from black, white-jacketed servitors whose sonic
judgement couldn’t distinguish a secondhand-car
salesman from Manchester from the phony pukka
tones of ex-patriates. He was no officer,
but he’d found himself saying things like “Luverly,”
“Right-o,” and, Jesus Christ, “Ta!” from a wicker chair,
with the other farts exchanging their brusque volley
in the class war. Every one of them a liar
dyeing his roots, their irrepressible Cockney,
overdoing impatience. Clods from Lancashire
surprised by servants, outpricing their own value
and their red-kneed wives with accents like cutlery
spilled from a drawer. For them, the fields of his valour,
the war in the desert under Montgomery,
and the lilac flowers under the crosses were
preserved by being pickled at the Victoria.
He’d played the officer’s pitch. Though he felt ashamed,
it paid off. The sand grit in his throat, the Rover,
all that sort of stuff. The khaki shorts that proclaimed
his forgotten service. Well, all that was over,
but not the class war that denigrated the dead
face down in the sand, beyond Alexandria.
The flags pinned to a map. The prone crosses
of tourists sprawled out far from the red lifeguard’s flag,
like those of his comrades with sand seaming their eyes.
What was it all for? A bagpipe’s screech and a rag.
Well, why not? In war, the glory was the yeoman’s;
the kids from drizzling streets; they fell like those Yanks
in a sun twice as fierce, Tobruk and Alamein’s,
their corpses black in the shade of the shattered tanks,
their bodies dragged like towels to a palm-tree’s shade.
Those lines of white surf raced like the applauding streets
alongside the Eighth Army when Montgomery broke
the back of the Afrika Korps. Blokes in white sheets
flinging caps like spray as we piped into Tobruk
and I leant on the tank turret while bagpipes screeched
ahead of those grinning Tommies. I wept with pride.
Tears prickled his eyes. Maud reached across the saucer
and gripped his fingers. He knew she could see inside
the wound in his head. His white nurse. His officer.
II
Not club-mates. Chums, companions. Comrades-in-arms.
They crouched, hands on helmets, while the Messerschmitt’s gun
stitched, in staccato succession, miniature palms
along the top of the trench. He shot up. Again
Tumbly pulled him down. “Just keep yer bleedin’ ’ead low!”
Scott was running to them, laughing, but the only thing
funny about him was the fact that one elbow
didn’t have the rest of the arm. He jerked the thing
from the stump, mimicking a Kraut salute; then, as
his astonishment passed, he sagged down from the knees
with that grin. And I turned to Tumbly and his eyes
were open but not moving; then an awful noise
lifted all of us up from the sand and I guess
I was hit then, but I could remember nothing
for months, in casualty. Oh yes! that business
of Tumbly’s eyes. The sky in them. Scottie laughing.
Tell them that at the Victoria, in the noise
of ice-cubes tinkling and the draft-beer frothing.
This wound I have stitched into Plunkett’s character.
He has to be wounded, affliction is one theme
of this work, this fiction, since every “I” is a
fiction finally. Phantom narrator, resume:
Tumbly. Blue holes for his eyes. And Scottie wiser
when the shock passed. Plain men. Not striking. Not handsome.
Through the Moorish arches of the hospital ward,
with a cloud wrapped around his head like an Arab,
he saw the blue Mediterranean, then Maud
lying on her back on the cliff and the scarab
of the troop ship far on the roadstead. Two days’ leave
before they set out, and he thought he would never
see her again, but if he did, a different life
had to be made whenever the war was over,
even if it lasted ten years, if she would wait,
not on this grass cliff but somewhere on the other
side of the world, somewhere, with its sunlit islands,
where what they called history could not happen. Where?
innocence? She deserved Eden after this war.
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 wit
h 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