Omeros (21 page)

It widened the furrows like a gap between hymns,

if that pause were protracted hour after hour

by century-ringed oaks, by a square Celtic cross,

by wafers of snowdrops from the day webbed mortar

had cinched the stone to the whisk of a sorrel horse

grazing its station. In it, a paper aspen

rustled its missal. Its encircling power

lifted the midges in vertiginous Latin,

then sailed a rook into the slit of a tower

like a card in a post-box. It waxed a tea-van,

draped a booth with sweaters, then it crossed the dry road

to hear a brook talk the old language of Ireland.

There it filled a bucket and carried the clear load

for the sorrel to nuzzle with ruffling nostrils.

The weight of the place, its handle, its ancient name

for “wood with a lake,” or “abbey with hooded hills,”

rooted in the bucket’s clang, echoed the old shame

of disenfranchisement. I had no oasis,

no pebbled language to drink from like a calm horse

or pilgrim lapping up soul-watering places;

the grass was brighter with envy, then my remorse

was a clouding sun. The sorrel swaying its whisk,

the panes of blue sky in the abbey were all set

in a past as old as Glen-da-Lough’s obelisk,

when alder and aspen aged in one alphabet.

The child-voiced brook repeated History’s lesson

as an elder clapped its leaves in approbation

until others swayed to the old self-possession

for which faith is known; but which faith, in a nation

split by a glottal scream, by a sparrow’s chirrup,

where a prayer incised in a cross, a Celtic rune

could send the horse circling with empty stirrup

from a sniper’s bolt? Here, from this abbey’s ruin,

if the rook flew north with its funereal caw,

far from this baptismal font, this silver weir,

too high for inspection as it crossed the border,

it would see a street that ended in wreaths of wire

while a hearse with drizzling lights waits for an order

in a sharp accent, making the black boots move on

in scraping syllables, the gun on its shoulder,

still splitting heirs, dividing a Shem from a Shaun,

an Ireland no wiser as it got older.

II

Though all its wiry hedgerows startle the spirit,

when the ancient letters rise to a tinker’s spoon,

banging a saucepan, those fields which they inherit

hide stones white-knuckled with hatred. A pitted moon

mounted the green pulpit of Sugar Loaf Mountain

in its wax-collar. Along a yew-guarded road,

a cloud hung from a branch in the orange hour,

like a shirt that was stained with poetry and with blood.

The wick of the cypress charred. Glen-da-Lough’s tower.

III

I leant on the mossed embankment just as if he

bloomed there every dusk with eye-patch and tilted hat,

rakish cane on one shoulder. Along the Liffey,

the mansards dimmed to one indigo silhouette;

then a stroke of light brushed the honey-haired river,

and there, in black cloche hat and coat, she scurried faster

to the changing rose of a light. Anna Livia!

Muse of our age’s Omeros, undimmed Master

and true tenor of the place! So where was my gaunt,

cane-twirling flaneur? I blest myself in his voice,

and climbed up the wooden stairs to the restaurant

with its brass spigots, its glints, its beer-brightened noise.

“There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s stream”

was one of the airs Maud Plunkett played, from Moore

perhaps, and I murmured along with them; its theme,

as each felted oar lifted and dipped with hammer-

like strokes, was that of an adoring sunflower

turning bright hair to her Major. And then I saw him.

The Dead were singing in fringed shawls, the wick-low shade

leapt high and rouged their cold cheeks with vermilion

round the pub piano, the air Maud Plunkett played,

rowing her with felt hammer-strokes from my island

to one with bright doors and cobbles, and then Mr. Joyce

led us all, as gently as Howth when it drizzles,

his voice like sun-drizzled Howth, its violet lees

of moss at low tide, where a dog barks “Howth! Howth!” at

the shawled waves, and the stone I rubbed in my pocket

from the Martello brought one-eyed Ulysses

to the copper-bright strand, watching the mail-packet

butting past the Head, its wake glittering like keys.

Chapter XL

I

A snail gnawing a leaf, the mail-packet nibbles

the Aegean coast, its wake a caterpillar’s

accordion. Then, becalmed by its own ripples,

sticks like a butterfly to its branch. The pillars,

the lizard-crossed terraces on the ruined hills

are as quiet as the sail. Storks crest the columns.

Gulls chalk the blue enamel and a hornet drills

the pink blossoms of the oleander and hums

at its work. In white villages with cracked plaster

walls, shawled women lean quietly on their shadows,

remembering statues in their alabaster

manhood, when their oiled hair was parted like the crow’s

folded wings. The flutes in the square and the sea-lace

of bridal lilac; sawing fiddles that outlast

the cicadas. On the scorched deck Odysseus

hears the hill music through the wormholes of the mast.

The sail clings like a butterfly to the elbow

of an olive branch. A bride on her father’s arm

scared of her future. On its tired shadow,

the prow turns slowly, uncertain of its aim.

He peels his sunburnt skin in maps of grey parchment

which he scrolls absently between finger and thumb.

The crew stare like statues at that feigned detachment

whose heart, in its ribs, thuds like the galley-slaves’ drum.

II

Hunched on their oars, they smile; “This is we Calypso,

Captain, who treat we like swine, you ain’t seeing shore.

Let this sun burn you black and blister your lips so

it hurt them to give orders, fuck you and your war.”

The mattock rests, idle. No oar lifts a finger.

Blisters flower on palms. The bewildered trireme

is turning the wrong way, like the cloud-eyed singer

whose hand plucked the sea’s wires, back towards the dream

of Helen, back to that island where their hunched spine

bristled and they foraged the middens of Circe,

when her long white arm poured out the enchanting wine

and they bucked in cool sheets. “Cap’n, boy? Beg mercy

o’ that breeze for a change, because sometimes your heart

is as hard as that mast, you dream of Ithaca,

you pray to your gods. May they be as far apart

from your wandering as ours in Africa.

