Omeros (4 page)

Past that islet out there was the Battle of the Saints.

Old Maud was ruddy as a tea-rose; once her hair

was gold as a beer-stein in firelight, but now

she’d stretch a mapped arm from her nightdress. “It’s a rare

chart of the Seychelles or something.” “Oh, my love, no!”

“You are my tea-rose, my crown, my cause, my honour,

my desert’s white lily, the queen for whom I fought.”

Sometimes the same old longing descended on her

to see Ireland. He set down his glass in the ring

of a fine marriage. Only a son was missing.

III

How fast it fades! Maud thought; the enamelled sky,

the gilded palms, the bars like altars of raffia,

even for that Madonna bathing her baby

with his little shrimp thing! One day the Mafia

will spin these islands round like roulette. What use is

Dennis’s devotion when their own ministers

cash in on casinos with their old excuses

of more jobs? Their future felt as sinister as

that of that ebony girl in her yellow dress.

“There’s our trouble,” Maud muttered into her glass. In

a gust that leant the triangular sails of the

surfers, Plunkett saw the pride of Helen passing

in the same yellow frock Maud had altered for her.

“She looks better in it”—Maud smiled—“but the girl lies

so much, and she stole. What’ll happen to her life?”

“God knows,” said Plunkett, following the butterfly’s

yellow-panelled wings that once belonged to his wife,

the black V of the velvet back, near the shallows.

Her head was lowered; she seemed to drift like a waif,

not like the arrogant servant that ruled their house.

It was at that moment that he felt a duty

towards her hopelessness, something to redress

(he punned relentlessly) that desolate beauty

so like her island’s. He drained the foaming Guinness.

Seychelles. Seashells. One more. In the olive saucer,

the dry stones were piling up, their green pith sucked dry.

Got what we took from them, yes sir! Quick, because the

Empire was ebbing. He watched the silhouette

of his wife, her fine profile set in an oval

ivory cloud, like a Victorian locket,

as when, under crossed swords, she lifted the lace veil.

The flag then was sliding down from the hill-stations

of the Upper Punjab, like a collapsing sail;

an elephant folded its knees, its striations

wrinkling like the tea-pavilions after the Raj,

whose ebbing surf lifted the coastlines of nations

as lacy as Helen’s shift. In the noon’s mirage

the golden palms shook their tassels, Eden’s Egypt

sank in the tinted sand. The Giza pyramids

darkened with the sharpening Pitons, as Achille shipped

both oars like rifles. Clouds of delivered Muslims

foamed into the caves of mosques, and honour and glory

faded like crested brandies. Then remorseful hymns

soared in the stone-webbed Abbey.
Memento mori

in the drumbeat of Remembrance Day. Pigeons whirr

over Trafalgar. Helen needed a history,

that was the pity that Plunkett felt towards her.

Not his, but her story. Not theirs, but Helen’s war.

The name, with its historic hallucination,

brightened the beach; the butterfly, to Plunkett’s joy,

twinkling from myrmidon to myrmidon, from one

sprawled tourist to another. Her village was Troy,

its smoke obscuring soldiers fallen in battle.

Then her unclouding face, her breasts were its Pitons,

the palms’ rusted lances swirled in the death-rattle

of the gargling shoal; for her Gaul and Briton

had mounted fort and redoubt, the ruined barracks

with its bushy tunnel and its penile cannon;

for her cedars fell in green sunrise to the axe.

His mind drifted with the smoke of his reverie

out to the channel. Lawrence arrived. He said:

“I changing shift, Major. Major?” Maud tapped his knee.

“Dennis. The bill.” But the bill had never been paid.

Not to that housemaid swinging a plastic sandal

by the noon sea, in a dress that she had to steal.

Wars. Wars thin like sea-smoke, but their dead were real.

He smiled at the mythical hallucination

that went with the name’s shadow; the island was once

named Helen; its Homeric association

rose like smoke from a siege; the Battle of the Saints

was launched with that sound, from what was the “Gibraltar

of the Caribbean,” after thirteen treaties

while she changed prayers often as knees at an altar,

till between French and British her final peace

was signed at Versailles. All of this came to his mind

as Lawrence came staggering up the terrace

with the cheque finally, and that treaty was signed;

the paper was crossed by the shadow of her face

as it was at Versailles, two centuries before,

by the shade of Admiral Rodney’s gathering force;

a lion-headed island remembering war,

its crouched flanks tawny with drought, and on its ridge, grass

stirred like its mane. For a while he watched the waiter

move through the white iron shields of the white terrace.

In the village Olympiad, on St. Peter’s Day,

he served as official starter with a flare-gun

borrowed from the manager of the marina.

It wasn’t Aegean. They climbed no Parthenon

to be laurelled. The depot faced their arena,

the sea’s amphitheatre. When one wore a crown—

victor ludorum
—no one knew what it meant, or

cared to be told. The Latin syllables would drown

in the clapping dialect of the crowd. Hector

would win, or Achille by a hair; but everyone

knew as the crossing ovals of their thighs would soar

in jumps down the cheering aisle, or their marathon

six times round the village, that the true bounty was

Helen, not a shield nor the ham saved for Christmas;

as one slid down the greased pole to factional roars.

Chapter VI

I

These were the rites of morning by a low concrete

parapet under the copper spears of the palms,

since men sought fame as centaurs, or with their own feet,

or wrestlers circling with pincer-extended arms,

or oblong silhouettes racing round a white vase

of scalloped sand, when a boy on a pounding horse

divided the wrestlers with their lowering claws

like crabs. As in your day, so with ours, Omeros,

as it is with islands and men, so with our games.

A horse is skittering spray with rope for its rein.

