Omeros (19 page)

to be the baying echoes of brutality,

and terror in the oaks along red country roads,

or the gibbet branches of a silk-cotton tree

from which Afolabes hung like bats. Hooded clouds

guarded the town squares with their calendar churches,

whose white, peaked belfries asserted that pastoral

of brooks with leisurely accents. On their verges,

like islands reflected on windscreens, Negro shacks

moved like a running wound, like the rusty anchor

that scabbed Philoctete’s shin, I imagined the backs

moving through the foam of pods, one arm for an oar,

one for the gunny sack. Brown streams tinkled in chains.

Bridges arched their spines. Led into their green pasture,

horses sagely grazed or galloped the plantations.

II

“Life is so fragile. It trembles like the aspens.

All its shadows are seasonal, including pain.

In drizzling dusk the rain enters the lindens

with its white lances, then lindens enclose the rain.

So that day isn’t far when they will say, ‘Indians

bowed under those branches, which tribe is not certain.’

Nor am I certain I lived. I breathed what the farm

exhaled. Its soils, its seasons. The swayed goldenrod,

the corn where summer hid me, pollen on my arm,

sweat tickling my armpits. The Plains were fierce as God

and wide as His mind. I enjoyed diminishing,

I exalted in insignificance after

the alleys of Boston, in the unfinishing

chores of the farm, alone. Once, from the barn’s rafter

a swift or a swallow shot out, taking with it

my son’s brown, whirring soul, and I knew that its aim

was heaven. More and more we learn to do without

those we still love. With my father it was the same.

The bounty of God pursued me over the Plains

of the Dakotas, the pheasants, the quick-volleyed

arrows of finches; smoke bound me to the Indians

from morning to sunset when I have watched its veiled

rising, because I am a widow, barbarous

and sun-cured in the face, I loved them ever since

I worked as a hand in Colonel Cody’s circus,

under a great canvas larger than all their tents,

when they were paid to ride round in howling circles,

with a dime for their glory, and boys screamed in fright

at the galloping braves. Now the aspens enclose

the lances of rain, and the wet leaves shake with light.”

III

From the fort another waltz drifted on the lake

past the pier’s paper lanterns, swayed by violins

in the brass-buttoned night. Catherine Weldon,

like Achille on the river, watched the worried lines

made by the boathouse lanterns. Then she heard a loon’s

wooden cry over black water. Lights draped the coigns

of the pierhead, then a scream as round as the moon’s

circled her scalp. The nausea stirring her loins

was not from war, but from the treachery that came after

war, the white peace of paper so ornately signed

that perhaps that sound was really the loon’s laughter

at treaties changing like clouds, their ink faded like wind.

Empires practised their abstract universals

of deceit: treaties signed with a wink of a pen’s

eye dipped in an inkhorn, but this was not Versailles

with painted cherubs, but on the Dakota Plains.

She had believed in the redemptions of History,

that the papers the Sioux had folded to their hearts

would be kept like God’s word, that each signatory,

after all that suffering, had blotted out their hates,

and that peace would break out as widely as the moon

through the black smoke of clouds that made the lake-water

shine stronger than the lanterns. Then she heard the loon,

no pain in the cry this time, but wooden laughter.

The clouds turned blank pages, the book I was reading

was like Plunkett charting the Battle of the Saints.

The New World was wide enough for a new Eden

of various Adams. A smell of innocence

like that of the first heavy snow came off the page

as I inhaled the spine. She walked past the lanterns

where some bark canoes were moored to the landing stage,

then paused to look at the waltzers in their ghost dance,

then stood at the window clapping transparent hands.

When one grief afflicts us we choose a sharper grief

in hope that enormity will ease affliction,

so Catherine Weldon rose in high relief

through the thin page of a cloud, making a fiction

of my own loss. I was searching for characters,

and in her shawled voice I heard the snow that would be blown

when the wind covered the tracks of the Dakotas,

the Sioux, and the Crows; my sorrow had been replaced.

Like a swift over water, her pen’s shadow raced.

“I have found, in bleached grass, the miniature horror

of a crow’s skull. When dry corn rattles its bonnet,

does it mean the Blackfoot is preparing for war?

When the Crow sets his visage on Death, and round it

circles his eyes with moons, each one is a mirror

foretold by his palm. So, the bird’s skull in the grass

transfixed me, parting the spears of dry corn, just as

it would your blond soldiers. As for the herds that graze

through lance-high grasses, drifting with the Dakotas,

are not the Sioux as uncertain of paradise,

when the grass darkens, as your corn-headed soldiers?

Doubt isn’t the privilege of one complexion.

I look to the white church spire and often think,

Is the cross for them also? The resurrection

of their bodies? The snow and the blood that we drink

for our broken Word? Ask your wheat-headed soldiers.

The charm that rattles in the fists of the shamans

is a god, not a writhing snake, with its severed tail.

They believe a Great Wind will whirl them in its hands

by grasses that never die, springs that never fail,

that restore their souls like the clear-running Hebron.”

Lantern light shines through the skin of an army tent

where her shadow asked its question. Catherine Weldon,

in our final letter to the Indian agent.

Chapter XXXVI

I

Museums endure; but
sic transit gloria

agitates the leaf-light on their concrete benches

in the sculpture garden, where frock-tailed sparrows are

tagging notes to a pediment while finches

debate on a classic façade. Art has surrendered

to History with its whiff of formaldehyde.

