Ọka is always eager to break into rain.

There, the clouds gray quickly, rounding and spawning drops of rain before you can catch your heart. The rain falls passionately. It gathers pace and rhythm, bringing with it the usual cold embrace. People clutch their skin as water seeps from the cotton folds of their clothes. A shirt drenched, a gown squeezed at the edges.

‘Life momentarily pauses,’ that likable man said to me while I waited at his shop where he sold eyeglasses. The colorful accessories dangled as the wind stirred. The man didn’t share my melancholy. He was far too busy, setting aside benches and putting his wares into boxes; too little time for the pensive stare I must have reflected, cast as often into the machinations of a world that momentarily succumbs to water.

I noticed a similar pensiveness in the gazes of people who stood across the road, waiting under the covered outstrip of a shopping plaza. Wheelbarrows covered in nylon, phone accessories secured, the sellers allowing time to ponder the music of the rain. Other people—mostly students—stand too and wait. Life indeed pauses.

And ironically, when life pauses, I think about movement. One time, we’re on a moving ferry, C. and I, and he’s talking about not succumbing to the excuses of lazy lovers. A woman knows what to do to make you happy, he says. Don’t ever beg after them. He knows my heart is laddened by the recent dissolution of an affair, those sticky ones that grew more intimate than definition could explain. So I was flying through the Enugu skies, eyes flustered by the rolling winds, the city’s structures miniature in view. It’s one of those moments when some simple realization hits you, and sometimes you’re unlucky enough to place yourself at the scene of all mistakes. Sometimes the mistake chokes you, but sometimes you breathe.

There’s something about the rain and old lovers. Cynics would perhaps label it an influence from popular culture’s obsession with rainfall, but one finds in the subjective personal a riveting association between rainfall and romantic situations. As a new resident of Ọka, I was surprised by how much weight the rains brought. Between the prime months of June and August, the streets of Ifite are sodden with water, its red earth marred like crushed spider webs. Debris would collect at the crook of unflowing gutters, revealing so much of the administrative deficiency that has plagued Nigerian states for years. Growing up in Lagos taught me enough about such unfavorable conditions, enough to fill three books, but there’s the romantic other-side to rainfall that made those months somewhat bearable. Stark with its pugnancy, those conditions made one stay indoors most of the time, and when that happened, I would think of women from my past.

II.

E.

E, like many of us, in the past, often fetched rainwater. Our compound was close to a canal and had dirty orange water in its well—we christened it Fanta—not dug-up properly, even though it didn’t really have much of a chance.

Standing just outside the compound then, if you jumped hard enough, you’d feel the moist presence of the ground below, only sand-filled to accommodate the surprising sturdiness of that white bungalow. Years later, the landlord built another house beside it, a smaller compound that accommodated three rooms and a shared toilet.

This smaller compound—called Boys Quarters in Nigerian parlance—was where we drew rainwater, as its zinc was newer and cleaner, and fell from above in straight lines down the narrow passageway that the residents emerged from their rooms onto.

E.’s family was made up of eight people, though she possibly had other siblings I wasn’t aware of, since they spoke with familial reverence about some names I didn’t know. She had two younger brothers, and the older one, with whom I shared a name, would sometimes assist in the water fetching to fill a big blue drum of theirs, and a cluster of 25-liter gallons, wet and shiny and yellow and arranged in rows under the zinc as it poured. We also had a big blue drum of ours, just behind our window, and into which I’d pour buckets of water, relishing the cold shocks that would occasionally pass through my body.

E.’s brother went wild too when it rained; he’d scream like a medieval viking, betraying the small frame of his body in miraculous acts of athleticism, jumping across buckets with unmeditated precision, balancing on one leg, and sometimes carrying a heavy gallon all by himself.

What E. did was make sure the gallons and buckets were filled up, that no one was shifting theirs to get a better position on the line. It was something we did then, for fun and also for competition; who’d fetch the most in the shortest time was something we took pride in. And so I would look at E., marveling at her silent efficiency and how she always sprouted into the most beautiful being when her brother came in sight. Her wiry arms would be glistened by the vividness of her active state, and she laughed easily when they shared an inside joke.

