Omeros (12 page)

at neglection-election to see my footman

wounded by factions that tearing him apart.

The United Force will not be a third party

between two parties, one Greek and the other Trojan,

both fighting for Helen: LP and WWPP,

only United Love can give you the answers!”

They drove through Roseau. He said:
“Are you hearing me?”

“Yes,” Hector said. “I not sure ’bout the bananas,”

pressing the button. The Comet trawled its echo

through the emerald valleys and the indigo hills,

up rutted shortcuts and their paradisal view

of rain-weathered villages with cathedrals—

the heaven of the priest’s and politician’s vow,

and the blue sea burst his heart again and again

as Philoctete sat, with the pamphlets in his lap,

watching the island filing backwards through the pane

of his wound and the window, from Vieuxfort to Cap.

He was her footman. It was her burden he bore.

Why couldn’t they love the place, same way, together,

the way he always loved her, even with his sore?

Love Helen like a wife in good and bad weather,

in sickness and health, its beauty in being poor?

The way the leaves loved her, not like a pink leaflet

printed with slogans of black people fighting war?

III

The Comet stopped again to let off Philoctete.

They were crawling through Castries, block by crowded block.

He limped through the crowds, as the crackling megaphone

moved past the market steps.

                                                     “Ces mamailles-là, nous kai rock

Gros Îlet,
the United Force giving a block-

orama till daybreak on Friday until cock

put down his saxophone and
violon en sac.

All your contributions are welcome in aid of

Professor Statics’s United Force. Peace and love!”

The night of the Statics Convention Blocko it rained,

it drenched out his faith in the American-style

conviction that voters needed to be entertained.

Statics toured the fête’s debris with a wounded smile.

Beaded bouquets of balloons, soggy paper-hats,

rain-corrugated posters, the banner across

two balconies, the cardboard cartons of pamphlets,

were history this Saturday. It was their loss,

not his. A career prophesied by the Comet’s

having a ball. He laughed. He rehired Philoctete

to clean up the hall first, then distribute the wet

balloons to the kids. Then he watched him disconnect

the bunting’s wrinkling face from a stepladder

with a pronged pole. It sagged like a kite to the street.

That, from the candidate, was his final order,

pointing a warm beer in his shorts and sandalled feet.

He hugged Philoctete, who wept for their defeat.

He left as a migrant-worker for Florida.

Chapter XXI

I

The jukebox glowed in Atlantic City. Speakers

bombarded the neon of the No Pain Café.

The night flared with vendors’ coalpots, the dull week, as

it died, exploded with Cadence, Country, Reggae.

Stars burst from the barbecues of chicken and conch,

singeing the vendors’ eyes. Round their kerosene lamp

the children’s eyes widened like moons until they sank

in the hills of their mothers’ laps. Frenetic DJs

soared evangelically from the thudding vamp

of the blockorama,

                                  
“This here is Gros Îlet’s

night, United Force, garçon, we go rock this village

till cock wake up!”

                                  The rumshops, from Midnight Hour,

Keep Cool, No Pain Café, to the high Second Stage,

with its Christmas lights winking, with decibel power

shattered the glass stars. Tourists, in seraphic white,

floated through the crowding shadows, the cooking smells,

the domino games by gas lanterns. Helen’s night.

The night Achille dreaded above everything else.

She sprinkled and ironed a dress.

                                                            “Is the music,

the people, I like.” Once the sun set on Fridays,

he grew nauseous with jealousy, watching the thick

breadfruit leaves viciously darken as the cafés

switched their doors open, and the first policemen barred

the street off with signs. After an early supper

he sat in the frame of the back door to the yard

watching her head, in the shower he’d built for her

from brand-new galvanize, streaming from the white foam

with expensive shampoo, and, when it disappeared,

came back, the mouth parted, the eyes squeezed with delight.

She stepped over the wet stones smiling, and she nodded

to him silent on the back step with Plunkett’s towel

holding her beaded nakedness. He said nothing.

He watched the lathered stones, even they seemed to smell

of her clean feet and her long arms’ self-anointing.

In the bedroom, she started again—he should come,

but she soon gave that up. The pipe was still trickling,

so he got up and locked it. If Seven Seas was home

he would sit with him in front of the pharmacy

with its closed door, and describe some parts of the fête

to Seven Seas, whom he envied, who couldn’t see

what was happening to the village. At the bent gate

he paused. No. He would go and sit with the canoes

far up the beach and watch the star-crowned silhouette

of the crouched island. Even there the DJ’s voice

carried over the shallows’ phosphorescent noise.

Or he watched her high head moving through the tourists,

through flying stars from the coalpots, the painted mouth

still eagerly parted. Murder throbbed in his wrists

to the loudspeaker’s pelvic thud, her floating move.

She was selling herself like the island, without

any pain, and the village did not seem to care

that it was dying in its change, the way it whored

away a simple life that would soon disappear

while its children writhed on the sidewalks to the sounds

of the DJ’s fresh-water-Yankee-cool-Creole.

He sat on
In God We Troust
under black almonds,

listening to the Soul Brothers losing their soul;

the sandy alleys would go and their simple stores,

the smell of fresh bread drawn from its Creole oven,

its flour turned into cocaine, its daughters to whores,

while the DJs screamed,

                                            “WE MOVIN’, MAN! WE MOVIN’!”

but towards what? Those stars were too fixed in heaven

to care, but sometimes he wished that he was as far

as they were. The young took no interest in canoes.

