balanced on their torchoned heads, without touching them,
up the black pyramids, each spine straight as a pole,
and with a strength that never altered its rhythm.
He spoke for those Helens from an earlier time:
“Hell was built on those hills. In that country of coal
without fire, that inferno the same colour
as their skins and shadows, every labouring soul
climbed with her hundredweight basket, every load for
one copper penny, balanced erect on their necks
that were tight as the liner’s hawsers from the weight.
The carriers were women, not the fair, gentler sex.
Instead, they were darker and stronger, and their gait
was made beautiful by balance, in their ascending
the narrow wooden ramp built steeply to the hull
of a liner tall as a cloud, the unending
line crossing like ants without touching for the whole
day. That was one section of the wharf, opposite
your grandmother’s house where I watched the silhouettes
of these women, while every hundredweight basket
was ticked by two tally clerks in their white pith-helmets,
and the endless repetition as they climbed the
infernal anthracite hills showed you hell, early.”
III
“Along this coal-blackened wharf, what Time decided
to do with my treacherous body after this,”
he said, watching the women, “will stay in your head
as long as a question you have no right to ask,
only to doubt, not hate our infuriating
silence. I am only the shadow of that task
as much as their work, your pose of a question waiting,
as you crouch with a writing lamp over a desk,
remains in the darkness after the light has gone,
and whether night is palpable between dawn and dusk
is not for the living; so you mind your business,
which is life and work, like theirs, but I will say this:
O Thou, my Zero, is an impossible prayer,
utter extinction is still a doubtful conceit.
Though we pray to nothing, nothing cannot be there.
Kneel to your load, then balance your staggering feet
and walk up that coal ladder as they do in time,
one bare foot after the next in ancestral rhyme.
Because Rhyme remains the parentheses of palms
shielding a candle’s tongue, it is the language’s
desire to enclose the loved world in its arms;
or heft a coal-basket; only by its stages
like those groaning women will you achieve that height
whose wooden planks in couplets lift your pages
higher than those hills of infernal anthracite.
There, like ants or angels, they see their native town,
unknown, raw, insignificant. They walk, you write;
keep to that narrow causeway without looking down,
climbing in their footsteps, that slow, ancestral beat
of those used to climbing roads; your own work owes them
because the couplet of those multiplying feet
made your first rhymes. Look, they climb, and no one knows them;
they take their copper pittances, and your duty
from the time you watched them from your grandmother’s house
as a child wounded by their power and beauty
is the chance you now have, to give those feet a voice.”
We stood in the hot afternoon. My father took
his fob-watch from its pocket, replaced it, then said,
lightly gripping my arm,
“He enjoys a good talk,
a serious trim, and I myself look ahead
to our appointment.” He kissed me. I watched him walk
through a pillared balcony’s alternating shade.
BOOK TWO
Chapter XIV
I
The midshipman swayed in the coach, trying to read.
He knew that the way to fortify character
was by language and observation: the Dutch road
striped with long poplar shadows in the late after-
noon, the weight of the man in his coach, a sunbeam
changing sides on the cushion, a spire’s fishhook
luring a low shoal of clouds like silvery bream
towards it; the light gilding the spine of his book,
who glowered and swung like a lantern on the seat
opposite, with the marsh-breath of an embalmer,
a wire-coop of white chickens between his feet,
each boot as capacious as those barges crossing
the Lowland reaches at dusk. The Dutch were grossing
a fortune in the Northern Antilles, and he
wondered if the farmer knew this with night closing
round his flambent Flemish nose. Admiral Rodney
had asked for the smartest midshipman possible,
who needed only one thing, a good memory,
so he was assigned to work his way to The Hague,
but in the roundabout way of all those people,
the higher the post the more their orders were vague.
He leant back in the coach, inspecting the twilight
ranked in darkening poplars, between which the farmer
glared at him. In a box on the roof, its ropes tight,
its brass clasp flashing, was his blue uniform; a
sword folded in it. He turned to the farmer’s face.
He had counted the clustered berries on the nose,
noted the eyebrows’ haystacks, the dull canal gaze
of his reflection, the forehead’s deep-ploughed furrows,
the bovine leisure with which he turned away eyes
stupefied by distances. Swaying on one knee,
an ochre jug gurgled. From this the farmer swallowed,
then heeled the cork shut with a ham-sized palm, only
to wriggle it again with one thumb to a loud
squeak that seemed to surprise him with every mile.