I couldn’t have known it then, but now it strikes the mind that the more I watched E., the more familiar I became with her minuscule quirks. How she picked the inside of her nose, scrunched in hilarious admission. She wore a low-cut, which would have given her a tomboyish look if she wasn’t so bodily pronounced. She had beautiful breasts, which were even more rounded at the edges, glued to her chest by the rain.

Having no profound memory of sexual intimacy, I looked at her with an almost passive passion, faintly buoyed by the fact that I wouldn’t act on what I felt. I couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen, entering into senior secondary school and becoming somewhat alert to the charges that pulled young people together into a room and threw all caution out of the door.

The atypical conservative Nigerian family treated sex like a plague subject back then, and even if the signs of pronounced affectation were around, especially among the older teenagers, they never considered any serious possibility, or maybe they just stayed willfully ignorant.

Well, for about two to three years, I watched E. under the rainfall, not knowing if I felt admiration or desire. Or, now that it emerges more vividly, it was lonesomeness; the feeling of being wrung apart inside yourself, taken to the far edges of the inner self by images that couldn’t be deciphered in their wholeness. For I saw E. as an embodiment of a complete being, in tune with her desires as poignantly as she honored responsibility.

Then, I was about responsibility, which made it a jarring experience when I realised one could do it all.

I once stumbled upon E., writing a letter to a boy I knew; he was a friend of my immediate elder brother.

From where I stood, I could barely understand what she saw in him, but all the traces of pure feeling were evident in the note.

Poorly written, infused with grammar mistakes, I would edit it considerably, and give it back to her. It wasn’t raining then, but something about the solitary act of letter writing invokes the memory of rain. In a Hollywood flick, a character might pen words of the most intense melancholy as the rain pours outside, knowing that when it stops raining, he will depart the room to mail the letter. In a way, rain stands as a double metaphor for movement and stillness. The act of contemplating what to do next gives a critical heft to everyday life.

III.

If you approach Trinity Market from Palace Road, there’s a break in the street’s exit that leads to multiple roads. Take the left, and the first street you’d find is Cemetery Road, named so because of the humongous burial site just some buildings away. But before reaching that land of glinting headstones beset with wild vegetation, you’ll find a spot where middle-aged men usually gathered. On every given day, they’re always present, but on rainy days, the number multiplies by three. That is, three times the volume of stories.

You wouldn’t stick around if you’re not part of the group, though no one would discourage you from doing so. They might leer your way, try to size you up, look at the phone you’re holding, or the footwear you have on to find any indication of your commercial prospects. One might engage you in a conversation; he’s a soulful kind of guy, with a low voice and a really interesting way of seeing life. He thinks a lot of the people he’s chilling with are wasting their time, but he’s moving through a phase that he will hopefully pass through. He strikes you as a somewhat religious guy.

These guys were interesting portraits silhouetted against the walls of desire. And though their discussions were mostly humorous, woven around the internal mechanics of what brought them together—gambling, smoking, communion—sometimes they talked about the women in their lives.

‘You hear wetin Musa dey talk?’ one of them might say, with the Musa present.

‘Wetin happen again?’ another might ask, shuffling the pack of cards like they weren’t interested in the obvious reportage about to happen.

‘Na that him girl na… she no come dey show face for area again’.

‘Abeg, Clippo, leave that talk,’ Musa would counter. ‘She dey work for Westminister na’.

‘Westminister for here,’ the man would oppose. ‘No be Umani babe dey come from Sagamu?’

The conversation lingers uncomfortably in the terrain of half-spoken truths until another interesting topic comes up, often just a few moments later. I’m struck by how at ease in the world the men are, and that the spare parts dealers who stay around don’t complain about the noise and the smoking and the barely-disguised gambling. Unlike these men, most of the traders are married, with potbellies and smiles that betray the relative comfort of their position. They wouldn’t fit into the ‘unlovely’ category of David Lurie’s lurid comment in Disgrace (‘that’s what whores are for after all, to put up with the ecstasies of the unlovely’), nor would they be caught in the melancholic blaze of an August rain.