Island after island passing. Still we ain’t home.”

The boatswain lifted the mattock, and the metre

of the long oars slowly settled on a rhythm

as the prow righted. He saw a limestone palace

over his small harbour, he saw a sea-swift skim

the sun-harped water, and felt the ant of a breeze

crossing his forehead, and now the caterpillar’s

strokes of the oars lifted the fanning chrysalis

of the full sails as a wake was sheared by the bow.

The quick mattock beat like the heart of Odysseus;

and if you have seen a butterfly steer its shadow

across a hot cove at noon or a rigged canoe

head for the horns of an island, then you will know

why a harbour-mouth opens with joy, why black crew,

slaves, and captain at the end of their enterprise

shouted in response as they felt the troughs lifting

and falling with their hearts, why rowers closed their eyes

and prayed they were headed home. They knew the drifting

Caribbean currents from Andros to Castries

might drag them to Margarita or Curaçao,

that the nearer home, the deeper our fears increase,

that no house might come to meet us on our own shore,

and fishermen fear this as much as Ulysses

until they see the single eye of the lighthouse

winking at them. Then the strokes match heartbeat to oar,

their blistered palms weeping for palms or olive trees.

III

And Istanbul’s spires, each dome a burnoosed Turk,

swathed like a Saracen, with the curved scimitar

of a crescent moon over it, or the floating muck

of a lowering Venice probed by a gondolier,

rippling lines repeating some pilgrim’s journals,

the weight of cities that I found so hard to bear;

in them was the terror of Time, that I would march

with columns at twilight, only to disappear

into a past whose history echoed the arch

of bridges sighing over their ancient canals

for a place that was not mine, since what I preferred

was not statues but the bird in the statue’s hair.

The honeyed twilight cupped in long, shadowed squares,

the dripping dungeons, the idiot dukes, were all

redeemed by the creamy strokes of a Velázquez,

like the scraping cellos in concentration camps,

with art next door to the ovens, the fluting veil

of smoke soaring with Schubert? The cracked glass of Duchamp’s

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors;
did Dada

foresee the future of Celan and Max Jacob

as part of the cosmic midden? What my father

spiritedly spoke of was that other Europe

of mausoleum museums, the barber’s shelf

of
The World’s Great Classics,
with a vanity whose

spires and bells punctually pardoned itself

in the absolution of fountains and statues,

in writhing, astonishing tritons; their cold noise

brimming the basin’s rim, repeating that power

and art were the same, from some Caesar’s eaten nose

to spires at sunset in the swift’s half-hour.

Tell that to a slave from the outer regions

of their fraying empires, what power lay in the work

of forgiving fountains with naiads and lions.

Chapter XLI

I

Service. Under my new empire. The Romans

acquired Greek slaves as aesthetics instructors

of their spoilt children, many from obscure islands

of their freshly acquired archipelago. But those tutors,

curly-haired, served a state without equestrians

apart from statues; a republic without class,

tiered only on wealth, and eaten with prejudice

from its pillared base, the Athenian
demos,

its
demos
demonic and its
ocracy
crass,

corrupting the blue-veined marble with its disease,

stillborn as a corpse, for all those ideals went cold

in the heat of its hate. And not only in tense

Southern towns and plantations, where it often killed

the slaves it gave Roman names for dumb insolence,

small squares with Athenian principles and pillars

maintained by convicts and emigrants who had fled

persecution and gave themselves
fasces
with laws

to persecute slaves. A wedding-cake Republic.

Its domes, museums, its ornate institutions,

its pillared façade that looked down on the black

shadows that they cast as an enraging nuisance

which, if it were left to its Solons, with enough luck

would vanish from its cities, just as the Indians

had vanished from its hills. Leaves on an autumn rake.

II

I re-entered my reversible world. Its opposite

lay in the autumnal lake whose trees kept still

perfectly, but where my disembodied trunk split

along the same line of reflection that halved Achille,

since men’s shadows are not pieces moved by a frown,

by the same hand that opens the willow’s fan to the light,

indifferent to who lifts us up once we are put down,

fixed in hierarchical postures, pawn, bishop, knight,

nor are we simply chameleons, self-dyeing our skins

to each background. The widening mind can acquire

the hues of a foliage different from where it begins

in the low hills of Gloucester running with smokeless fire.

There Iroquois flashed in the Indian red, in the sepias

and ochres of leaf-mulch, the mind dyed from the stain

on their sacred ground, the smoke-prayer of the tepees

pushed back by the Pilgrim’s pitchfork. All over again,

diaspora, exodus, when the hills in their piebald ranges

move like their ponies, the tribes moving like trees

downhill to the lowland, a flag-fading smoke-wisp estranges

them. First men, then the forests. Until the earth

lies barren as the dusty Dakotas. Men take their colours

as the trees do from the native soil of their birth,

and once they are moved elsewhere, entire cultures

lose the art of mimicry, and then, where the trees were,

the fir, the palm, the olive, the cedar, a desert place

widens in the heart. This is the first wisdom of Caesar,

to change the ground under the bare soles of a race.

This was the groan of the autumn wind in the tamaracks

which I shared through Catherine’s body, coming in waves

through the leaves of the Shawmut, the ochre hands of the Aruacs.

Here too, at Concord, the contagious vermilion

advanced with the maples, like red poinciana

under the fort of that lion-headed island,

spreading the stain on a map under the banner

of a cloud-wigged George. Under the planks of its bridge