Over a glass-case a scholarly beard renders

a clouding judgement. The freckle-faced sun outside

mugs through a window, and so I retrieve my breath

from a varnished portrait, take back my irises

from glaring insomniac Caesar, for whom death

by marble resolved the conspirator’s crisis,

past immortal statues inviting me to die.

Out in fresh air, close to a Bayeux of ivy,

I smoked on the steps and read the calligraphy

of swallows. Behind me, reverential mourners

whispered like people in banks or terminal wards;

Art is immortal and weighs heavily on us,

and museums leave us at a loss for words.

Outside becomes a museum: its ornate frames

square off a dome, a few trees, a brace of sparrows;

till every view is a postcard signed by great names:

that sky Canaletto’s, that empty bench Van Gogh’s.

I ground out my butt and re-entered the dead air,

down the echoing marble with its waxed air

of a pharaonic feast. Then round a corridor

I caught the light on green water as salt and clear

as the island’s. Then I saw him. Achille! Bigger

than I remembered on the white sun-splintered deck

of the hot hull. Achille! My main man, my nigger!

circled by chain-sawing sharks; the ropes in his neck

turned his head towards Africa in
The Gulf Stream,

which luffed him there, forever, between our island

and the coast of Guinea, fixed in the tribal dream,

in the light that entered another Homer’s hand,

its breeze lifting the canvas from the museum.

But those leprous columns thudding against the hull

where Achille rests on one elbow always circle

his craft and mine, it needs no redemptive white sail

from a sea whose rhythm swells like Herman Melville.

Heah’s Cap’n Melville on de whiteness ob de whale—

“Having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue …

giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe.”

Lawd, Lawd, Massa Melville, what could a nigger do

but go down dem steps in de dusk you done describe?

So I stood in the dusk between the Greek columns

of the museum touched by the declining sun

on the gilt of the State House dome, on Saint Gaudens’s

frieze of black soldiers darkening on the Common,

and felt myself melting in their dusk. My collar

turned up in a real freeze, I looked for a cab,

but cabs, like the fall, were a matter of colour,

and several passed, empty. In the back of one, Ahab

sat, trying to catch his whaler. I looped a shout

like a harpoon, like Queequeg, but the only spout

was a sculptured fountain’s.
Sic transit
taxi, sport.

Streetlights came on. The museum windows went out.

II

Passing the lamplit leaves I knew I was different

from them as our skins were different in an empire

that boasted about its hues, in a New England

that had raked the leaves of the tribes into one fire

on the lawn back of the carport, like dead almond

leaves on a beach, and I saw the alarmed pale look,

when I stepped out of a streetlight, that a woman

gave me at a bus-stop, straight out of Melville’s book;

then the consoling smile, like a shark’s, all the fear

that had widened between us was incurable,

as cold as the edge of autumn in the night air

whose leaves rustled the pages of Melville’s Bible.

III

White sanderlings scuttered towards the fraying net

of the evening surf, then panicked, just out of reach,

when a wave made another try, although it could not

exceed the limits set by the scalloping beach

where the birds were mirrored in slate, their shapes exact

and nervous, beaks darting, and then the wrinkling glass

disturbed their reflection. As I steadily walked

towards them, the clattering flock, to let me pass,

circled the tilted sea, and then it resettled,

wave, sand, and bird repeating their process, since they

had seen so many lovers joined by the hands, led

by the star that rises first from the darkening bay.

On the mud-marked seafront people took evening walks,

letting their dogs sniff the foam from a pewter surf,

gulls puffed their chests to the medalling sun on rocks

drying at low tide. Loosened kale heaved in the sough

of the lobster-yawls. A dog kept barking, “Hough, hough!”

at the stiff horizon. Homer (first name Winslow)

made that white chapel stroke under the mackerel-shoaled

sky of Marblehead, reframed in the windscreens

of cars in the parking lot. Summer was bone-cold.

On the nibbling beach whipped by its wind-machines

the scarves lifted and rattled with a lifeguard’s flag,

and a knife that was edged with autumn pressed its blade

on my cheek, the wind sounded like a paper-bag

thwacked open, and the crunching sound my shoes made

on the concrete’s sand enraged me. Tears blurred my sight;

head lowered, I stopped. White shoes were blocking my path.

I looked up. My father stood in the white drill suit

of his eternal summer on another wharf.

He stood in cold mud watching the curled froth decline

round Marblehead. Gulls were turning in from the cold.

He put out his hand. The palm was as cold as mine.

I said: “This is hardly the place; maybe I called

but it’s too cold for talk; this happens to old men,

and I’m nearly there. You could have been my child,

and the more I live, the more our ages widen.”

“We could go to a warmer place.” My father smiled.

“Oh, not where you think, an island close to Eden.

But before you return, you must enter cities

that open like
The World’s Classics,
in which I dreamt

I saw my shadow on their flagstones, histories

that carried me over the bridge of self-contempt,

though I never stared in their rivers, great abbeys

soaring in net-webbed stone, when I felt diminished

even by a postcard. Those things I wrote to please

your mother and our friends, unrevised, unfinished,

in drawing-room concerts died in their own applause.

Way back in the days of the barber’s winding sheet,

I longed for those streets that History had made great,

but the island became my fortress and retreat,

in that circle of friends that I could dominate.

Dominate, Dominus. With His privilege,

I felt like the “I” that looks down on an island,

the way that a crested palm looks down from its ridge

on a harbour warmer than this one, or my hand.

But there is pride in cities, so remember this:

Once you have seen everything and gone everywhere,

cherish our island for its green simplicities,

enthrone yourself, if your sheet is a barber-chair,