Omeros (30 page)

of bubbling lead erupted with speculators

whose heads gurgled in the lava of the Malebolge

mumbling deals as they rose. These were the traitors

who, in elected office, saw the land as views

for hotels and elevated into waiters

the sons of others, while their own learnt something else.

Now, in their real estate, they lunged at my shoes

to pull me down with them as we walked along shelves

bubbling with secrets, with melting fingers of mud

and sucking faces that argued Necessity

in rapid zeroes which no one else understood

for the island’s profit. One had rented the sea

to offshore trawlers, whose nets, if hoisted, would show

for thrice the length of its coast, while another thief

turned his black head like a ball in a casino

when the roulette wheel slowed down like his clicking teeth

in the pool’s sluggish circle. It screamed in contempt

that choked in its bile at black people’s laziness

whenever it leapt from the lava and then went

under again, then the shooting steam shot its price

from a fissure, as they went on making their deals

for the archipelago with hot, melting hands

before the price of their people dropped. The sandals

led me along the right path, around the fierce sands,

round the circle of speculation, where others

kept making room for slaves to betray their brothers,

till the eyes in the stone head were cursing their tears.

II

Just as the nightingales had forgotten his lines,

cameras, not chimeras, saw his purple sea

as a postcard archipelago with gnarled pines

and godless temples, where the end of poetry

was a goat bleating down from the theatre steps

while the myrtles rustled like the dry sails of ships.

“You ain’t been nowhere,” Seven Seas said, “you have seen

nothing no matter how far you may have travelled,

cities with shadowy spires stitched on a screen

which the beak of a swift has ravelled and unravelled;

you have learnt no more than if you stood on that beach

watching the unthreading foam you watched as a youth,

except your skill with one oar; you hear the salt speech

that your father once heard; one island, and one truth.

Your wanderer is a phantom from the boy’s shore.

Mark you,
he
does not go; he sends his narrator;

he plays tricks with time because there are two journeys

in every odyssey, one on worried water,

the other crouched and motionless, without noise.

For both, the ‘I’ is a mast; a desk is a raft

for one, foaming with paper, and dipping the beak

of a pen in its foam, while an actual craft

carries the other to cities where people speak

a different language, or look at him differently,

while the sun rises from the other direction

with its unsettling shadows, but the right journey

is motionless; as the sea moves round an island

that appears to be moving, love moves round the heart—

with encircling salt, and the slowly travelling hand

knows it returns to the port from which it must start.

Therefore, this is what this island has meant to you,

why my bust spoke, why the sea-swift was sent to you:

to circle yourself and your island with this art.”

Helmets of mud-caked skulls. Out of the spectres

that the forge of the Malebolge was bubbling with,

a doubled shape stood up. Its grin was like Hector’s.

Hector in hell, shouldering the lance of an oar!

In this place he had put himself in full belief

of an afterlife; a shadow in the geyser

that arched like a comet with its fountaining steam,

since for me not to have seen him there would question

a doctrine with more conviction than my own dream.

His charred face seemed to be travelling to the sun,

when its light broke through the changeable smoke once more,

since hell was certain to him as much as heaven;

now he was helmeted, and the borrowed visor

had slitted his face like an iguana’s pods,

his shield a spiked hubcap, for the road-warrior

had paused in the smoke, not for Omeros’s gods

nor the masks of his origins, the god-river,

the god-snake, but for the One that gathered his race

in the shoal of a net, a confirmed believer

in his own hell, that his spectre’s punishment was

a halt in its passage towards a smokeless place.

There were Bennett & Ward! The two young Englishmen

in dirty pith-helmets crouched by the yellow sand

dribbling from the volcano’s crust. Both were condemned

to pass a thermometer like that ampersand

which connected their names on a blackboard, its sign

coiled like a constrictor round the tree of Eden.

III

The stone heels guided me. I followed close behind

through the veils of stinking sulphur, filthy and frayed,

till I was as blind as it was, steering with one hand

in front of my face, beating webs from my forehead,

through the fool’s gold of the yellow rocks, the thin sand

running from their fissures. But in such things, the guide

needs the trust of the wounded one to begin with;

he could feel my doubt behind him. That was no good.

I had lost faith both in religion and in myth.

In one pit were the poets. Selfish phantoms with eyes

who wrote with them only, saw only surfaces

in nature and men, and smiled at their similes,

condemned in their pit to weep at their own pages.

And that was where I had come from. Pride in my craft.

Elevating myself. I slid, and kept falling

towards the shit they stewed in; all the poets laughed,

jeering with dripping fingers; then Omeros gripped

my hand in enclosing marble and his strength moved

me away from that crowd, or else I might have slipped

to that backbiting circle, mockers and self-loved.

The blind feet guided me higher as the crust sloped.

As I, contemptuously, turned my head away,

a fist of ice gripped it from the soul-shaping forge,

and it wrenched my own head bubbling its half-lies,

crying out its name, but each noun stuck in its gorge

as it begged for pardon, willing to surrender

if another chance were given it at language.

But the ice-matted head hissed,

                                                        “You tried to render

their lives as you could, but that is never enough;

now in the sulphur’s stench ask yourself this question,

whether a love of poverty helped you

to use other eyes, like those of that sightless stone?”

My own head sank in the black mud of Soufrière,

while it looked back with all the faith it could summon.

Both heads were turned like the god of the yawning year

on whose ridge I stood looking back where I came from.