Only silhouettes last. No one remembers the names

of foam-sprinters. Time halts the arc of a javelin.

This was repeated behind Helen’s back, in the shade

of the wall. She was gossiping with two women

about finding work as a waitress, but both said

the tables was full. What the white manager mean

to say was she was too rude, ’cause she dint take no shit

from white people and some of them tourist—the men

only out to touch local girls; every minute—

was brushing their hand from her backside so one day

she get fed up with all their nastiness so she tell

the cashier that wasn’t part of her focking pay,

take off her costume, and walk straight out the hotel

naked as God make me, when I pass by the pool,

people nearly drown, not naked completely, I

still had panty and bra, a man shout out, “Beautifool!

More!” So I show him my ass. People nearly die.

The two women screamed with laughter, then Helen leant

with her skirt tucked into her thighs, and asked, elbows

on her knees, if it had work in the beach restaurant

with the Chinee. They said “None.” Behind her, footballers

were heading the world. Helen said: “Girl, I pregnant,

but I don’t know for who.” “For who,” she heard an echoing call, as

with
oo
’s for rings a dove moaned in the manchineel.

Helen stood up, brushing her skirt. “Is no sense at all

spending change on transport”; easing straps from each heel.

II

Change burns at the beach’s end. She has to decide

to enter the smoke or to skirt it. In that pause

that divides the smoke with a sword, white Helen died;

in that space between the lines of two lifted oars,

her shadow ambles, filly of Menelaus,

while black piglets root the midden of Gros Îlet,

but smoke leaves no signature on its page of sand.

“Yesterday, all my troubles seem so far away,”

she croons, her clear plastic sandals swung by one hand.

III

Far down the beach, where the boy had wheeled it around,

the stallion was widening. Helen heard its hooves

drumming through her bare feet, and turned, as the unreined

horse plunged with its dolphining neck, the wheezing halves

of its chest distended by the ruffling nostrils

like a bellows, as spray fanned from the punished waves,

while the boy with an Indian whoop hammered his heels

on the barrel of the belly into thick smoke

where its blur spun, whinnying, and the stallion’s sound

scalded her scalp with memory. A battle broke

out. Lances of sunlight hurled themselves into sand,

the horse hardened to wood, Troy burned, and a soundless

wrestling of smoke-plumed warriors was spun

from the blowing veils, while she dangled her sandals

and passed through that door of black smoke into the sun.

And yesterday these shallows were the Scamander,

and armed shadows leapt from the horse, and the bronze nuts

were helmets, Agamemnon was the commander

of weed-bearded captains; yesterday, the black fleet

anchored there in the swift’s road, in the wiry nets

thrown past the surf when the sea and a river meet;

yesterday the sightless holes of a driftwood log

heard the harp-wires on the sea, the white thunder

off Barrel of Beef, and Seven Seas and a dog

sat in a wineshop’s shade; a red sail entered the

drifting tree of a rainspout, and the faint pirogue

slow as a snail whose fingers untie the reef-knots

of a common horizon left a silvery slime

in its wake; yesterday, in that sea without time,

the golden moss of the reef fleeced the Argonauts.

I saw her once after that moment on the beach

when her face shook my heart, and that incredible

stare paralyzed me past any figure of speech,

when, because they thought her moods uncontrollable,

her tongue too tart for a waitress to take orders,

she set up shop: beads, hair-pick, and trestle table.

She braided the tourists’ flaxen hair with bright beads

cane-row style, then would sit apart from the vendors

on her sweet-drink crate while they bickered like blackbirds

over who had stolen whose sale, in the shadows

of the thatched hut with T-shirts and flowered sarongs.

Her carved face flickering with light-wave patterns cast

among the coconut masks, the coral earrings

reflected the sea’s patience. Once, when I passed

her shadow mixed with those shadows, I saw the rage

of her measuring eyes, and felt again the chill

of a panther hidden in the dark of its cage

that drew me towards its shape as it did Achille.

I stopped, but it took me all the strength in the world

to approach her stall, as it takes for a hunter

to approach a branch where a pantheress lies curled

with leaf-light on its black silk. To stand in front of her

and pretend I was interested in the sale

of a mask or a T-shirt? Her gaze looked too bored,

and just as a pantheress stops swinging its tail

to lightly leap into grass, she yawned and entered

a thicket of palm-printed cloth, while I stood there

stunned by that feline swiftness, by the speed

of her vanishing, and behind her, trembling air

divided by her echo that shook like a reed.

Chapter VII

I

Where did it start? The iron roar of the market,

with its crescent moons of Mohammedan melons,

with hands of bananas from a Pharaoh’s casket,

lemons gold as the balls of Etruscan lions,

the dead moon of a glaring mackerel; it increases

its pain down the stalls, the curled heads of cabbages

crammed on a tray to please implacable Caesars,

slaves head-down on a hook, the gutted carcasses

of crucified rebels, from orange-tiled villas,

from laurels of watercress, and now it passes

the small hearts of peppers, nippled sapodillas

of virgins proffered to the Conquistadores.

The stalls of the market contained the Antilles’

history as well as Rome’s, the fruit of an evil,

where the brass scales swung and were only made level

by the iron tear of the weight, each brass basin

balanced on a horizon, but never equal,

like the old world and new, as just as things might seem.

They came out of the iron market. Achille gave

Helen back the filled basket. Helen said:
“Ba moin!”

“Give it to me!”

                            Achille said: “Look! I not your slave!

You bound to show off for people?” Of course, she laughed

with that loud ringing laugh of hers, then walked ahead

of him. And he, feeling like a dog that is left

to nose the scraps of her footsteps, suddenly heard