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 torr
ents 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
that congealed to sepia lagoons, from which some case
of bilharzia would erupt in kids whose livers
caught the hookworm’s sickle. Pretty, dangerous streams.
Their past was flat as a postcard, and their future,
a brighter and flatter postcard, printed the schemes
of charters with their poverty-guaranteed tour.
In the frayed whisks of the vanished storm he felt his
own scalp, freckled, with its skeins of thinning hair,
but sunshine broke through the misty precipices
with a double rainbow that turbanned La Sorcière,
the sorceress mountain with a madras kerchief
and flashing spectacles. They called her Ma Kilman
because the village was darkened by their belief
in her as a gardeuse, sybil, obeah-woman
webbed with a spider’s knowledge of an after-life
in her cracked lenses. She took Holy Communion
with Maud sometimes, but there was an old African
doubt that paused before taking the wafer’s white leaf.
The Rover whined up the Morne till they saw, below
a shelf of sunshot asphalt, the expansive plunge
of Cul-de-Sac valley and the soaked indigo
serration of peaks. A sky, loaded like a sponge,
dabbed at, then dried the defiant beads of moisture
on the levelled bananas with their fecal smell
of new mud; but their irrigation ditches were
channels of light and the oval potholes small
mirrors of blueing cloud that the tires shattered,
that almost instantly reglazed their reflection,
until the storm’s green ruin no longer mattered,
and the sparkling road only increased affection
when they watched the sunlight redefining Roseau’s
old sugar-factory roof. The road climbed the bay,
as a cool wind thatched the bamboos like osiers,
urging them with light tongues downward to Anse La Raye,
chattering with expectation at the young sprouts
that would spring from the storm. Their delight was strengthened
by boys racing the Rover with half-naked shouts,
offering them bananas, until the bends straightened
and left them gasping for breath against the wet trees,
till others sprouted from grass around the next bend;
then the sea widened its blue around Canaries,
and the road, coiling with ochre precipices,
was like a rope that bound them, much closer even
than the hurricane, by its azure silences,
the way lianas knot their inseparable vine
around two tree trunks sometimes, or a mast grows leaves
in the heart of a forest, binding every vein,
rooted in the island for the rest of their lives.
The horns of the island were peaks split asunder
by a volcanic massif. Through ferns, Soufrière
waited under springs whose smoke signalled the thunder
of the dead. It was a place where an ancient fear
increased as he neared it. Holes of boiling lava
bubbled in the Malebolge, where the mud-caked skulls
climbed, multiplying in heads over and over,
while the zircon gas from the flues climbed the bald hills.
This was the gate of sulphur through which he must pass,
singeing his memory, tho
ugh he pinched his nostrils
until the stench faded into verdurous peace,
like registering skulls in the lime-pits of Auschwitz.
The wound closed in smoke, then wind would reopen it,
a geyser would jet its gas through a cracked fissure
the way that steam suddenly hissed from the bonnet
of the uncapped radiator, scalding his face
if he didn’t leap clear. He filled the cooling ring
from a stream in the ferns. Then they went on climbing
around larger and greener ferns, their wide fronds
large as a fan belt’s, passing the old sulphur mine
with its rusted wheel, its hawsers of lianas,
where a Messrs. Bennett & Ward, his countrymen,
in 1836 went home to England as
bush and high taxes foreclosed their wild enterprise.
Wreaths of funereal moss draped their endeavour.
A huge wheel’s teeth locked in rust. What had stopped their scheme?
Quarrels over money? Had one caught a fever,
and, yellow as that leaf, in his delirium
babbled of an alchemy that could turn sulphur
gold, while his partner dabbed the cold sweat of a dream
from his forehead? Had they had another offer
somewhere on the outer boundaries of freedom
and free enterprise that came with an empire?
What was their force? How would they extract the mineral
from the mine and transport it? Transport it to where?
Or had they run out of money and that was all,
until fever grass and bush foreclosed the idea
and their banks were weed? He saw the sprocketed wheel
gritting its teeth at the sulphur that still lay there.
III
In the sharp blue heights beyond them there were orchids
springing from the side-paths. Sometimes, a resinous
woodsman would startle them, his bag full of snake-heads
to flog to Der Guva’ment. He walked without noise,
a shaft of light angling the floor of the forest
without shaking the ferns, his soles quiet as moss.
Through stumps of brown teeth he pointed out the hillcrest
with gaping, precipitous valleys, where smoke rose
from a charcoal pit, and under the smoke, the lines
of a white, amnesiac Atlantic, then with a bow,
and a patois blessing with old African signs,
as soundless as light on the road they watched him go.
England seemed to him merely the place of his birth.
How odd to prefer, over its pastoral sites—
reasonable leaves shading reasonable earth—
Omeros Page 5