At night, outside a scanty brothel, one of them leans into the ear of a woman. Her nylon-tight pink overalls reveal dull yellow thighs, fleshy and jiggling ever slightly, as she shifts her weight from leg to leg. From inside, the music is urgent; it could be Makossa or Nigerian pop, but it quickens the resolve of the man, whose throat is now visibly pulsed with speech. A hand fiddles subconsciously in his pocket, and he looks around a bit warily, or is it accepting? The details in his eyes are somewhat obscured by the night, but the composition of their frames will slightly adjust, will go from shadings of apprehension to reluctance, and finally understanding. With his head bowed, he follows her into the darkened passageway that leads into the rooms.

IV.

Following the birth of E.’s child, I would often wonder whether the same qualities that made her so fiercely beautiful were the same that tormented the antiquated dreams of her family. Her parents were Catholic, and the faith frowned upon abortion, so when I saw her, there was a silent reproach I felt within myself that I didn’t make known my thoughts on her person. Around the neighborhood where I grew up, unmarried ladies getting pregnant just outside of their teenage years wasn’t totally unheard of, but there was a subtle ostracizing that came with it. Where such girls once went to, they couldn’t or rather wouldn’t, as they feared they would be verbally harassed or something of the sort.

The undertones of this perceptive change were present in E.’s story. By then, we saw little of each other; I’d gone on to university, and they had packed out of the compound we once shared. It had been demolished by the landlord, a longtime member of the ruling party, on the grounds that it was a bad look on the government since it was built on shallow foundation. All the tenants had been looking for a new place for months prior, and E.’s family, quite coincidentally, had found residence in the secondary school I attended, closed down after being rocked by conflict within the owning family, and converted after a year into residential space.

Still, the memories of those rainy evenings and the activity they spurred—the sensations, too—bring a rich dose of nostalgia now whenever the clouds get puffy. Together, they’re grouped under an emotional file whose contents stretch back fifteen years, when rainfall brought, not nostalgia, but feelings of suppressed rage—at the inadequacy of the world, its simple inability to hold the many fragments of existence together. Your heart is always in several places at once, and when it rains, one’s always grasping for the metaphysical act of unity.

V.

In 1913, Robert Frost wrote one of my favorite poems. Published in his collection A Boy’s Will.

‘To The Thawing Wind’ carries, like all of Frost’s poetry, a charming wisdom that ceaselessly reveals itself. When I first read the poem in late 2024, it was the flow that struck me, a declarative, almost prophetic remodelling of God’s words in Genesis. But remarkably, there’s no ‘let there’ in Frost’s proposition, only words of a less strong suggestion: ‘Come,’ ‘Bathe,’ ‘Turn.’ Frost writes:

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!

Bring the singer, bring the nester;

Give the buried flower a dream;

Make the settled snow-bank steam;

Find the brown beneath the white;

Opening with the gust of wind, Frost’s voice mirrors the geographic atmosphere of the poem. That force dictates the details of the imagery; from singer to flower, whose buried state here infers the timelessness of braving life’s existential states. ‘A dream,’ Frost writes, executing that spatial alertness that makes him more than a nature poet. For in everyday material, Frost soars with his imagination, here ascending like a bird to carry the entire collection of images without losing the rough textures of sensation. Where the brown is sought for beneath the white, both suggestions carry referential importance, as the former infers the soil, life’s essence, while the white is the face of all things undiscovered, like the face of the sky and seas. This turnaround perspective is further exacerbated by the request of ‘[making] the settled snow-bank steam’.

But whate’er you do to-night,

Bathe my window, make it flow,

Melt it as the ice will go;

Melt the glass and leave the sticks

Like a hermit’s crucifix;

‘A hermit’s crucifix,’ he writes. An object of faith that implicitly powers the God-force at the root of the poem. But Frost’s persona doesn’t cling stubbornly to idealism; he wants the grace to remain still, but let its face depart. I find in this poem the poetic demonstration of the complex philosophy that the rain imparts on a mind, and peering into that view with Frost’s eyes, I see the rain as God’s ultimate tool of melancholy.

