Omeros (16 page)

that seared through his skull; he cried his father’s name

over the river. Then he swam to the opposite trees.

He cut off their circle. He hid and felt the same

mania that, in the arrows of drizzle, he felt for Hector.

He let them pass. One was laggard; with a clenched roar

he swung at the grinning laggard and the bladed oar

cleft through his skull with a sound like a calabash,

splattering his chest with brain; then the archer

thudded in his death-throes like a spear-gaffed fish

as Achille hammered and hammered him with the oar’s head,

as the skull grinned up at him with skinned yellow teeth

like a baboon mating; then Achille wrenched the bow

from the locked hand, and then, sobbing with grief

at the death of a brother, he shot like the brown arrow

of the sea-swift through ferns, not shaking their leaves,

brushing webbed vines from his face, and the leaf-shade

freckled him like an ocelot, like the leopard loping,

as he hurdled the roots, raking the way clear of the net

of vines, till his palm was streaked with blood, unroping

himself from their thorns, his eyes salted with sweat,

and the one thought thudding in him was, I can deliver

all of them by hiding in a half-circle, then I could

change their whole future, even the course of the river

would flow backwards, past the mangroves. Then a cord

of thorned vine looped his tendon, encircling the heel

with its own piercing chain. He fell hard. He saw

the leaves pinned with stars. Ants crawled over Achille

as his blind eyes stared from the mud, still as the archer

he had brained, the bow beside him and the broken oar.

Chapter XXVIII

I

Now he heard the griot muttering his prophetic song

of sorrow that would be the past. It was a note, long-drawn

and endless in its winding like the brown river’s tongue:

“We were the colour of shadows when we came down

with tinkling leg-irons to join the chains of the sea,

for the silver coins multiplying on the sold horizon,

and these shadows are reprinted now on the white sand

of antipodal coasts, your ashen ancestors

from the Bight of Benin, from the margin of Guinea.

There were seeds in our stomachs, in the cracking pods

of our skulls on the scorching decks, the tubers

withered in no time. We watched as the river-gods

changed from snakes into currents. When inspected,

our eyes showed dried fronds in their brown irises,

and from our curved spines, the rib-cages radiated

like fronds from a palm-branch. Then, when the dead

palms were heaved overside, the ribbed corpses

floated, riding, to the white sand they remembered,

to the Bight of Benin, to the margin of Guinea.

So, when you see burnt branches riding the swell,

trying to reclaim the surf through crooked fingers,

after a night of rough wind by some stone-white hotel,

past the bright triangular passage of the windsurfers,

remember us to the black waiter bringing the bill.”

But they crossed, they survived. There is the epical splendour.

Multiply the rain’s lances, multiply their ruin,

the grace born from subtraction as the hold’s iron door

rolled over their eyes like pots left out in the rain,

and the bolt rammed home its echo, the way that thunder-

claps perpetuate their reverberation.

So there went the Ashanti one way, the Mandingo another,

the Ibo another, the Guinea. Now each man was a nation

in himself, without mother, father, brother.

II

The worst crime is to leave a man’s hands empty.

Men are born makers, with that primal simplicity

in every maker since Adam. This is pre-history,

that itching instinct in the criss-crossed net

of their palms, its wickerwork. They could not

stay idle too long. The chained wrists couldn’t forget

the carver for whom antelopes leapt, or

the bow-maker the shaft, or the armourer

his nail-studs, the shield held up to Hector

that was the hammerer’s art. So the wet air

revolved in the potter’s palms, in the painter’s eye

the arcs of a frantic springbok bucked soundlessly,

baboons kept signing their mimetic alphabet

in case men forgot it, so out of habit

their fingers grew leaves in the foetid ground of the boat.

So now they were coals, firewood, dismembered

branches, not men. They had left their remembered

shadows to the firelight. Scratching a board

they made the signs for their fading names on the wood,

and their former shapes returned absently; each carried

the nameless freight of himself to the other world.

Then, after wreaths of seaweed, after the bitter nouns

of strange berries, coral sores, after the familiar irons

singing round their ankles, after the circling suns,

dry sand their soles knew. Sand they could recognize.

Men they knew by their hearts. They came up from the darkness

past the disinterested captains, shielding their eyes.

III

Not where russet lions snarl on leaf-blown terraces,

or where ocelots carry their freckled shadows, or wind erases

Assyria, or where drizzling arrows hit the unflinching faces

of some Thracian phalanx winding down mountain passes,

but on a palm shore, with its vines and river grasses,

and stone barracoons, on brown earth, bare as their asses.

Yet they felt the sea-wind tying them into one nation

of eyes and shadows and groans, in the one pain

that is inconsolable, the loss of one’s shore

with its crooked footpath. They had wept, not for

their wives only, their fading children, but for strange,

ordinary things. This one, who was a hunter,

wept for a sapling lance whose absent heft sang

in his palm’s hollow. One, a fisherman, for an ochre

river encircling his calves; one a weaver, for the straw

fishpot he had meant to repair, wilting in water.

They cried for the little thing after the big thing.

They cried for a broken gourd. It was only later

that they talked to the gods who had not been there

when they needed them. Their whole world was moving,

or a large part of the world, and what began dissolving

was the fading sound of their tribal name for the rain,

the bright sound for the sun, a hissing noun for the river,

and always the word “never,” and never the word “again.”

