with his huge hands and their rope-furrowed calluses,
then he took up the wand and stood there in the mirror
of her pride and her butterfly-quiet kisses.
He was resinous and frightening. He smelt like trees
on a ridge at sunrise, like unswaying cedars;
then he set out for the hot road towards Castries,
the square already filling with tables. Buses
passed him with screaming children and in their cries
was the ocean’s distance over three centuries.
III
Their small troupe stood in the hot street. Three musicians,
fife, chac-chac, and drummer and the androgynous
warriors, Philo and Achille. Un! Deux! Trois! The dance
began with Philo as its pivot, to the noise
of dry leaves scraping asphalt, the banana-trash
levitating him slowly as the roofs spun round
the dip and swivel of the head, a calabash
masking the agonized face, as Achille drummed the ground
with quick-stuttering heels, stopped. And then he stood straight.
Now he strode with the wand and the fluttering mitre
until he had walked to the far end of the street.
There he spun. Then, knee passing knee, he stepped lighter
than a woman with her skirt lifted high crossing
the stones of a stream when the light is small mirrors,
with the absurd strength of his calves and his tossing
neck, which shook out the mitre like a lion’s mane,
with a long running leap, then a spin, while he held
the shaft low, like a rod divining. All the pain
re-entered Philoctete, of the hacked yams, the hold
closing over their heads, the bolt-closing iron,
over eyes that never saw the light of this world,
their memory still there although all the pain was gone.
He swallowed his nausea, and spun his arms faster,
like a goblet on a potter’s wheel, its brown blur
soothed by his palms, as the bamboo fifes grew shriller
to the slitted eyes of the fifers. The drummer’s wrists
whirred like a hummingbird’s wings, and, to Achille, the
faster they flew, the more he remembered, blent
to his rite; then suddenly the music ceased.
The crowd clapped, and Achille, with great arrogance, sent
Philoctete to bow and pick up the coins on the street
glittering like fish-scales. He let the runnels of sweat
dry on his face. Philoctete sat down. Then he wept.
BOOK SEVEN
Chapter LVI
I
One sunrise I walked out onto the balcony
of my white hotel. The beach was already swept,
and in the clear grooves of the January sea
there was only one coconut shell, but it kept
nodding in my direction as a swimmer might
with sun in his irises, or a driftwood log,
or a plaster head, foaming. It changed shapes in light
according to each clouding thought. A khaki dog
came racing its faster shadow on the clean sand,
then stopped, yapping at the shell, not wetting its paws,
backing off from the claws of surf that made the sound
of a cat hissing; then it faked an interest
in a crab-hole and worried it. If that thing was
a coconut, why didn’t it drift with the crest
of the slow-breathing swell? Then, as if from a vase,
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-s
tops
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:
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, br
aking 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
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