Water is prevalent in all existence and civilization because of its endless quality, and even its force is amplified by the activity of movement. Imagine being so powerful and yet being something that moves. And rain—water’s highest point—literally and figuratively—represents that divine ability with an unassuming presence. And it has become part of us so long, we don’t consider its miracle, not with the patient depth of Frost. The poem ends thus:

Burst into my narrow stall;

Swing the picture on the wall;

Run the rattling pages o’er;

Scatter poems on the floor

Turn the poet out of door.

The poet is patient no more; action must follow thought. And the poem vice-versa, as we see here. Compounding the image, even with the presence of a ‘narrow stall,’ Frost invites the big into the small. Beyond complicating the processes of his mind towards fullness, it must imprint a physical manifestation on him. The image isn’t pretty; even, again executing a flawless mirror association, the poet requests to ‘swing the picture on the wall’. By the time he arrives at the closing couplet, a resounding sense of confusion has come upon the poem. It’s the kind of confusion that comforts, seeing as its purpose is an inward search. But what does Frost’s door hold?

‘Out of the door,’ some would infer, is the dramatically correct statement. But poetry has that license to remake language, and consequently structure, and here the absence of that ‘the’ relays a poignant sense of vagrancy. It’s a door within which anyone belongs, since we’re all poets of different kinds. And if poets come with ‘aural expectations,’ to borrow Seamus Heaney’s phrase, then Frost is the one with whom the external world comes most alive. We hear the hardwrought rustle of tangled leaves and the almost inaudible melt of snow, a recurring geographic feature of his poetry.

Photo by *Thought Catalog* on *Unsplash.*

VI.

‘And it seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind / Never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in’ ~ Eric Donaldson, ‘Candle In The Wind’

During my early years as an undergraduate, disillusioned by the untimely withering of a relationship I didn’t know to water, I would read a lot of poetry, mostly American. Richard Siken and Ellen Bass were favorites from this period, with both sharing that wild streak of romantic ideals that was tempered by an assuring handle on form.

When a good poet takes up the theme of love, I imagine they’re contending with Creation. Love finds parallel in nature, and their most shared quality is the angling towards perfection. Even though it enacts an untroubled satisfaction with the requirements of violence, the forces of nature are always pulling it together, searching for balance. Balance as a prerequisite for perfection. In our romantic affairs especially, humans try to recreate that fullness through the incorporation of shared likes and values. If a love interest digs cinema, we’re suddenly wanting to go see a movie. If they’re music buffs, we might generate interest in the idyllic world of sounds—always, relentlessly, finding the pulse of connection.

So when we encounter rain, there’s that almost vain perception that Creation, like an old friend, reaches back with an open hand, calls on us to make the most of rain-music on zincs, the papery rustle of leaves bending and falling, the endless streams of water rolling off a window, the sight of the skies turning a fresher blue than ever, the scent of rain, like a special camphor, present yet lying unremarkably in the corners of our perception. From the view of my balcony, an endless green reaches me, and farmlands prepared for the rain as crops bloom in the undersoil, a silent, immeasurable force of growth.

To the artist, the rain provides atmosphere. To the farmer, contemplation. To the passersby, a momentary pause on their daily activity. But there’s a time when the moon floats high into the sky, and dropping the satisfaction of their roles, everyone must contend with the feelings of cold. Say, the rain has stopped but the shiver remains, that breath which passes through the night like an estranged spirit. Sometimes the breeze howls, a lover hunting for the departed.

Of course, there’s the reassuring insistence that the rain has set many on the path of melancholy like myself. It wasn’t for no reason that R&B’s visual identity was centered around a man crying in the rain. I think it’s beautifully ugly then—that Creation’s blessing fingers the deeper angst of a person, while also offering a chance at redemption. Such complexities of purpose makes the rainy season a riveting one to live through, one that’s been constantly renewed all through the years of my adult life.

