Omeros (20 page)

a sail leaving harbour and a sail coming in,

the shadows of grape-leaves on sunlit verandahs

made me content. The sea-swift vanishes in rain,

and yet in its travelling all that the sea-swift does

it does in a circular pattern. Remember that, son.”

The surf was dark. The lights stuttered in the windows

along the empty beach, red and green lights tossed on

the cold harbour, and beyond them, like dominoes

with lights for holes, the black skyscrapers of Boston.

BOOK FIVE

Chapter XXXVII

I

I crossed my meridian. Rust terraces, olive trees,

the grey horns of a port. Then, from a cobbled corner

of this mud-caked settlement founded by Ulysses—

swifts, launched from the nesting sills of Ulissibona,

their cries modulated to “Lisbon” as the Mediterranean

aged into the white Atlantic, their flight, in reverse,

repeating the X of an hourglass, every twitter an aeon

from which a horizon climbed in the upturned vase.

A church clock spun back its helm. Turtleback alleys

crawled from the sea, not towards it, to resettle

in the courtyard under the olives, and a breeze

turned over the leaves to show their silvery metal.

Here, clouds read backwards, muffling the clash

of church bells in cotton. There, on an opposite wharf,

Sunday in a cream suit, with a grey horned moustache,

strolled past wooden crates, and the long-shadowed Sabbath

was no longer Lisbon but Port of Spain. There, time sifts

like grain from a jute sack under the crooning pigeons.

Sunday clicks open a gold watch, startling the swifts

from the opening eye of a tower, closes it, then slips the sun’s

pendulum back into its fob, patting it with a nod.

Sunday strolls past a warehouse whose iron-ringed door

exhales an odour of coffee as a reek of salt cod

slithers through the railings. Sunday is a widower

in an ice-cream suit, and a straw with a mourning band,

an old Portugee leathery as Portugal, via Madeira,

with a stalled watch for a compass. When he rewinds its hand

it raises an uproar of docks, mulatto clerks cowed

by jets of abuse from wine-barrelled wholesalers,

winches and cranes, black drivers cursing black loaders,

and gold-manacled vendors teasing the Vincentian sailors

folded over the hulls. Then not a single word, as

Saturday went home at one, except from the pigeons

and a boy rattling his stick along the rusted staves

of a railing, its bars caging him as he runs.

After that arpeggio, Sunday hears his own footsteps,

making centuries recede, the ebbing market in slaves

and sugar declining below the horizon. Then Sunday stops

to hear schooners thudding on overlapping wharves.

II

Across the meridian, I try seeing the other side,

past rusty containers, waves like welts from the lash

in a light as clear as oil from the olive seed.

Once the world’s green gourd was split like a calabash

by Pope Alexander’s decree. Spices, vanilla

sweetened this wharf; the grain of swifts would scatter

in their unchanging pattern, their cries no shriller

than they are now over the past, or ours, for that matter,

if our roles were reversed, and the sand in one half

replicated the sand in the other. Now I had come

to a place I felt I had known, an antipodal wharf

where my forked shadow swayed to the same brass pendulum.

Yes, but not as one of those pilgrims whose veneration carried

the salt of their eyes up the grooves of a column

to the blue where forked swifts navigated. Far from it; instead,

I saw how my shadow detached itself from them

when it disembarked on the wharf through a golden haze

of corn from another coast. My throat was scarred

from a horizon that linked me to others, when our eyes

lowered to the cobbles that climbed to the castle yard,

when the coins of the olives showed us their sovereign’s face.

My shadow had preceded me. How else could it recognize

that light to which it was attached, this port where Europe

rose with its terrors and terraces, slope after slope?

III

A bronze horseman halts at a wharf, his green-bronze

cloak flecked with white droppings, his wedged visor

shading the sockets’ hyphenating horizons,

his stare fixed like a helm. We had no such erections

above our colonial wharves, our erogenous zones

were not drawn to power, our squares shrank the directions

of the Empire’s plazas. Above us, no stallions paw

the sky’s pavement to strike stars from the stones,

no sword is pointed to recapture the port of Genoa.

There the past is an infinite Sunday. It’s hot, or it rains;

the sun lifts the sheets of the rain, and the gutters

run out. For those to whom history is the presence

of ruins, there is a green nothing. No bell tower utters

its flotilla of swallows memorizing an alphabet,

no cobbles crawl towards the sea. We think of the past

as better forgotten than fixed with stony regret.

Here, a castle in the olives rises over the tiered roofs

of crusted tile but, like the stone Don in the opera,

is the ghost of itself. Over the flagstones, hooves

clop down from the courtyard, stuttering pennons appear

from the mouths of arches, and the past dryly grieves

from the O’s of a Roman aqueduct; silver cuirasses

flash in the reversible olives, their silvery leaves,

and twilight ripens the municipal canvases,

where, one knee folded, like a drinking deer, an admiral

with a grey horned moustache and foam collar proffers a gift

of plumed Indians and slaves. The wharves of Portugal

were empty as those of the islands. The slate pigeons lift

from the roof of a Levantine warehouse, the castle in the trees

is its own headstone. Yet, once, Alexander’s meridian

gave half a gourd to Lisbon, the seeds of its races,

and half to Imperial Spain. Now Sunday afternoon passes

the empty cafés, their beads hanging like rosaries,

as shawled fado singers sob in turn to their mandolins

while a cobbled lane climbs like a tortoise, and tiredly raises

its head of a pope at the limp sails on washing lines.

Chapter XXXVIII

I

In scorched summer light, from the circle of Charing Cross,

he arose with the Underground’s grit and its embers of sparrows

in a bargeman’s black greatcoat, clutching in one scrofulous

claw his brown paper manuscript. The nose, like a pharos,

bulbed from his cragged face, and the beard under it was

foam that exploded into the spray burst of eyebrows.

