Omeros (6 page)

into the steaming troughs of the jostling pen,

then jumped back from the bristling boulders that would crash

against his knees as their wooden gate swung open.

Then Achille scraped the dung-caked cement with a yard

broom, and the clogged shit spidered out into the drain

when he swung the galvanized-iron bucket hard

at the reeking wall, then hurled it harder again

in repetitious rage, the way that combers hit

a braced sea-rock, streaming. Inside, he cursed the screams

of the doomed, panicking swine matted with their shit,

their skidding trotters entered the gate of his dreams.

“I miss the light northern rain, I miss the seasons,”

Maud moaned, implying the climate lacked subtlety.

Some breeze reported the insult, since the monsoon’s

anger coarsened the rain, until between the sty

and water-roped porch grew an impenetrable

jungle that drummed with increasing monotony,

its fraying lianas whipping from each gable,

the galvanized guttering belching with its roar.

Then, soaked like paper, the hills were a Chinese scroll

and she saw a subtlety where none was before.

Bamboo strokes. Wet cloud. Peasant with straw hat and pole.

Fern spray. White mist. Heron crossing fresh waterfall.

The map of heaven was breaking up in nations,

and a soggy nimbus haloed the loaded moon

when Achille saw the mare’s tails, prognostications

of a grumbling sky that underlined each omen—

from the widowed veils of the indigo rainspouts

to candles of egrets screwed on a swaying branch,

then the match of lightning; in irascible knots

freckling the hot glass of the Coleman lanterns

termites singed their glazed wings and fell away as ants.

Then, next day, the stillness. And in it, the bitterns

and the gulls circling inland. Then, in the distance,

the strange yellow light. He went to buy kerosene

from Ma Kilman’s crowded shop, and he was on his way back,

half-blind from her searing gas-lamp, when a blue sheen

lit the roofs and the street widened with a forked crack

of lightning igniting the egrets, splashing the palms

on the cracked plaster sky. Achille dropped the bottle.

Rain on the galvanized night. Helen in his arms.

The wind changed gear like a transport with the throttle

of the racing sea. He picked up the bottle. Before

he could, sprinting to it, fight with the rusted latch,

thudding lances of rain pinned him against the door,

but he shouldered it open, then he heard the crash

of thousands of iron nails poured in a basin

of rain on his tin roof. The cloud galleons warred

with flashing blue broadsides. Achille, soaked to the skin,

filled the lamp and lit it; he angled the brass guard

leeward of the wind and whipped off his shirt in bed.

Shadows writhed from the wick, the plantains in the yard

were wrestling to share the small roof over his head.

After a while, he got used to the heavy sound

on the galvanize. He ate cold jackfish and prayed

that his cold canoe was all right on the high sand.

He imagined the galleon, its ghost, through the frayed

ropes of the hurricane as he lowered the wick.

Hector and Helen. He lay in the dark, awake.

II

Hector wasn’t with Helen. He was with the sea,

trying to save his canoe when its anchor-rope

had loosened, but sheets of black rain mercilessly

spun the bow back in the wave-troughs when he would grope

at the mooring, and in the brown, nut-littered troughs

the hull was swamping as bilge whirlpooled round his feet;

he saw how every wash crashed. Spray high as a house!

Then the long, cannon-loud boom breaking after it,

not seeing land through the rain, thinking it was close

from the sand-chirred water, and then he was afraid

when he saw how they were heading past the lighthouse

that spun in the gusts, with the anchor gone, the boat

keeling to the gunwale, so he shifted his weight,

he paddled hard with the short oar to come about,

but he paddled air, the wave crests brownish-white,

churning with wrenched palm-fronds; he stood up with the oar,

rocking on the keel-board, then he sat, his soul wet

and shaking. He crept to the bow, then dived ashore,

but the spinning stern clubbed him, so he stayed under

the debris to find some calm and depth, but the more

he dived, the faster the current spun him, thunder

and lightning cracked and he saw the canoe founder

without any grief; he rode a trough for a while,

paddling on his back, to measure the right rhythm

of the crests, then slid down a slow-gathering wall

like a surfer: once he caught the beat, he could swim

with the crumbling surf, not against the sea’s will,

letting it spin him if it chose, even if it chose

to treat him like its garbage; then he felt the swirl

of fine sand and staggered up straight in the shallows.

III

The Cyclone, howling because one of the lances

of a flinging palm has narrowly grazed his one eye,

wades knee-deep in troughs. As he blindly advances,

Lightning, his stilt-walking messenger, jiggers the sky

with his forked stride, or he crackles over the troughs

like a split electric wishbone. His wife, Ma Rain,

hurls buckets from the balcony of her upstairs house.

She shakes the sodden mops of the palms and once again

changes her furniture, the cloud-sofas’ grumbling casters

not waking the Sun. The Sun had been working all day

and would sleep through it all. After their disasters

it was he who cleaned up after their goddamned party.

So he went straight to bed at the first sign of a drizzle.

Now, like a large coalpot with headlands for its handles,

the Sea cooks up a storm, raindrops start to sizzle

like grease, there is a brisk business in candles

in Ma Kilman’s shop. Candles, nails, a sudden increase in

the faithful, and a mark-up on matches and bread.

