Omeros (17 page)

All night he had worked the rods without any sleep,

watching Achille cradled in the bow; he had read

the stars and known how far out they were and how deep

the black troughs were and how long it took them to lift,

but he owed it to his captain, who took him on

when he was stale-drunk. He had not noticed the swift.

“You know what we ketch last night? One
mako
size ‘ton,’”

using the patois for kingfish, blue albacore.

“Look by your foot.”

                                     The kingfish, steel-blue and silver,

lay fresh at his feet, its eye like a globed window

ringing with cold, its rim the circular river

of the current that had carried him back, with the spoon

bait in its jaw, the ton was his deliverer,

now its cold eye in sunlight was blind as the moon.

A grey lens clouded the gaze of the albacore

that the mate had gaffed and clubbed. It lay there, gaping,

its blue flakes yielding the oceanic colour

of the steel-cold depth from which it had shot, leaping,

stronger than a stallion’s neck tugging its stake,

sounding, then bursting its trough, yawning at the lure

of a fishhook moon that was reeled in at daybreak

round the horizon’s wrist. Tired of slapping water,

the tail’s wedge had drifted into docility.

Achille had slept through the fight. Cradled at the bow

like a foetus, like a sea-horse, his memory

dimmed in the sun with the scales of the albacore.

“Look, land!” the mate said. Achille altered the rudder

to keep sideways in the deep troughs without riding

the crests, then he looked up at an old man-o’-war

tracing the herring-gulls with that endless gliding

that made it the sea-king.

                                              “Them stupid gulls does fish

for him every morning. He himself don’t catch none,

white slaves for a black king.”

                                                     “When?” the mate said. “You wish.”

“Look him dropping.” Achille pointed. “Look at that son-

of-a-bitch stealing his fish for the whole focking week!”

A herring-gull climbed with silver bent in its beak

and the black magnificent frigate met the gull

halfway with the tribute; the gull dropped the mackerel

but the frigate-bird caught it before it could break

the water and soared.

                                        “The black bugger beautiful,

though!” The mate nodded, and Achille felt the phrase lift

his heart as high as the bird whose wings wrote the word

“Afolabe,” in the letters of the sea-swift.

“The king going home,” he said as he and the mate

watched the frigate steer into that immensity

of seraphic space whose cumuli were a gate

dividing for a monarch entering his city.

II

Like parchment charts at whose corners four winged heads spout

jets of curled, favouring gusts, their cheeks like cornets

till the sails belly as the hull goes hard about

through seas as scrolled as dragons in ornate knots,

so strong gusts favoured the sail, until he could shout

from happiness, except that the mate would have heard.

This was the shout on which each odyssey pivots,

that silent cry for a reef, or familiar bird,

not the outcry of battle, not the tangled plots

of a fishnet, but when a wave rhymes with one’s grave,

a canoe with a coffin, once that parallel

is crossed, and cancels the line of master and slave.

Then an uplifted oar is stronger than marble

Caesar’s arresting palm, and a swift outrigger

fleeter than his galleys in its skittering bliss.

And I’m homing with him, Homeros, my nigger,

my captain, his breastplates bursting with happiness!

Let the dolphins like outriders escort him now

past Barrel of Beef, because he can see the white

balconies of the hotel dipping with the bow,

and, under his heel, the albacore’s silver weight.

III

And this was the hymn that Achille could not utter:

“Merci, Bon Dieu, pour la mer-a, merci la Vierge”
—

“Thank God for the sea who is His Virgin Mother”;

“Qui ba moin force moin”
— “Who gave me the privilege

of working for Him. Every bird is my brother”;

“Toutes gibiers c’est frères moin’, pis n’homme ni pour travail”
—

“Because man must work like the birds until he die.”

He could see the heightening piles of the jetty

in front of the village hung with old tires, the mate

standing in his torn red shirt, the anchor ready,

then the conch-shell blowing and blowing its low note

like a ground dove’s. And way up, in his yam garden,

Philoctete planting green yam shoots heard the moaning sea,

and crossed his bare, caving chest, and asked God pardon

for his doubt. In the sharp shade of the pharmacy

Seven Seas heard it; he heard it before the dog

thudded its tail on the box and the fishermen

ran down the hot street to pull the tired pirogue.

Achille let the mate wave back. Then he saw Helen.

But he said nothing. He sculled with a single oar.

He watched her leave. The mate hoisted the albacore.

Chapter XXXI

I

A remorseful Saturday strolled through the village,

down littered pavements, the speakers gone from the street

whose empty shadows contradicted the mirage

of last night’s blockorama, but the systems’ beat

thudded in Achille’s head that replayed the echo,

as he washed the canoe, of a Marley reggae—

“Buffalo soldier.” Thud. “Heart of America.”

Thud-thud. Mop and pail. He could not rub it away.

Between the soft thud of surf the bass beat wider,

backing his work up with its monodic phrasing.

He saw the smoky buffalo, a black rider

under a sweating hat, his slitted eyes grazing

with the herds that drifted like smoke under low hills,

the wild Indian tents, the sky’s blue screen, and on it,

the black soldier turned his face, and it was Achille’s.

