Omeros (22 page)

the mossed logs lay with black shakos like dead Hussars.

The shot heard round the world entered the foliage

of Plunkett’s redoubt, when the arc of an empire was

flung over both colonies, wider than the seine

a fisherman hurls over a bay at sunrise,

but all colonies inherit their empire’s sin,

and these, who broke free of the net, enmeshed a race.

Cicadas exchanged musket-volleys in the wood.

A log held fire. To orders from an insane

cloud, battalions of leaves kept falling in their blood.

III

Flare fast and fall, Indian flags of October!

The blue or grey waves riding in Boston Harbor,

the tide like the cavalry, with its streaming mane

and its cirrus-pennons; ripen the grape-arbour

with its thick trellis; redden the sumac from Maine

to the Finger Lakes, let the hornet keep drilling

forts of firewood and mitred Hussars stand by

in scarlet platoons, signed on for George’s shilling,

let aspens lift their aprons and flutter goodbye,

let the earth fold over from the Pilgrim’s sober

plough, raise pitchforks to scatter your daughters out of

the hayloft, erect your white steeple over

the cowed pews, lift the Book, whose wrinkled cover

is Leviathan’s hide; damn them and their love, or

hurl the roped lance in the heart of Jehovah!

That was Catherine’s terror; the collar, the hay-rake,

the evening hymn in the whalehouse, its starched ribs

white as a skeleton. The nightmare cannot wake

from a Sunday where the mouse-claw of ivy grips

the grooved brick of colleges, while a yellow tractor

breaks the Sabbath and the alchemical plateau

of the Transcendental New England character,

sifting wit from the chaff, the thorn out of Thoreau,

the mess from Emerson, where a benefactor

now bronzed in his unshifting principles can show

us that any statue is a greater actor

than its original by its longer shadow.

Privileges did not separate me, instead

they linked me closer to them by that mental chain

whose eyes interlocked with mine, as if we all stood

at a lectern or auction block. Their condition

the same, without manacles. The chains were subtler,

but they were still hammered out of the white-hot forge

that made every captor a blacksmith. The river

had been crossed, but the chain-links of eyes in each face

still flashed submission or rage; I saw distance

in them, and it wearied me; I saw what Achille

had seen and heard: the metal eyes joining their hands

to wrists adept with an oar or a “special skill.”

Chapter XLII

I

Acres of synonymous lights, black battery cells

and terminals coiling with traffic, winked out. Sunrise

reddened the steel lake. Downstairs, in the hotel’s

Canadian-fall window, a young Polish waitress with eyes

wet as new coal and a pageboy haircut was pouring him

coffee, the maples in glass as yellow as orange juice.

Her porcelain wrist tilted, filling his gaze to the brim.

He hoped adoration unnerved her; the sensible shoes

skirting the bare tables, her hand aligning the service

with finical clicks. As if it had tapped her twice

on the back for her papers, she turned with that nervous

smile of the recent immigrant that borders on tears.

A Polish Sunday enclosed it. A Baroque square, its age

patrolled by young soldiers, the flag of their sagging regime

once bright as her lipstick, the consonants of a language

crunched by their boot soles. In it was the scream

of a kettle leaving a freightyard, then the soft farms

with horses and willows nodding past a train window,

the queues in the drizzle. Then the forms

where her name ran over the margin, then a passport photo

where her scared face waited when she opened its door.

She was part of that pitiless fiction so common now

that it carried her wintry beauty into Canada,

it lined her eyelashes with the snow’s blue shadow,

it made her slant cheekbones flash like the cutlery

in the hope of a newer life. At the cashier’s machine

she stood like a birch at the altar, and, very quietly,

snow draped its bridal lace over the raven’s-wing sheen.

Her name melted in mine like flakes on a river

or a black pond in which the wind shakes packets of milk.

When she stood with the cheque, I tried reading the glow

of brass letters on her blouse. Her skin, shaded in silk,

smelt fresh as a country winter before the first snow.

Snow brightened the linen, the pepper, salt domes, the gables

of the napkin, silencing Warsaw, feathering quiet Cracow;

then the raven’s wing flew again between the white tables.

There are days when, however simple the future, we do not go

towards it but leave part of life in a lobby whose elevators

divide and enclose us, brightening digits that show

exactly where we are headed, while a young Polish waitress

is emptying an ashtray, and we are drawn to a window

whose strings, if we pull them, widen an emptiness.

We yank the iron-grey drapes, and the screeching pulleys

reveal in the silence not fall in Toronto

but a city whose language was seized by its police,

that other servitude Nina Something was born into,

where under gun-barrel chimneys the smoke holds its voice

till it rises with hers. Zagajewski. Herbert. Milosz.

II

November. Sober month. The leaves’ fling was over.

Willows harped on the Charles, their branches would blacken.

Drizzles gusted on bridges, lights came on earlier,

twigs clawed the clouds, the hedges turned into bracken,

the sky raced like a shaggy wolf with a rabbit pinned

in its jaws, its fur flying with the first snow,

then gnawed at the twilight with its incisors skinned;

the light bled, flour flew past the grey window.

I saw Catherine Weldon running in the shawled wind.

III

The ghost dance of winter was about to start.

The snowflakes pressed their patterns on the crusting panes,

lakes hardened with ice, a lantern lit the wolf’s heart,

the grass hibernated under obdurate pines,

light sank in the earth as the growing thunderhead

in its army blanket travelled the Great Plains,

with lightning lance, flour-faced, crow-bonneted,

but carrying its own death inside it, wearily.

Red god gone with autumn and white winter early.