Chapter XXIX

I

At noon a ground dove hidden somewhere in the trees

whooed like a conch or a boy blowing a bottle

stuck on one note with maddening, tireless cries;

it was lower than the nightingale’s full throttle

of grief, but to Helen, stripping dried sheets along

the wire in Hector’s yard, the monodic moan

came from the hole in her heart. It was not the song

that twittered from the veined mesh of Agamemnon,

but the low-fingered O of an Aruac flute.

She rested the sheets down, she threw stones at the noise

in that lime-tree past the fence, and looked for the flight

of the startled dove from the branches of her nerves.

But the O’s encircled her, black as the old tires

where Hector grew violets, like bubbles in soapy

water where she scrubbed the ribbed washboard so hard tears

blurred her wrist. Not Helen now, but Penelope,

in whom a single noon was as long as ten years,

because he had not come back, because they had gone

from yesterday, because the fishermen’s fears

spread in the surfing trees. She watched a bleaching-stone

drying with lather, the print of wet feet fading

where she had unpinned the yellow dress from the line,

while the ground dove cooed and cooed, so sorrow-laden

in its lime-tree, that the lemon dress was her sign.

Embracing the dry sheets, Helen entered the house

where the moan could not reach her, she crammed the sheets down

in the basket. She unhooked her skirt, then the blouse,

panties and bra. She sprawled on the unmade bed, brown

and naked as God made her. The hand was not hers

that crawled like a crab, lower and lower down

into the cave of her thighs, it was not Hector’s

but Achille’s hand yesterday. She turns slowly round

on her stomach and comes as soon as he enters.

II

Lonely as a bachelor’s plate, a full moon cleared

the suds of the clouds. Seven Seas felt the moonlight

on his hands, washing his wares. The dog appeared.

He scraped rice and fish into its enamel plate

and said, “Watch the bones, eh!”; then he smelt Philoctete

entering the yard, making sure to hook back the gate

so the dog wouldn’t slide out. He said: “Nice moonlight,”

following the man’s sore’s smell. “No news about your friend, yet?”

he asked in English. Philoctete sat on the same

step he chose every moonlight and said in Creole:

“They say he drown.” The dog chewed noisily.

                                                                                  “His name

is what he out looking for, his name and his soul,”

Seven Seas said.

                              “Where that?”

                                                        They both looked at the moon.

It made the yard clean, it clarified every leaf.

“Africa,” the blind one said. “He go come back soon.”

Philoctete nodded. What else was left to believe

but miracles? Whose vision except a blind man’s,

or a blind saint’s, her name as bright as the island’s?

III

On that moonlit night I was snoring, cupping her side,

when she shook me off from her damp flesh with a shout

that bristled me. She yanked the chain of her bedside

lamp, as I, with ponderous head and wincing snout,

saw her hands claw her face. As I shifted closer

she flailed me away in terror and she cowered

close to the headboard, so I moved to enclose her

within my split trotters, with my curved tusks lowered,

spines prickling my hunch. “Monster!” She shuddered. “Monster!

I turned round to watch your face while you were sleeping,

and you snored, rooting a trough, and covered with flies.”

By then, if monsters weep, I would have been weeping

through the half-sleep that still gummed my slitted eyes.

Her fingers were branches. I boared through their bracken

towards her breasts, and their tenderness took me in.

I felt her sobbing, then her small shoulders slacken

to her body’s smile. “Oh, God, I drank too much wine

at dinner last night.” Then Circe embraced her swine.

Now, running home, Achille sprung up from the seabed

like a weightless astronaut, not flexing his knees

through phosphorescent sleep; the parchment overhead

of crinkling water recorded three centuries

of the submerged archipelago, in its swell

the world above him passed through important epochs

in which treaties were shredded like surf, governments fell,

markets soared and plunged, but never once did the shocks

of power find a just horizon, from capture

in chains to long debates over manumission,

from which abolitionists soared in a rapture

of guilt. Kings lost their minds. A Jesuit mission

burned in Veracruz; fleeing the Inquisition

a Sephardic merchant, bag locked in one elbow,

crouched by a Lisbon dock, and in that position

was reborn in the New World: Lima; Curaçao.

A snow-headed Negro froze in the Pyrenees,

an ape behind bars, to Napoleon’s orders,

but the dark fathoms were godless, then the waters

grew hungrier and a wave swallowed Port Royal.

Victoria revolved with her gold orb and sceptre,

Wilberforce was struck by lightning, a second Saul

at the crossroads of empire, while the spectre

breathed in the one element that had made them all

fishes and men; Darwin claimed fishes equal

in the sight of the sea. Madrasi climbed the hull

with their rolled bundles from Calcutta and Bombay,

huddling like laundry in the hold of the
Fatel

Rozack,
ninety-six days out and forty-one more away

from the Cape of Good Hope. In a great sea-battle,

before them, a midshipman was wounded and drowned.

Dawn brought a sea-drizzle. Achille, cramped from a sound

sleep, watched the lights of the morning plane as it droned.

Chapter XXX

I

He yawned and watched the lilac horns of his island

lift the horizon.

                             “I know you ain’t like to talk,”

the mate said, “but this morning I could use a hand.

Where your mind was whole night?”

                                                                  “Africa.”

                                                                                  “Oh? You walk?”

The mate held up his T-shirt, mainly a red hole,

and wriggled it on. He tested the bamboo pole

that trawled the skipping lure from the fast-shearing hull

with the Trade behind them.

                                                    “Mackerel running,” he said.

“Africa, right! You get sunstroke, chief. That is all.

You best put that damn captain-cap back on your head.”