The stomach’s rippling orb enraged the squire,
who averted each offer with a hardening smile
at this bulk, obese and turgid as his Empire.
Were it not for the war he might have loved the place;
even with its ribbed windmills’ skeletal rattle,
for its orange-roofed farms hidden among poplars,
wheels with crystal weirs, its black-mapped, creamy cattle
grazing their long shadows. The fields were prosperous
and lied of peace. From them, horizontal fire
lit an enormous cloud, then its changing towers
were crossed by unlucky rooks, and a touched spire
withdrew from the field, as dusk pricked its first flowers.
Under a sucked-out sun, like a lemon lozenge
on a blue Delft plate, he counted the black crosses
of shipping, the steeples, and the immense
clouds over the port emptied as if by a plague.
The farmer grunted, not to him but to the chickens
between his huge boots, and boasted in Dutch: “The Hague.”
A spy sent through the Lowlands, he was to observe
from certain ports the tonnage, direction, and mass
of Dutch merchantmen; the arms they shipped in reserve
to American colonies through St. Eustatius,
an island bristling with contraband; then embark
to Plymouth to serve with Rodney. A florin moon
showed him the footman lowering his chest in the dark
of the wharves. He tipped his hat to the footman
and gave him a coin. He was a very thorough
and obs
ervant young officer with an honour-
able career ahead of him, but a bit raw.
His name was Plunkett, his vessel The Marlborough.
II
Gunpowder and stores were shipped to St. Eustatius
from these innocent, moonlit harbours, in support
of French aid to the colonies; with slow paces,
the sea-chest hidden, he walked the edge of the port
as the moonlight amazed him, its milk-white brilliance
pouring from dark pewter clouds. It shone with such force
he could read his palm by it, and from this distance,
the curled brass names of the vessels under their prows.
He memorized them, closing his eyes, reprinted
their silhouettes like an etching. These merchantmen
sold guns not only to North American agents
but to British merchants selling their countrymen
to profitable conflict. The intelligence
would be used by the Admiral at home, to wreak
massive revenge not only on the Dutch islands
but on the French island bastion of Martinique,
with its sheltering harbour where the whole French fleet
could muster. For some reason, under the immense
clouds, he remembered the coop between the feet
of the farmer, with its uncomplaining chickens
waiting to be sacrificed, resigned to their fate.
His forked shadow aped him, scribbling its own report,
when a cry from the Night Watch froze it. They both hid
between huge kegs of gunpowder that lined the port,
while the startled moon, like a hunted hare, scurried
through the bare masts as leafless as its winter hills
to a snowcrest of powdery cloud. The hare stood
with its limp forepaws, ears pronged, its quivering nostrils
veering like a compass till it found the black wood
under whose rigging the Night Watch crunched like hunters
climbing with shouldered guns towards it. The hare’s face
of the frightened moon, as they searched with their lanterns
and ready muskets, made his pulse echo the pace
of the hare’s heart up those hills he had hunted once,
he muffled his heartbeat with one paw. A cloud capped
his own frightened face, and the moon’s. The hare crept down
into the cloud with its white tuft. The midshipman kept
low behind a wine-barrel, a huge demijohn,
and moved like the crippled hare back towards its den,
leaving drops on the snow, heart like a lantern
that the hunters might see, or wine-drops that redden
a snowy tablecloth, to where his sword was hidden.
His intelligence helped. After the Dutch defeat
on the islet facing Martinique, a great redoubt
was being prepared. Rodney was building a fort.
III
The slaves watched the Redcoats running between the trees,
dispersing like blossoms when the poinciana
rattles its hanging bandoliers in the breeze
as the thunderheads ignite with no cannoneer.
Battles were natural as storms; they needed no cause.
A common enemy bound captive to captor.
They clapped as the soldiers scrambled to the redoubts,
and their hot palms longed for lances in that rapture
of men before war, till a fusillade of shouts
burst from the apoplectic, sunburnt engineers.