The nightmare was gone. The bust became its own past,

I could still hear its white lines in the far-off foam.

I woke to hear blackbirds bickering at breakfast.

Chapter LIX

I

My light was clear. It defined the fallen schism

of a starfish, its asterisk printed on sand,

its homage to Omeros my exorcism.

I was an ant on the forehead of an atlas,

the stroke of one spidery palm on a cloud’s page,

an asterisk only. Achille with his cutlass

rattling into the hold shared the same privilege

of an archipelago’s dawn, a fresh language

salty and shared by the bittern’s caw, by a frieze

of low pelicans. The sea was my privilege.

And a fresh people. The roar of famous cities

entered the sea-almond’s branches and then tightened

into silence, and my crab’s hand came out to write—

and down the January beach as it brightened

came bent sibyls sweeping the sand, then a hermit

waist-high in the empty bay, still splashing his face

in that immeasurable emptiness whose war

was between the clouds only. In that blessèd space

it was so quiet that I could hear the splutter

Philoctete made with his ablutions, and that deep “Ah!”

for the New Year’s benediction. Then Philoctete

waved “Morning” to me from far, and I waved back;

we shared the one wound, the same cure. I felt the wet

sand under my soles, and the beach close like a book

behind me with every footmark. The morning’s gift

was enough, but holier than that was the crab’s lift-

ed pincer with its pen like the sea-dipping swift.

All the thunderous myths of that ocean were blown

up with the spray that dragged from the lacy bulwarks

of Cap’s bracing headland. The sea had never known

any of them, nor had the illiterate rocks,

nor the circling frigates, nor even the white mesh

that knitted the Golden Fleece. The ocean had

no memory of the wanderings of Gilgamesh,

or whose sword severed whose head in the
Iliad.

It was an epic where every line was erased

yet freshly written in sheets of exploding surf

in that blind violence with which one crest replaced

another with a trench and that heart-heaving sough

begun in Guinea to fountain exhaustion here,

however one read it, not as our defeat or

our victory; it drenched every survivor

with blessing. It never altered its metre

to suit the age, a wide page without metaphors.

Our last resort as much as yours, Omeros.

II

Why waste lines on Achille, a shade on the sea-floor?

Because strong as self-healing coral, a quiet culture

is branching from the white ribs of each ancestor,

deeper than it seems on the surface; slowly but sure,

it will change us with the fluent sculpture of Time,

it will grip like the polyp, soldered by the slime

of the sea-slug. Below him, a parodic architecture

re-erected the earth’s crusted columns, its porous

temples, stoas through which whipping eels slide,

over him the tasselled palanquins of Portuguese man-o’-wars

bobbed like Asian potentates, when ribbed dunes hide

the spiked minarets, and the waving banners of moss

are the ghosts of motionless hordes. The crabs’ anabasis

scuttles under his wake, because this is the true element,

water, which commemorates nothing in its stasis.

From that coral and crystalline origin, a simply decent

race broke from its various pasts, from howling sand

to a track in a forest, torn from the farthest places

of their nameless world. With nothing more in his hand

than the lance of a spear-gun, fishes keep shifting

direction like schools of philosophers,

and cautious plankton, who wait till darkness is lifting

from the Antillean seabed, burst into phosphorus,

meadows of stuttering praise. History has simplified

him. Its elegies had blinded me with the temporal

lament for a smoky Troy, but where coral died

it feeds on its death, the bones branch into more coral,

and contradiction begins. It lies in the schism

of the starfish reversing heaven; the mirror of History

has melted and, beneath it, a patient, hybrid organism

grows in his cruciform shadow. For a city

it had coral parthenons. No needling steeple

magnetized pilgrims, but it grew a good people.

God’s light ripples over them as it does the Troumasse

River in the morning, as it does over me, when

the palm-wheel threshes its spokes, and my ecstasy

of privilege lifts me with the man-o’-war’s wing

in that fear of happiness I have never shed,

pierced by a lance of sunlight flung over the sea.

O Sun, the one eye of heaven, O Force, O Light,

my heart kneels to you, my shadow has never changed

since the salt-fresh mornings of encircling delight

across whose cities the wings of the frigate ranged

freer than any republic, gliding with ancient

ease! I praise you not for my eyes. That other sight.

III

By the bay’s cobalt, to that inaudible thud

that hits the forehead with its stunning width and hue,

the rage of Achille at being misunderstood

by a camera for the spelling on his canoe

was the same process by which men are simplified

as if they were horses, muscles made beautiful

by working the sea; by the deep clefts that divide

the plates of their chests, the iron wrists that can pull

a dead log up the wash alone, or, when the trench

of a breaker crests, how their soles turn into rocks,

though they are blurred for a while in the bursting drench

shifting a little for purchase. So an anchor

had hooked its rust in one sufferer, and the scar shows

on the slit bone still; so work was the prayer of anger

for a cursing Achille, who refused to strike a pose

for crouching photographers. So, if at the day’s end

when they hauled with aching tendons the logged net,

their palms stinging dry with salt cuts from the stubborn seine,

the tourists came flying to them to capture the scene

like gulls fighting over a catch, Achille would howl

at their clacking cameras, and hurl an imagined lance!

It was the scream of a warrior losing his only soul

to the click of a Cyclops, the eye of its globing lens,

till they scuttered from his anger as a khaki mongrel