Omeros (27 page)

clouds plump as dough grew fragrant as the long ovals

of crusting bread drawn out of a Creole oven

by spatulas longer than oars. The sunlight stuck

to his cheek, then ran down like salt butter

in the mouths of the loaves. Hunger gnawed his stomach

as he marched back to the gate. It was shut, but the

guard opened it again for him. He had to make

the bakery before they went, the wicker-woven

baskets emptied quickly; sometimes they’d be gone

before he and Maud got there. His Bread of Heaven

laced with salt butter, his private communion.

She was at the church door. He honked, hurrying her in.

III

Maud held the warm bag against her stomach and she

slapped his hand when it fumbled towards the package

of pointed loaves. “Pig.” She smiled and stung his raw knee

with a slap, turning away in pretended rage

when he squeezed her thigh. “Dennis! I’ve just come from

church! Here. Why don’t you squeeze one of these tits instead?”

By the time they crossed the wickered road to the farm

he had devoured two loaves of the fragrant bread

sunlit by the butter which he always carried.

Despite that morning’s near-accident, the old Rover

sailed under the surf of threshing palms and his heart

hummed like its old engine, his wanderings over,

like the freighter rusting on its capstans. The heat

was wide now and the shadows blacker in the rows

of Maud’s garden beds. Their fragrance did not draw her.

She smelt mortality in the oleanders

as well as the orchids; in the funeral-parlour

reek of stale water in vases. She went upstairs.

She didn’t garden that morning. Sick of flowers.

Their common example of bodily decay,

from the brown old age of bridal magnolias

to the sunflower’s empire that lasted a day.

By Bendemeer’s stream. Nature had not betrayed her,

she smiled, lying in her bed. On the sun-streaked floor

the sunflower’s dish, tracking the sun like radar,

altered the jalousies’ shadows till they meant more

than the rays they let in. The gold wheel frightened her.

Chapter LII

I

The morning Maud died he sat in the bay window,

watching the angel-hair blow gently from her face.

That wax rose pillowed there was his crown and wonder,

a breeze lifting the curtains like her bridal lace.

Seashells. Seychelles. The empire of cancer spread

across the wrinkled sheets. Loosened from their ribbon,

his fleet of letters sailed their mahogany bed

close to a Macaulay and a calf-bound Gibbon,

an empire’s bookends. His locket and his queen,

her golden knot his sovereign, and the covered keys

of the shawled piano she’d never play again.

She was his orb and sceptre, the shire of his peace,

the hedges aisling England, lanes ending in spires,

rooks that lift and scatter from oaks threshing like seas,

the black notes of sparrows on telegraph wires,

all these were in his letters, in the small brass-barred

chest next to her fingers, his voice was in each word.

She had been reading them in their carved double-bed.

That broke his grief. The Major stood, then staggered

to clutch the linen, burying his face inside her.

He rubbed their names against her stomach. “Maud, Maud,

it’s Dennis, love, Maud.” Then he stretched beside her,

as if they were statues on a stone tomb, so still

he heard the groan of a sun-expanded board

on the hot verandah, and from the roofs downhill

a bucket rattling for water, then the dry cardboard

rattle of breadfruit leaves on the bay-window sill.

II

Provinces, Protectorates, Colonies, Dominions,

Governors-General, black Knights, ostrich-plumed Viceroys,

deserts, jungles, hill-stations, all an empire’s zones,

lay spilled from a small tea-chest; felt-footed houseboys

on fern-soft verandahs, hearty Toby-jugged Chiefs

of Police, Girl-Guide Commissioners, Secretaries,

poppies on cenotaphs, green-spined Remembrance wreaths,

cornets, kettledrums, gum-chewing dromedaries

under Lawrence, parasols, palm-striped pavilions,

dhows and feluccas, native-draped paddle-ferries

on tea-brown rivers, statue-rehearsing lions,

sandstorms seaming their eyes, horizontal monsoons,

rank odour of a sea-chest, mimosa memories

touched by a finger, lead soldiers, clopping Dragoons.

Breadfruit hands on a wall. The statues close their eyes.

Mosquito nets, palm-fronds, scrolled Royal Carriages,

dacoits, gun-bearers, snarling apes on Gibraltar,

sermons to sweat-soaked kerchiefs, the Rock of Ages

pumped by a Zouave band, lilies light the altar,

soldiers and doxies by a splashing esplanade,

waves turning their sheet music, the yellowing teeth

of the parlour piano,
Airs from Erin
played

to the whistling kettle, and on the teapot’s head

the cozy’s bearskin shako, biscuits break with grief,

gold-braid laburnums, lilac whiff of lavender,

columned poplars marching to Mafeking’s relief.

Naughty seaside cards, the sepia surrender

of Gordon on the mantel, the steps of Khartoum,

The World’s Classics
condensed, Clive as brown as India,

bathers in Benares, an empire in costume.

His will be done, O Maud, His kingdom come,

as the sunflower turns, and the white eyes widen

in the ebony faces, the sloe-eyes, the bent smoke

where a pig totters across a village midden

over the sunset’s shambles, Rangoon to Malta,

the regimental button of the evening star.

Solace of laudanum, menstrual cramps, the runnings,

tinkles in the jordan, at dusk the zebra shade

of louvres on the quilt, the maps spread their warnings

and the tribal odour of the second chambermaid.

And every fortnight, ten sharp on Sunday mornings,

shouts and wheeling patterns from our Cadet Brigade.

All spilt from a tea-chest, a studded souvenir,

props for an opera, Victoria Regina,

for a bolster-plump Queen the pillbox sentries stamp,

piss, straw and saddle-soap, heaume and crimson feather,

post-red double-deckers, spit-and-polished leather,

and iron dolphins leaping round an Embankment lamp.