In the grey vertical forest of the hurricane season,

when the dirty sea returns the wreaths of the dead,

all the village could do was listen to the gods in session,

playing any instruments that came into their craniums,

the harp-sighing ripple of a hither-and-zithering sea,

the knucklebone pebbles, the abrupt Shango drums

made Neptune rock in the caves. Fête start! Erzulie

rattling her ra-ra; Ogun, the blacksmith, feeling

No Pain; Damballa winding like a zandoli

lizard, as their huge feet thudded on the ceiling,

as the sea-god, drunk, lurched from wall to wall, saying:

“Mama, this music so loud, I going in seine,”

then throwing up at his pun. People were praying,

but then the gods, who were tired, were throwing a fête,

and their fêtes went on for days, and their music ranged

from polkas of rain to waves dancing La Comète,

and the surf clapped hands whenever the patterns changed.

For the gods aren’t men, they get on well together,

holding a hurricane-party in their cloud-house,

and what brings the gods close is the thunderous weather,

where Ogun can fire one with his partner Zeus.

Achille in his shack heard chac-chac and violin

in the telephone wires, a sound like Helen

moaning, or Seven Seas, blind as a sail in rain.

In the devastated valleys, crumpling brown water

at their prows, headlights on, passenger-vans floated

slowly up roads that were rivers, through the slaughter

of the year’s banana-crop, past stiff cows bloated

from engorging mud as the antlers of trees tossed

past the banks like migrating elk. It was as if

the rivers, envying the sea, tired of being crossed

in one leap, had joined in a power so massive

that it made islands of villages, made bridges

the sieves of a force that shouldered culverts aside.

The rain passed, but people looked up to the ridges

fraying with its return, and the flood, in its pride,

entered the sea; then Achille could hear the tunnels

of brown water roaring in the mangroves; its tide

hid the keels of the canoes, and their wet gunwales

were high with rainwater that could warp them rotten

if they were not bailed. The river was satisfied.

It was a god too. Too much had been forgotten.

Then, a mouse after a fête, its claws curled like moss,

nosing the dew as the lighthouse opened its eye,

the sunlight peeped out, and people surveyed the loss

that the gods had made under a clearing-up sky.

Candles shortened and died. The big yellow tractors

tossed up the salad of trees, in yellow jackets

men straightened the chairs of dead poles, the contractors

in white helmets and slickers heard the castanets

of the waves going up the islands, moving on

from here to Guadeloupe, the beaded wires were still.

They saw the mess the gods made in one night alone,

as Lightning lifted his stilts over the last hill.

Achille bailed out his canoe under an almond

that shuddered with rain. There would be brilliant days still,

till the next storm, and their freshness was wonderful.

Chapter X

I

For Plunkett, despair came with this shitty weather,

from the industrious torrents of mid-July

till the farm was drubbed to a standstill. This year, the

rain was an unshifting thicket, the branched sky

grew downwards like mangroves, or an immense banyan.

The bulbs dangled weakly from the roof of the pens,

their cords sticky with flies, till he, like everyone

else, watched the drifts, hating the separate silence

that settled his labourers when their work was done.

He saw that their view of him would always remain

one of patronage; his roof was over their heads,

as they sat disconsolately watching the rain

erode and dissolve the mounds of Maud’s garden-beds,

their eyes glazed and clouded with some forgotten pain

from the white shambles of lilies, the dripping boards

of rope-twisted water blown from the leaking pen,

while Maud sat embroidering her tapestry of birds

in the lamplit house which each horizontal gust

blew farther from him. He saw her in the windows

and felt she was drifting away, just like the ghost

of the drowned galleon. He bolted up to the house.

He stayed in the house. The ginger tom boxed its paws

at the yarn-knitting window. Hogs ran to slaughter

like infantry tired of trenches and shovels,

and rain-maddened lilies chose a death by water,

like pregnant virgins in Victorian novels.

Maud rescued some. In rain hat and yellow slicker,

she bent over their beds in the gentler drizzles;

then the beds would darken, the drizzles grow thicker

in an even heavier downpour than the last.

Trees and power poles fell. Lamps came on in the house.

A winter besieged them with limp weeklies and tea.

Beyond the orchids she watched the grey-shawled showers

cross the grey lawn, then go down towards the grey sea.

By the crystal teardrop lamp she’d brought from Ireland,

humming then stopping, then humming. Settling the bulbs

of saved lilies in vases with her leaf-veined hand.

Seychelles. Seashells. He watched her, then, with glottal gulps

that maddened her, sucked his tea. He felt murderous

as the monsoon when she started playing some tripe

about “Bendemeer’s stream,” each chord binding the house

with nerves of itching ivy; he crammed in his pipe,

then bit it erect, and in a raw, sodden rage

strode to the unshawled piano and slammed the lid,

missing her fingers. Maud waited. She closed the page

of
Airs from Erin
and, very carefully, hid

it under the velvet of the piano stool,

brushed past him with her shawl, and climbed up the slow stairs,

tugging at her fingers. No fool like an old fool,

the Major raged. The window was streaming with tears,

but none came. When? It was the old wound in his head.

Rubbish. Easy excuse. He never blamed the war.

It was like original sin. Then the Major heard

someone knocking carefully. The voice said: “Major?

Major, we going,” and left. The ginger uncurled

from the dark sofa. He lifted him carefully,

placed him by the window to look out on this world

the way he no longer did. Then, his heart full, he

went up, eased the door: Sleeping. But she never slept

with one elbow over her eyes. Sorrow dissolved

him, and he sat on the bed, and then both of them wept

the forgiving rain of those who have truly loved.

It seemed long as the season, and then the rain stopped.

II

Once the rains passed they took the olive Land Rover

round the shining island, up mornes with red smudges

of fresh immortelles with old things to discover;

the deep-green crescents held African villages

that, over centuries, had roofed their shacks with tins,

erected a square stone church, until by stages,

the shacks would creep down the ridges to become towns.

That was how History saw them. He studied the course

that it offered: the broken roads, the clear rivers