On the verge of collapse, the fallen sails of his trousers

were upheld by a rope. In the barges of different shoes

he flapped towards the National. The winch of his voice,

a fog still in its throat, barged through the queues

at the newspaper kiosks, then changed gears with the noise

of red double-deckers embarking on chartered views

from pigeon-stirred Trafalgar; it broke off the icing

from wedding-cake London. Gryphons on their ridge

of sandstone snarled because it had carried the cries in

the Isle of Dogs running over Westminster Bridge.

Today it would anchor in the stone waves of the entrance

of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. There, in tiered sunshine,

the black sail collapsed, face sunward with both hands

crossed over the shop-paper volume bound with grey twine.

He looked like a heap of slag-coal crusting the tiers

with their summering tourists. Eyes shut, the frayed lips

chewed the breeze, the beard curled like the dog’s ears

of his turned-down
Odyssey,
but Omeros was naming the ships

whose oars spidered soundlessly over the sun-webbed calm

behind his own lashes. Then, suddenly, a raging sparrow

of a church-warden bobbed down the steps. It picked one arm.

The bargeman huddled. It screeched. It yanked an elbow,

then kicked him with polished pumps, and a curse as

Greek to the choleric cleric as one might imagine

sprayed the spluttering soutane. It showed him the verses

framed at the entrance announcing this Sunday’s lesson

in charity, etc. Then, like a dromedary, over the sands

of the scorching pavement, the hump began to press on

back to the river. The sparrow, rubbing both hands,

nodded, and chirruped up the steps back to its sanctuary,

where, dipping one claw in the font, it vanished inside

the webbed stone. The bargeman tacked towards his estuary

of light. It was summer. London rustled with pride.

II

He curled up on a bench underneath the Embankment wall.

He saw London gliding with the Thames around its neck

like a barge which an old brown horse draws up a canal

if its yoke is Time. From here he could see the dreck

under the scrolled skirts of statues, the grit in the stone lions’

eyes; he saw under everything an underlying grime

that itched in the balls of rearing bronze stallions,

how the stare of somnolent sphinxes closed in time

to the swaying bells of “cities all the floure”

petalling the spear-railed park where a couple suns

near the angled shade of All-Hallows by the Tower,

as the tinkling Thames drags by in its ankle-irons,

while the ginkgo’s leaves flexed their fingers overhead.

He mutters its fluent alphabet, the peaked A of a spire,

the half-vowels of bridges, down to the crumpled Z

of his overcoat draping a bench in midsummer’s fire.

He read the inverted names of boats in their element,

he saw the tugs chirring up a devalued empire

as the coins of their wake passed the Houses of Parliament.

But the shadows keep multiplying from the Outer

Provinces, their dialects light as the ginkgo’s leaf, their

fingers plucking their saris as wind picks at water,

and the statues raising objections; he sees a wide river

with its landing of pier-stakes flooding Westminster’s

flagstones, and traces the wake of dugouts in the frieze

of a bank’s running cornice, and whenever the ginkgo stirs

the wash of far navies settles in the bargeman’s eyes.

A statue swims upside down, one hand up in response

to a question raised in the House, and applause rises

from the clapping Thames, from benches in the leaves.

And the sunflower sets after all, retracting its irises

with the bargeman’s own, then buds on black, iron trees

as a gliding fog hides the empires: London, Rome, Greece.

III

Who decrees a great epoch? The meridian of Greenwich.

Who doles out our zeal, and in which way lies our

hope? In the cobbles of sinister Shoreditch,

in the widening rings of Big Ben’s iron flower,

in the barges chained like our islands to the Thames.

Where is the alchemical corn and the light it yields?

Where, in which stones of the Abbey, are incised our names?

Who defines our delight? St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

After every Michaelmas, its piercing soprano steeple

defines our delight. Within whose palatable vault

will echo the Saints’ litany of our island people?

St. Paul’s salt shaker, when we are worth their salt.

Stand by the tilted crosses of well-quiet Glen-da-Lough.

Follow the rook’s crook’d finger to the ivied grange.

As black as the rook is, it comes from a higher stock.

Who screams out our price? The crows of the Corn Exchange.

Where are the pleasant pastures? A green baize-table.

Who invests in our happiness? The Chartered Tour.

Who will teach us a history of which we too are capable?

The red double-decker’s view of the Bloody Tower.

When are our brood, like the sparrows, a public nuisance?

When they screech at the sinuous swans on the Serpentine.

The swans are royally protected, but in whose hands

are the black crusts of our children? In the pointing sign

under the harps of the willows, to the litter of Margate Sands.

What has all this to do with the price of fish, our salary

tidally scanned with the bank-rate by waxworks tellers?

Where is the light of the world? In the National Gallery.

In Palladian Wren. In the City that can buy and sell us

the packets of tea stirred with our crystals of sweat.

Where is our sublunar peace? In that sickle sovereign

peeling the gilt from St. Paul’s onion silhouette.

There is our lunar peace: in the glittering grain

of the coined estuary, our moonlit, immortal wheat,

its white sail cresting the gradual swell of the Downs,

startling the hare from the pillars on Salisbury Plain,

sharpening the grimaces of thin-lipped market towns,

whitewashing the walls of Brixton, darkening the grain

when coal-shadows cross it. Dark future down darker street.

Chapter XXXIX

I

The great headstones lifted like the keels of curraghs

from Ireland’s groundswell and spray foamed on the walls

of the broken abbey. That silver was the lake’s,

a salver held by a tonsured hill. The old well’s

silence increased as gravel was crunched by pilgrims

following the monks’ footpath. Silence was in flower.