Then, pennons in reggae-motion, a white bonnet

in waves of heat like a sea-horse, leading them in

their last wide charge, the soft hooves pounding in his skull,

Red Indians bouncing to a West Indian rhythm,

to the cantering beat which, as he swayed, the scull

of the lance-like oar kept up like a metronome,

as, fist by fist, from the bow he pulled up anchor,

he saw, like palms on a ridge, the Red Indians come

with blurred hooves drumming to the music’s sweet anger,

while his own horse neighed and stamped, smelling a battle

in its own sweat. Achille eased the long Winchester

out of its fringed case. This was the oar. His saddle

the heaving plank at the stern, a wave’s crest was the

white eagle bonnet; then slowly he fired the oar

and a palm-tree crumpled; then to repeated cracks

from the rifle, more savages, until the shore

was littered with palm spears, bodies: like Aruacs

falling to the muskets of the Conquistador.

II

Seven Seas asked him to rake the leaves in his yard.

The pomme-Arac shed so many the rusted drum

filled quickly, and more were falling as he carried

each pile. Through the teeth of the rake Achille heard them

talk a dead language. He would clean up this whole place.

He cutlassed the banana trash. He gripped a frond

of the rusting coconut, swivelling its base

till it gave, then he dumped the rubbish in a mound

round the smoking drum. The black dog did dog-dances

around him, yapping, crouching, entangling his heel.

Meanwhile, the bonfire rose with crackling branches.

Seven Seas, on his box, called the dog from Achille.

He wanted to ask Seven Seas where trees got names,

watching the ribbed branches blacken with the same stare

of the blind man at the leaves of the leaping flames,

and why our life’s spark is exceeded by a star.

But the light of a star is dead and maybe our

light was the same. Then Achille saw the iguana

in the leaves of the pomme-Arac branches and fear

froze him at the same time it fuelled the banner

of the climbing flame. Then the ridged beast disappeared.

He stepped back from the pomme-Arac’s shade on the grass

diagrammed like the lizard. Then, as if he heard

his thought, Seven Seas said: “
Aruac
mean the race

that burning there like the leaves and
pomme
is the word

in patois for ‘apple.’ This used to be their place.”

Maybe he’d heard the iguana with his dog’s ears,

because the dog was barking around the trunk’s base.

He had never heard the dog’s name either. It was

one of those Saturdays that contain centuries,

when the strata of history layered underheel,

which earth sometimes flashes with its mineral signs,

can lie in a quartz shard. Gradually, Achille

found History that morning. Near the hedge, the tines

of the rake in the dead leaves grated on some stone,

so he crouched to uproot the obstruction. He saw

deep marks in the rock that froze his fingers to bone.

The features incised there glared back at his horror

from its disturbed grave. A face that a child will draw:

blank circles for eyes, a straight line down for the nose,

a slit for a mouth, but the expression angrier

as Achille’s palm brushed off centuries of repose.

A thousand archaeologists started screaming

as Achille wrenched out the totem, then hurled it far

over the oleander hedge. It lay dreaming

on one cheek in the spear-grass, but that act of fear

multiplied the lances on his scalp. Stone-faced souls

peered with their lizard eyes through the pomme-Arac tree,

then turned from their bonfire. Instantly, like moles

or mole crickets in the shadow of History,

the artifacts burrowed deeper into their holes.

III

A beach burns their memory. Copper almond leaves

cracking like Caribs in a pepper smoke, the blue

entering God’s eye and nothing raked from their lives

except one elegy from Aruac to Sioux,

the shadow of a frond’s bonnet riding white sand,

while Seven Seas tried to tell Achille the answer

to certain names. The cane’s question shook in his hand

while the pomme-Arac leaves burned. He said he was once

a Ghost Dancer like that smoke. He described the snow

to Achille. He named the impossible mountains

that he had seen when he lived among the Indians.

Sybils sweep the sand of our archipelago.

Chapter XXXII

I

She floated so lightly! One hand, frail as a swift,

gripping the verandah. The cotton halo fanned

from her shrunken crown, and I felt that I could lift

that fledgling, my mother, in the cup of my hand

and settle her somewhere else: away from the aged

women rubbing rosaries in the Marian Home,

but I was resigned like them. I no longer raged

at the humiliations of time. Her turn had come

to be bent by its weight, its indifferent process

that drummed in wrist and shank. Time was that fearful friend

they talked to, who sat beside them in empty chairs,

as deaf as they were; who sometimes simply listened.

They were all withdrawn. They’d entered a dimension

where every thought was weightless, every form clouded

by its ephemeral halo. Time’s intention

rather than death was what baffled them; in the deed

of dying there was terror, but what did time mean,

after some friend stopped talking and around her bed

they opened the panels of an unfolding screen?

The frail hair grew lovelier on my mother’s head,

but when my arm rested on her hollow shoulder

it staggered slightly from the solicitous weight.

I was both father and son. I was as old as her

exhausted prayer, as her wisps of memory floated

with a vague patience, telling her body: “Wait,”

when all that brightness had withered like memory’s flower,

like the allamanda’s bells and the pale lilac

bougainvillea vines that had covered our gabled house.

They, like her natural memory, would not come back.

Her days were dim as dusk. There were no more hours.

From her cupped sleep, she wavered with recognition.

I would bring my face closer to hers and catch the

scent of her age.

                              “Who am I? Mama, I’m your son.”

“My son.” She nodded.

                                          “You have two, and a daughter.

And a lot of grandchildren,” I shouted. “A lot to

remember.”

                     “A lot.” She nodded, as she fought her

memory. “Sometimes I ask myself who I am.”

We looked at the hills together, at roofs that I knew

in childhood. “Their names are Derek, Roddy, and Pam.”

“I have to go back to the States again.”

                                                                   “Well, we

can’t be together all the time,” she said, “I know.”

“There is too much absence,” I said. Then a blessed

lucidity broke through a cloud. She smiled. “I know

who you are. You are my son.”