III

There was Plunkett in my father, much as there was

my mother in Maud. Not just the morning-glories

or our own verandah’s lilac bougainvilleas,

or the splayed hands of grape-leaves, of classic stories

on the barber’s wooden shelf, the closest, of course,

was Helen’s, but there in that khaki Ulysses

there was a changing shadow of Telemachus

in me, in his absent war, and an empire’s guilt

stitched in the one pattern of Maud’s fabulous quilt.

Chapter LIII

I

The Major stood straight as a mast without a sail

in the wooden waves of the pews. I turned my head

slowly, as we do at funerals, and saw the veil

that netted Helen’s beauty. Then I tried to read

from the gilt hymnal with its ribbon, but felt the mesh

of her veil brushing my nape, and its black hairs stirred

with the legend behind my back, the smoke made flesh,

the phantom singed by a beach-fire. All I had heard

flamed in that look, galleys drowned in its wake.

This was the seduction of quicksand, my deep fear

of vertiginous irises that could not help their work

any more than the earth’s fascination with fire

as it left the earth. An amen enclosed a hymn

and Plunkett’s amen steadied the wavering choir

in the echoing stone. Fans, like moths, stirred the air.

And in that gap before the Father’s injunction,

a smooth black priest with a smoother voice that pleased him

more than his listeners in its serene unction,

I felt the chasm that widened at Glen-da-Lough,

deep as a daisied trench, over the quilted bier,

the disenfranchisement no hyphenating rook

could connect between two religions, the one here

and that of our chapel. I turned around to look

at the black faces seized by faith and heard the whirr

of larches turning their missals, the Xeroxed sheets

that the Major had asked the priest to use in her

memory, for the midshipman, and the war’s fading fleets.

I recognized Achille. He stood next to Philoctete

in a rusted black suit, his eyes anchored to the pew;

then he lifted them and I saw that the eyes were wet

as those of a boy, and my eyes were watering too.

Why should he be here, why should they have come at all,

none of them following the words, but he had such grace

that I couldn’t bear it. I could leave the funeral,

but his wet ebony mask and her fishnetted face

were shrouded with Hector’s death. Could he, in that small

suit too tight at the shoulders, who shovelled the pens

in the rain at Plunkett’s, love him? Where was it from,

this charity of soul, more piercing than Helen’s

beauty? runnelling his face like the road to the farm?

We sang behind Plunkett, and I saw Achille perspire

over the words, his lips following after the sound.

II

I knew little about Maud Plunkett. I knew I was here

because the Major had trained us all as cadets.

What I shared with his wife we shared as gardeners.

I had wanted large green words to lie waxen on

the page’s skin, floating but rooted in its lymph as

her lilies in the pond’s cool mud, every ivory prong

spreading the Japanese peace of
Les Nympheas

in the tongue-still noon, the heat, where a wooden bridge

with narrow planks arched over the calligraphic

bamboo, their reflections rewritten when a midge

wrinkled the smoothness, and from them, the clear concentric

rings from a pebble, from the right noun on a page.

I was both there and not there. I was attending

the funeral of a character I’d created;

the fiction of her life needed a good ending

as much as mine; that night by the tasselled shade

with its oblong halo over her bowed hair sewing,

I had looked up from the green baize with the Major’s

face from the ornate desk to see light going

from her image, and that image was my mother’s,

whose death would be real, real as our knowing.

Join, interchangeable phantoms, expected pain

moves me towards ghosts, through this page’s scrim,

and the ghosts I will make of you with my scratching pen,

like a needle piercing the ring’s embroidery

with a swift’s beak, or where, like a nib from the rim

of an inkwell, a martin flickers a wing dry.

Plunkett’s falsetto soared like a black frigate-bird,

and shifted to a bass-cannon from his wattled throat,

Achille lowered his head for the way it circled

high over our pews, and I heard the brass bugle-note

of his khaki orders as we circled the Parade Ground,

and then the hymn ended. We watched the Major lift

his wife’s coffin hung with orchids, many she had found

in the blue smoke of Saltibus. Then Achille saw the swift

pinned to the orchids, but it was the image of a swift

which Maud had sewn into the silk draping her bier,

and not only the African swift but all the horned island’s

birds, bitterns and herons, silently screeching there.

III

When Plunkett passed, Achille looked at his red hands,

and the Major widened his eyes at him and Philoctete,

and nodded at Helen, who turned her black veil away,

and he saw her head shaking under the covering net.

Then the big shots passed, and every brown dignitary,

some with medals and ribbons, gave them a short smile

of gracious detachment, but with no special surprise

at their devotion. Achille waited till the aisle

emptied, the gilt missals were replaced in their pews,

then stood outside at the church door as the filled hearse

opened for the orchids and the bird-choked tapestry

straightened. I saw Helen, in that slow walk of hers,

come and lean next to him. She lifted the eyed veil,

and said: “I coming home.” Then he and Philoctete

walked with her to the transports near the Coal Market.

Chapter LIV

I

I saw him at the bank next day, moustache bristling,

white, irascible cockatoo hair, the red hands,

the mouth puckered forward, inaudibly whistling.

The man behind me said: “Collecting insurance.

So fast, boy?”

                        I turned and said, “Dat ain’t so funny.”

He stood behind the banana-farmers in line.

They smelt of wet earth, they smelt green as their money.

I thought of his own deposits, stinking of swine,

as he stood in his flaccid shorts, his khaki shirt

carrying a black armband, and I saw that he was

one with the farmers, transplanted to the rich dirt

of their valleys, a ginger-lily from the moss

of Troumasse River, a white, red-knuckled heron

in the reeds, who never wanted the privilege

that peasants, from habit, paid to his complexion.

He stood his turn in the queue, then at the cage

he bent to the teller’s bars, and I heard the old voice