled our sunlit wharves

where schooners swayed idly, moored to their cold capstans.

A wind turns the harbour’s pages back to the voice

that hummed in the vase of a girl’s throat: “Omeros.”

III

“O-meros,” she laughed. “That’s what we call him in Greek,”

stroking the small bust with its boxer’s broken nose,

and I thought of Seven Seas sitting near the reek

of drying fishnets, listening to the shallows’ noise.

I said: “Homer and Virg are New England farmers,

and the winged horse guards their gas-station, you’re right.”

I felt the foam head watching as I stroked an arm, as

cold as its marble, then the shoulders in winter light

in the studio attic. I said, “Omeros,”

and
O
was the conch-shell’s invocation,
mer
was

both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,

os,
a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes

and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore.

Omeros was the crunch of dry leaves, and the washes

that echoed from a cave-mouth when the tide has ebbed.

The name stayed in my mouth. I saw how light was webbed

on her Asian cheeks, defined her eyes with a black

almond’s outline, as Antigone turned and said:

“I’m tired of America, it’s time for me to go back

to Greece. I miss my islands.” I write, it returns—

the way she turned and shook out the black gust of hair.

I saw how the surf printed its lace in patterns

on the shore of her neck, then the lowering shallows

of silk swirled at her ankles, like surf without noise,

and felt that another cold bust, not hers, but yours

saw this with stone almonds for eyes, its broken nose

turning away, as the rustling silk agrees.

But if it could read between the lines of her floor

like a white-hot deck uncaulked by Antillean heat,

to the shadows in its hold, its nostrils might flare

at the stench from manacled ankles, the coffled feet

scraping like leaves, and perhaps the inculpable marble

would have turned its white seeds away, to widen

the bow of its mouth at the horror under her table,

from the lyre of her armchair draped with its white chiton,

to do what the past always does: suffer, and stare.

She lay calm as a port, and a cloud covered her

with my shadow; then a prow with painted eyes

slowly emerged from the fragrant rain of black hair.

And I heard a hollow moan exhaled from a vase,

not for kings floundering in lances of rain; the prose

of abrupt fishermen cursing over canoes.

Chapter III

I

“Touchez-i, encore: N’ai fendre choux-ous-ou, salope!”

“Touch it again, and I’ll split your arse, you bitch!”

“Moi j’a dire—’ous pas prêter un rien. ’Ous ni shallope,

’ous ni seine, ’ous croire ’ous ni choeur campêche?”

“I told you, borrow nothing of mine. You have a canoe,

and a net. Who you think you are? Logwood Heart?”

“’Ous croire ’ous c’est roi Gros Îlet? Voleur bomme!”

“You think you’re king of Gros Îlet, you tin-stealer?”

Then in English: “I go show you who is king! Come!”

Hector came out from the shade. And Achille, the

moment he saw him carrying the cutlass,
un homme

fou,
a madman eaten with envy, replaced the tin

he had borrowed from Hector’s canoe neatly back in the prow

of Hector’s boat. Then Achille, who had had enough

of this madman, wiped and hefted his own blade.

And now the villagers emerged from the green shade

of the almonds and wax-leaved manchineels, for the face-off

that Hector wanted. Achille walked off and waited

at the warm shallows’ edge. Hector strode towards him.

The villagers followed, as the surf abated

its sound, its fear cowering at the beach’s rim.

Then, far out at sea, in a sparkling shower

arrows of rain arched from the emerald breakwater

of the reef, the shafts travelling with clear power

in the sun, and behind them, ranged for the slaughter,

stood villagers, shouting, with a sound like the shoal,

and hoisting arms to the light. Hector ran, splashing

in shallows mixed with the drizzle, towards Achille,

his cutlass lifted. The surf, in anger, gnashing

its tail like a foaming dogfight. Men can kill

their own brothers in rage, but the madman who tore

Achille’s undershirt from one shoulder also tore

at his heart. The rage that he felt against Hector

was shame. To go crazy for an old bailing tin

crusted with rust! The duel of these fishermen

was over a shadow and its name was Helen.

II

Ma Kilman had the oldest bar in the village.

Its gingerbread balcony had mustard gables

with green trim round the eaves, the paint wrinkled with age.

In the cabaret downstairs there were wooden tables

for the downslap of dominoes. A bead curtain

tinkled every time she came through it. A neon

sign endorsed Coca-Cola under the
NO PAIN

CAFÉ ALL WELCOME
. The
NO PAIN
was not her own

idea, but her dead husband’s. “Is a prophecy,”

Ma Kilman would laugh. A hot street led to the beach

past the small shops and the clubs and a pharmacy

in whose angling shade, his khaki dog on a leash,

the blind man sat on his crate after the pirogues

set out, muttering the dark language of the blind,

gnarled hands on his stick, his ears as sharp as the dog’s.

Sometimes he would sing and the scraps blew on the wind

when her beads rubbed their rosary. Old St. Omere.

He claimed he’d sailed round the world. “Monsieur Seven Seas”

they christened him, from a cod-liver-oil label

with its wriggling swordfish. But his words were not clear.

They were Greek to her. Or old African babble.

Across wires of hot asphalt the blind singer

seemed to be numbering things. Who knows if his eyes

saw through the shades, tapping his cane with one finger?

She helped him draw his veteran’s compensation

every first of the month from the small Post Office.

He never complained about his situation

like the rest of them. The corner box, and the heat

on his hands would make him shift his box to the shade.

Ma Kilman saw Philoctete hobbling up the street,

so she rose from her corner window, and she laid

out the usual medicine for him, a flask of white

acajou, and a jar of yellow Vaseline,

a small enamel basin of ice. He would wait

in the No Pain Café all day. There he would lean

down and anoint the mouth of the sore on his shin.

III

“Mais qui ça qui rivait-’ous, Philoctete?”

                                                                       
“Moin blessé.”

“But what is wrong wif you, Philoctete?”

                                                                       “I am blest

wif this wound, Ma Kilman,
qui pas ka guérir pièce.

Which will never heal.”

                                          “Well, you must take it easy.

Go home and lie down, give the foot a lickle rest.”

Philoctete, his trouser-legs rolled, stares out to sea

from the worn rumshop window. The itch in the sore