Omeros (29 page)

or a girl’s throat, I heard a moan from the village

of a blowing conch, and I saw the first canoe

on the horizon’s glittering scales. The old age

of the wrinkled sea was in that moan, and I knew

that the floating head had drifted here. The mirrors

of the sky were clouded, and I heard my own voice

correcting his name, as the surf hissed: “Omeros.”

The moment I named it, the marble head arose,

fringed with its surf curls and beard, the hollow shoulders

of a man waist-high in water with an old leather

goatskin or a plastic bag, pricking the dog’s ears,

making it whine with joy. Then, suddenly, the weather

darkened, and it darkened the forked, slow-wading wood

until it was black, and the shallows in that second

changed to another dialect as Seven Seas stood

in the white foam manacling his heels. He beckoned,

that is, the arm of that log brought in by the tide,

then the cloud passed, and the white head glared, almond-eyed

in her white studio with its foam-scalloped beard

a winter ago, then it called to the khaki dog

that still backed off from the surf, yet now what appeared

changed again to its shadow, then a driftwood log

that halted and beckoned, moving to the foam’s swell,

one elbow lifted, calling me from the hotel.

They kept shifting shapes, or the shapes metamorphosed

in the worried water; no sooner was the head

of the blind plaster-bust clear than its brow was crossed

by a mantling cloud and its visage reappeared

with ebony hardness, skull and beard like cotton,

its nose like a wedge; no sooner I saw the one

than the other changed and the first was forgotten

as the sand forgets a shadow in widening sun,

their bleached almond seeds their only thing in common.

So one changed from marble with a dripping chiton

in the early morning on that harp-wired sand

to a foam-headed fisherman in his white, torn

undershirt, but both of them had the look of men

whose skins are preserved in salt, whose accents were born

from guttural shoal, whose vision was wide as rain

sweeping over the sand, clouding the hills in gauze.

I came down to the beach. In its pointed direction,

the dog raced, passing the daisy-prints of its paws.

II

Up a steep path where even goats are careful,

the path that Philoctete took past the foaming cove,

the blind stone led me, my heart thudding and fearful

that it would burst like the sea in a drumming cave.

It was a cape that I knew, tree-bent and breezy,

no wanderer could have chosen a better grave.

If this was where it ended, the end was easy—

to give back the borrowed breath the joy that it gave,

with the sea exulting, the wind so wild with love.

His stubble chin jerked seaward, and the empty eyes

were filled with them, with the colour of the blue day;

so a swift will dart its beak just before it flies

towards its horizon, hazed Greece or Africa.

I could hear the crumpling parchment of the sea in

the wind’s hand, a silence without emphasis,

but I saw no shadow underline my being;

I could see through my own palm with every crease

and every line transparent since I was seeing

the light of St. Lucia at last through her own eyes,

her blindness, her inward vision as revealing

as his, because a closing darkness brightens love,

and I felt every wound pass. I saw the healing

thorns of dry cactus drop to the dirt, and the grove

where the sibyl swayed. I thought of all my travelling.

III

“I saw you in London,” I said, “sunning on the steps

of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, your dog-eared manuscript

clutched to your heaving chest. The queues at the bus-stops

smiled at your seaman’s shuffle, and a curate kicked

you until you waddled down to the summery Thames.”

“That’s because I’m a heathen. They don’t know my age.

Even the nightingales have forgotten their names.

The goat declines, head down, with these rocks for a stage

bare of tragedy. The Aegean’s chimera

is a camera, you get my drift, a drifter

is the hero of my book.”

                                           “I never read it,”

I said. “Not all the way through.”

                                                          The lift of the

arching eyebrows paralyzed me like Medusa’s

shield, and I turned cold the moment I had said it.

“Those gods with hyphens, like Hollywood producers,”

I heard my mouth babbling as ice glazed over my chest.

“The gods and the demi-gods aren’t much use to us.”

“Forget the gods,” Omeros growled, “and read the rest.”

Then there was the silence any injured author

knows, broken by the outcry of a frigate-bird,

as we both stared at the blue dividing water,

and in that gulf, I muttered, “I have always heard

your voice in that sea, master, it was the same song

of the desert shaman, and when I was a boy

your name was as wide as a bay, as I walked along

the curled brow of the surf; the word ‘Homer’ meant joy,

joy in battle, in work, in death, then the numbered peace

of the surf’s benedictions, it rose in the cedars,

in the
laurier-cannelles,
pages of rustling trees.

Master, I was the freshest of all your readers.”

“Ready?”

                 I nodded. We descended the goat-track,

down to the chumbling cove with its crescent beach,

and the old goat, skipping, shouted over his back:

“Who gave you my proper name in the ancient speech

of the islands?”

                            “A girl.”

                                           We climbed down in silence.

“A Greek girl?”

                            “Who else?”

                                                   “From what city? Do you know?”

“No. I forget.”

                          “Thebes? Athens?”

                                                             “Yeah. Could be Athens,”

I said, stumbling. “What difference does it make now?”

That stopped the old goat in his tracks. He turned:

                                                                                         “What difference?

None, maybe, to you, but a girl … that’s very nice.

Her image rises out of every battle’s noise.

A girl smells better than a book. I remember Helen’s

smell. The sun on her flesh. The light’s coins on my eyes.

That ten years’ war was nothing, an epic’s excuse.