Chapter XLIII

I

Flour was falling on the Plains. Her hair turned grey

carrying logs from the woodpile. The tiny turret

of the fort in the snow pointed like a chalet

in a child’s crystal and Catherine remembered

the lights on all afternoon in a Boston street,

the power of the globe that lay in a girl’s palm

to shake the world to whiteness and obliterate

it the way the drifts were blurring the Parkin farm,

the orange twilight cast by the feverish grate

at the carpet’s edge on arrows of andirons

in a brass quiver. She felt the light marking lines

on her warm forehead, reddening the snow mountains

above the chalet with their green crepe-paper pines;

then she would shake the crystal and all would be snow,

the Ghost Dance, assembling then, as it was now.

Work made her wrists cold iron. She rested the axe

down in its white echo. No life was as hard as

the Sioux’s, she thought. But a pride had stiffened their backs.

Hunger could shovel them up like dried cicadas

into the fiery pit like that in the hearth,

when she stared round-eyed in the flames. They were not meek,

and she had been taught the meek inherit the earth.

The flour kept falling. Inedible manna

fell on their children’s tongues, from dribbling sacks

condemned by the army. The crow’s flapping banner

flew over the homes of the Braves. They stood like stakes

without wires: the Crows, the Sioux, the Dakotas.

The snow blew in their wincing faces like papers

from another treaty which a blind shaman tears

to bits in the wind. The pines have lifted their spears.

Except that the thick, serrated line on the slope

was rapidly growing more pine-trees. A faint bugle

sounded from the chalet. She watched the pine-trees slip

in their white smoke downhill to the hoot of an owl

and yapping coyotes answering the bugle,

as the pines lowered their lances in a gallop,

and she heard what leapt from the pine-logs as a girl,

the crackle of rifle-fire from the toy fort,

like cicadas in drought; then she heard the cannon—

the late muffled echo after it was fired

and the dark blossom it made, its arch bringing down

lances and riders with it. The serrated sea

of pines spread out on the plain, their own avalanche

whitening them, but they screamed in the ecstasy

of their own massacre, since this was the Ghost Dance,

and the blizzard slowly erased their swirling cries,

the horses and spinning riders with useless shields,

in the white smoke, the Sioux, the Dakotas, the Crows.

The flour basting their corpses on the white fields.

The absence that settled over the Dakotas

was contained in the globe. Its pines, its tiny house.

II

“I pray to God that I never share in man’s will,

which widened before me. I saw a chain of men

linked by wrists to our cavalry. I watched until

they were a line of red ants. I let out a moan

as the last ant disappeared. Then I rode downhill

away from the Parkin farm to the Indian camp.

I entered the camp in the snow. A starved mongrel

and a papoose sat in the white street, with a clay

vessel in the child’s hands, and the dog’s fanged growl

backed off from my horse, then lunged. Then I turned away

down another street through the tents to more and more

silence. There were hoof-marks frozen in the flour dust

near a hungry tent-mouth. I got off. Through its door

I saw white-eyed Omeros, motionless. He must

be deaf too, I thought, as well as blind, since his head

never turned, and then he lifted the dry rattle

in one hand, and it was the same sound I had heard

in Cody’s circus, the snake hiss before battle.

There was a broken arrow, and others in the quiver

around his knees. Those were our promises. I stared

a long while at his silence. It was a white river

under black pines in winter. I was only scared

when my horse snorted outside, perhaps from the sound

of the rattler. I went back outside. Where were the

women and children? I walked on the piebald ground

with its filthy snow, and stopped. I saw a warrior

frozen in a drift and took him to be a Sioux

and heard the torn war flags rattling on their poles,

then the child’s cry somewhere in the flour of snow,

but never found her or the dog. I saw the soles

of their moccasins around the tents, and a horse

ribbed like a barrel with flies circling its teeth.

I walked like a Helen among their dead warriors.

III

“This was history. I had no power to change it.

And yet I still felt that this had happened before.

I knew it would happen again, but how strange it

was to have seen it in Boston, in the hearth-fire.

I was a leaf in the whirlwind of the Ordained.

Then Omeros’s voice came from the mouth of the tent:

‘We galloped towards death swept by the exaltation

of meeting ourselves in a place just like this one:

The Ghost Dance has tied the tribes into one nation.

As the salmon grows tired of its ladder of stone,

so have we of fighting the claws of the White Bear,

dripping red beads on the snow. Whiteness is everywhere.’”

Look, Catherine! There are no more demons outside the door.

The white wolf drags its shawled tail into the high snow

through the pine lances, the blood dried round its jaw;

it is satisfied. Come, come to the crusted window,

blind as it is with the ice, through the pane’s cataract;

see, it’s finished. It’s over, Catherine, you have been saved.

But she sat on a chair in the parlour while the cracked

window spread its webs, and for days and nights starved

and thinned in her rocker. The maddened wind runs

around the still farm. Bread greened, and like a carved

totem her body hardened to wood. Apples dried, onions

curled with green sprouts, and rats, growing bolder,

with eyes like berries, moved like the burial lanterns

of the cavalry. Her shawl slipped from one shoulder

but she left it there, in peace, since this was peace now,

the winter of the Ghost Dance. “I’m one year older,”

she said to the feathery window. “I loved snow

once, but now I dread its white siege outside my door.”

Years severed in half by winter! By a darkness

through which branches groped, paralyzed in their distress.

Which flocks betrayed. Wild geese with their own honking noise

over jammed highways, the Charles’s slow-moving ice.

No twilight, but lamps turned on in mid-afternoon,

my humped shadow like a bear entering its cave,

clawing at the frozen lock, as every noun