In recent times, I have looked at the rainy season through the compass of my resident city. When I started visiting Enugwu to meet C., it was quite striking how quickly the streets emptied after a rain. Due to its well-paved roads and dug-out gutters, there was little of the soggy embrace that Ọka soil took up. This means that the streets are also occupied faster than usual, wherein the paraphernalia of rainy weather comes into view: the jackets, umbrellas, a cup of steaming tea. Wrapped in soft green leaves or white nylon, okpa is sold, a favored snack in the city. By contrast, Ọka’s residents are mostly indoors while it rains, except in the Ifite school area where economy must service education.

Every fact of life leads up to an interminable point of diversion. Here’s where my problem begins; I can’t quite place what I desire the rain to be. Am I wanting to be outside, sharing the essential paradox of those who cleave to icy discomfort so that the later hours would be more comfortable? Or am I to be inside, shadowing the artist, consumed in passions that warm the cold away from one’s heart? Or perhaps, and perhaps more earnestly, the promise of E.’s body trails the many rainy, cold nights of my life, seeking completion. What completes the promise of an unexpressed desire? And who can tell, even, that my heart isn’t just making complex the distracted ideologies of a primitive being—who says that a male body troubled by cold must seek satisfaction in female warmth?

Photo by *Davide Colonna* on *Unsplash.*

VII.

Two poems bring me closer to my thoughts: a poem from Weldon Kees’ Eight Variations and Lisa Mueller’s ‘In The Thriving Season’. They appear in the Christian Wiman and Don Share-edited The Open Door, one of my favorite poetry anthologies.

Both poems situate the atmospheric state of rainfall beside the throb of longing, but the approach is different. Mueller’s poem takes after character analysis, situating a childlike presence within the darkening compass of an immoral world. Indeed, her ‘fistfuls of sun’ is an antithesis to salvage the silence of unbecoming, what she describes as a ‘vast hurt’.

Quite clear in the poem’s poise, there’s a premise of adventure which exists alongside danger, a double sensibility that is enriched by an essential absence. As a character cedes into their impulses, there’s the trail of emotions left whose poetics can be parallel to violence, as earlier stated, a shared trait to nature. We hear Mueller’s persona directly address this possibility when it observes thus:

I can believe birth is fathered

by death, believe that she was quick

when you forgave pain and terror

and shook the fever from your blood.

By contrast, Kees’ poem likens such feelings to ‘impure streams,’ sparking suggestions of a more ‘moral’ perspective. Where there’s similarly a human presence in the opening line, that presence takes the mythical form of a Critic, not only reveling in theoretical, elevated language, but postulating on how the world should be. Bearing similar function to Frost, the movement doesn’t address a place as much as it defines it, as we see in this couplet:

Let ruined weather perish in the streets

And let the world’s black lying flag come down

‘Ruined weather’ suggests the forthcoming presence of a season, and Kees withholds that until the last line of the poem. Yet we see, in the body of perception we’re given, a persona who’s intensely aware of the world outside. If the poem itself is a strict, unabsorbed Critic, then its subject is a rotund absorber of visceral sensibilities, able to concern itself with the passing of time and the listless emotions that float with said passing. The voice brings us the satisfying presentation of these sensibilities in the second stanza, wherein there’s an imagistic arrangement that captures the exhaustion of a body drowned in what Achebe, in a poem, described as ‘overtaxing acts of love’:

Tired after love and silent in this house,

Your back turned to me, quite alone,

Standing with one hand raised to smooth your hair,

At a small window, green with rain.

We return to the Mueller poem with better appreciation for the nuances of love. Here, where the plain is beset with pain, terror, and blood, we’re able to meet the perspective of a lover who must charge on undeterred, whose ‘flower’ doesn’t carry the imminent glory of Frost’s, but isn’t exactly withering either. Indeed, it ‘relents’ even though the season thrives, a paradoxical set-up that suggests that sometimes, holding back is the natural thing to do. And it’s a sentiment that softly falls into the memorable statement that ends the poem:

Now in the thriving season of love

when the bud relents into flower,

your love turned absence has turned once more,

and if my comforts fall soft as rain

on her flutters, it is because

love grows by what it remembers of love.

We’re still the same ones dancing.

II.

E.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

Home is anywhere the body speaks stillness.

The Thunderbolt Wife.