They got back to their job of hauling the cannon
that hung halfway up the cliff over the white noise
of the sea-lace. It was bound like a cadaver
lowered at a sea-burial, with this difference—
that the roped body was rising from the water
in iron resurrection, inch by squeaking inch
from the rusty hawser, dangerously swaying,
while two slaves locked and kept the wheel-handle of the winch
from whirring backwards and others watched the fraying
ropes that smoked from the strain. If a single knot frayed,
the cannon would hit the cliff and its weight unravel
the balance and the strain on their shoulders too great
as the weight increased and the cannon would travel
straight down to the sea, carrying slaves and soldiers
with it. There was fear and pride in their work now
and Achille’s ancestor cursed his pain-locked shoulders,
tilting his body for purchase, locking his jaw
like the winch of the wheel until his temples hurt,
but he passed on the engineer’s orders: “More! More!”
and felt the little avalanches of loose dirt
under his soles. The cries of black warrior ants
passed in a chain as they lifted the iron log
towards the crest of the trees, so he changed their response
to a work-song they knew, hauling a long pirogue
up from their river, and between beats his commands
varying softly, then the groans between the counting,
and, higher than pain, they let the ropes saw their hands
till they bled on the hemp, and the cannon mounting,
mounting, until its mouth touched the very first branch,
like an iguana climbing, entering the trees.
And their hands sprung up like branches: slaves, engineers,
they embraced one another separately, in tears.
They leapt in the air, they drummed with their blurring heels,
they loosened and flipped the ropes, and the hawser’s tails
wriggled up the precipice. In its iron wheels
the iron lizard sat fixed towards the French sails.
That was their victory. Some paused to watch the foam
chaining the black rocks below them, and thought of home.
It was then that the small admiral with a cloud
on his head renamed Afolabe “Achilles,”
which, to keep things simple, he let himself be called.
Chapter XV
I
In the channel with three islets christened “Les Saintes,”
in a mild sunrise the ninth ship of the French line
flashed fire at The Marlborough, but swift pennants
from Rodney’s flagship resignalled his set design
to break from the classic pattern. The Marlborough
declined engagement and veered from the cannonade;
reading the pennants, she crossed the enemy’s trough,
her sister frigates joining the furrow she made.
You have seen pelicans veer over pink water
of an April bay. So, stem-to-stern, Rodney’s force
in a bracing gust followed The Marlborough; but, since
the wind grew too light, both fleets were tacking off-course
and closing in at three or four knots from the wind’s
changing sides; so close that all their cannoneers could
read the other’s arc of ignition, hear the shout
before the recoil, and see the splintering wood,
then close-fire muskets, like cicadas in drought,
or stones that crack from a fisherman’s beach-fire.
The midshipman felt the hull coming hard about;
the Admiral had wanted some hands below, before
the close fighting. His order had to be obeyed.
II
A malevolent flower of smoke continued past dawn
on the brightening horizon. He heard the deep roar
of the boatswain, the gunner’s “Aye!” From her squadron
a French frigate coming close had been hit. She bore
down on The Marlborough, the young midshipman peered
at her smoke-shawled beaut
y, and thought there was no war
as courtly as a sea-battle; her white sails steered
towards him, her embrochures spitting fire
while black veils of fury billowed from her beaked head;
for this he had watched the gulls from his ploughed shire,
the canvas on one shoulder, and the deadly ride
through marsh lowlands. Observation is character,
so he watched her wallowing in her wounded pride
with her loosened stores, he heard feet pounding the board
of the upper-deck, and slid, as his vessel tried
to avoid ramming. He held on, reached for his sword,
when The Marlborough shuddered to the dying groan
of the cracking mainmast, a gommier, a split elm,
its leaves like collapsing canvas, covering the ground.
He grabbed air as the helmsman wheeled hard at the helm,
then the sky showed through a hole. Then it vomited
a wave through the wooden maw, spewing its debris
of splinters and—God knows why—bottles; as she passed
he read her ornate italics: Ville de Paris.
III
He was making for the ladder that led them up
to the deck, sword drawn in one hand. With the other
he was hoisting himself on the rail when the ship
foundered again and another huge wave poured through
the hole, and this time its wash rapidly mounted
in the cabin, spinning him from the ladder against
the wall opposite, and as hard as he tried
to wade in its whirlpool of debris, the next wave sent
him against his own sword. It was a fatal wound
but he pulled out the sword. Then the wash thudded him
on the roof of the cabin, the surge spun him round
as he swallowed water with no floor under him.
Once the breach was drained and the direction altered
and the shorn mast stripped, the pouring breach was secured.
They found him face downwards, still holding to the sword.
From the hull of the Ville de Paris, wine-bottles
bobbed in the wake, crimson blood streamed from the wood
as they drifted in the mild current from the battle’s
muffled distance. The casks and demijohns’ blood
stained the foam faintly, and now one of them settles
on the sea-floor, its pyrite crusted and oblate
with the sea-blown, distended glass. Huge tentacles
rolled it as a cat boxes its prey. Then it was left—
a chalice hoisted by a diver’s rubber claws.