That was longtime shit. Once it came from Africa.

And the sea would soon get accustomed to the noise.

He watched a falling star singe the arc of its zone

and traced the comet as its declining vector

hissed out like a coal in the horizon’s basin

over the islet, and he trembled for Hector,

the title he gave his transport. Bright Helen

was like a meteor too, and her falling arc

crossed over the village, over some moonlit lane

with its black breadfruit leaves. Every life was a spark,

but her light remained unknown in this backward place,

falling unobserved, the way he watched the meteor

at one in the morning track the night of her race,

then fade, forgotten, as sunrise forgets a star.

II

Dominus illuminatio mea,
Egypt delivered

back to itself. India crumpling on its knees

like a howdah’d elephant, all of the empowered

tide and panoply of lances, Gurkhas, Anzacs, Mounties

drained like a bath from the bunghole of Eden’s Suez,

or a back-yard canal. In Alexandria, at the raven’s hour,

clouds of the faithful hunch at the muezzin’s prayers,

with the hymn of mosquitoes, deserts whence our power

withdrew, Himalayan hill-stations where the millipede

enters and coils, like a lanyard around a flagpole,

and the rat scuttles in straw, jungles where a leopard

narrows its gaze to sleep on a crumbling uphol-

stered sofa, while chickens climb the stairs. The crest

of the bookmark was under his thumb, the frontispiece

signed by a boy’s hand.
D. Plunkett.
He laid him to rest

between the water-stained pages as he shut the book.

Dominus illuminatio mea,
O Lord, light of my life.

He turned his head towards Maud, but she did not look

up from her needle. He fiddled with the paper-knife

on the blotter. He had won the prize for an essay

on the Roman Empire. In those days, history was easy.

He arched like the cat, and went to the verandah

as Maud looked up once. The Major counted the stars

like buttons through the orchids; they were the usual wonder.

He heard the contending music, on one side from the bars

of the village, thudding; on the other, across black water,

the hotel’s discotheque. At that very moment Achille was

studying a heaven whose cosmology had been erased

by the crossing. He was trying to trace the armature

of studs and rivets where the constellations are placed,

but for him they were beads on an abacus, no more.

From night-fishing he knew the necessary ones,

the one that sparkled at dusk, and at dawn, the other.

All in a night’s work he saw them simply as twins.

He knew others but would not call them by their given

names, forcing a silvery web to link their designs,

neither the Bear nor the Plough, to him there was heaven

and earth and the sea, but Ursa or Plunkett Major,

or the Archer aiming? He tried but could not distinguish

their pattern, nor call one Venus, nor even find

the pierced holes of Pisces, the dots named for the Fish;

he knew them as stars, they fitted his own design.

III

“What?”

                 She was draping the silk slip on a hanger,

twisting it skillfully. She turned her breasts away.

Down the deep ravine of her shoulders, his anger

drained like the soapy water over the pathway

of stones he had placed there, where her small footprints dried.

It was still moonlight, and the moonlight filled the sheen

of the nightgown she entered like water as her pride

shook free of the neck. He saw the lifted wick shine

on the ebony face, and the shadow she made

on the wall. Now the shadow unpinned one earring,

its head tilted, and smiled. It was in a good mood.

It checked its teeth in a mirror, he watched it bring

the mirror close to its eyes. The blocko was done.

It was so quiet in the village, he heard the stars

click like its earrings when the shadow put them down.

He turned his face to the wall. Whoever she was,

however innocent her joy, he couldn’t take it

anymore. A transport passed, and in the silence

he felt his heart sicken, watching her as she brushed

her hair slowly and stopped. And Achille saw Helen’s

completion for the first time. He saw how she wished

for a peace beyond her beauty, past the tireless

quarrel over a face that was not her own fault

any more than the full moon’s grace sailing dark trees,

and for that moment Achille was angrily filled

with a pity beyond his own pain. There was peace

in the clouds, and the moon in a silk-white nightgown

stood over him.

                              “What?” he said. “What make you this whore?

Why you don’t leave me alone and go fock Hector?

More men plough that body than canoe plough the sea.”

The lance of his hatred entered her with no sound,

yet she came and lay next to him, and they lay quietly

as two logs laid parallel on moonlit sand.

He heard the fig-trees embracing and he smiled

when the first cock cuckolded him. She found his hand

and held it. He turned. She was asleep. Like a child.

Chapter XXII

I

Shortly after, she moved in with Hector. She moved

everything while he was fishing but a hairpin

stuck in her soap-dish. To him this proved

that she would come back. Stranger things than that happen

every day, Ma Kilman assured him, in places

bigger than Gros Îlet. When he walked up a street,

he stuck close to the houses, avoiding the faces

that called out to him from doorways. He passed them straight.

Gradually he began to lose faith in his hands.

He believed he smelt as badly as Philoctete

from the rotting loneliness that drew every glance

away from him, as stale as a drying fishnet.

He avoided the blind man with his black, knotted hands

resting on the cane; he avoided looking at

a transport when it approached him, in case, by chance,

it was Hector driving and should in case she sat

on the front seat by him; the van that Hector bought

from his canoe’s sale had stereo, leopard seat.

II

The Comet, a sixteen-seater passenger-van,

was the chariot that Hector bought. Coiled tongues of flame

leapt from its sliding doors. Each row was a divan