Did you, you know, do it often?” Then his head tossed

at a horizon whose smile was as sad as his.

I saw in its empty line a love that was lost.

“Often,” I lied. He said,

                                          “Are they still fighting wars?”

I saw a coming rain hazing his pupils.

“Not over beauty,” I answered. “Or a girl’s love.”

“Love is good, but the love of your own people is

greater.”

                “Yes,” I said. “That’s why I walk behind you.

Your name in her throat’s white vase sent me to find you.”

“Good. A girl smells better than the world’s libraries.”

Chapter LVII

I

At the edge of the shallows was a black canoe

stayed by a grizzled oarsman, his white chin stubbled

as a dry sea-urchin’s; but still I did not know

why, wading aboard, I felt such an untroubled

weightlessness, or why the ferryman held the prow,

except it was for that marble freight whose shadow

now sat amidships. The marble shaded its eyes

with one palm and shouted: “Home!” and the startled dog

scuttled into an almond grove. I heard the oars

clicking their teeth, but no wake followed the pirogue,

and the oarsman seemed to stare through me to the shore’s

dividing line, as each stroke diminished its trees.

We followed the hotel’s shoreline between bathers

whose bodies the oars passed through: lovers, families,

without dividing them yet. No one noticed us

or thought of that shadow wobbling underwater

that sharked towards them, breaking the sun-wired mesh,

or stared at our strange crew; it was only after

our current reached them that they stood hugging their flesh.

Then the oarsman smiled. The island filed past my eyes,

the hills that I knew, a road. I felt them going

for good round the point; then we were passing Castries,

the wharf where my father stood. The wharf was rowing

farther away from me till the white liner stuck

to the green harbour was no bigger than a toy,

as Seven Seas watched me with each receding stroke.

And my cheeks were salt with tears, but those of a boy,

and he saw how deeply I had loved the island.

Perhaps the oarsman knew this, but I didn’t know.

Then I saw the ebony of his lifted hand.

And Omeros nodded: “We will both praise it now.”

But I could not before him. My tongue was a stone

at the bottom of the sea, my mouth a parted conch

from which nothing sounded, and then I heard his own

Greek calypso coming from the marble trunk,

widening the sea with a blind man’s anger:

“In the mist of the sea there is a horned island

with deep green harbours where the Greek ships anchor”

and the waves were swaying to the stroke of his hand,

as I heard my own thin voice riding on his praise

the way a swift follows a crest, leaving its shore:

“It was a place of light with luminous valleys

under thunderous clouds. A Genoan wanderer

saying the beads of the Antilles named the place

for a blinded saint. Later, others would name her

for a wild wife. Her mountains tinkle with springs

among moss-bearded forests, and the screeching of birds

stitches its tapestry. The white egret makes rings

stalking its pools. African fishermen make boards

from trees as tall as their gods with their echoing

axes, and a volcano, stinking with sulphur,

has made it a healing place.”
My voice was going

under the strength of his voice, which carried so far

that a black frigate heard it, steadying its wing.

II

The charred ferryman kept rowing, black as the coal

on which the women climbed.

                                                       “Wha’ happenin’, bossman?”

He grinned, and I caught a dead whiff of alcohol;

but all islands have that legendary oarsman

slapping down dominoes on a rumshop table,

then raking the slabs in with a gravedigger’s breath,

who grins and never loses. That comfortable,

common, familiar apparition of my death

spoke my own language, the one for which I had died,

his cracked soles braced against the rib of the gunwale,

not the marble tongue of the bust I sat beside,

and what was dying but the shadow of a sail

crossing this page or her face? That’s why he had grinned,

rowing my ribbed trunk in sleep, it was he who steered

it to that other beach in an altering wind.

Now Seven Seas spoke to him, and the oarsman veered

the prow, braking an oar, and sculling it, until

the canoe was entering a hill-locked lagoon—

Marigot shot with fires of the immortelle,

with a crescent beach as thin as the quarter-moon,

virginal, inviolate, until the masts of war.

III

Seven Seas showed me the ghostly fleet at anchor

in that deep-draught shelter, assembled to destroy

their shadowy opposites, and spat in rancour

over the side of the pirogue. “This is like Troy

all over. This forest gathering for a face!

Only the years have changed since the weed-bearded kings.

Beyond these stone almonds I can see Comte de Grasse

pacing like horned Menelaus while his wife swings

her sandals by one hand, strutting a parapet,

knowing that her beauty is what no man can claim

any more than this bay. Her beauty stands apart

in a golden dress, its beaches wreathed with her name.”

We rowed through the rotting fleet in a dead silence,

stirred only by the chuckle of the prow, then each mast

after reflection changed to a spindly fence

at the curve of a mangrove river, and then mist

blurred out Achille by his river. And then the bust

with its marble mouth revolved its irisless eyes.

Chapter LVIII

I

Up heights the Plunketts loved, from Soufrière upwards

past that ruined scheme which hawsers of lianas

had anchored in bush, of Messrs. Bennett & Ward,

the blind guide led me with a locked marble hand as

we smelt the foul sulphur of hell in paradise

on the brittle scab crusting its volcano’s sores

and the scorching light that had put out Lucia’s eyes

seared mine when I saw the Pool of Speculation

under its horned peaks. I heard the boiling engines

of steam in its fissures, the deep indignation

of Hephaestus or Ogun grumbling at the sins

of souls who had sold out their race, the ancient forge