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
Rebecca Hamilton, Conner Kressley