Poems by Dermot O'Sullivan

Dream

by Dermot O'Sullivan

From Canary Summer 2019

Dermot lives near the extreme edge of Tijuca Forest, where it stretches across the hills into the city. He grew up close to where the Owendoher joins the Dodder River.

One day the rainforests will return. Briefly they have been knocked back, chased up into the mountains that loom over the city, but one day this backwards movement will reverse and the inevitability of vegetable gravity will descend upon Rio de Janeiro with its full, murderous, green force.

Now a concrete-choked metropolis stinking with 12 million lives, then a barren wasteland of hollowed-out high-rises and deserted streets. The forests will return soon after, trees will tear up the asphalt, dragging the guts of the city — the sewers, the wires, the drainage pipes — up into the open light of day. Trees will clamber up the stairs of abandoned skyscrapers, swarm through the open-plan offices and punch out the windows, drooping like lolling tongues out into the void, dropping fruits and seeds back down into the streets, bringing to a boil the botanical turmoil below.

Whole neighborhoods will become impassable, overrun by finely-woven mato, thickets of thorny bushes over which the soft filaments of lacy creepers will expand like tentacles of ice on a freezing puddle. Snakes and spiders and rats and mosquitos and cicadas will multiply. But no one will recoil in disgust, no one will hear the whine of a bloodsucking malarial fly, none will stop to bask in the revving, trilling insanity of flocks of fat locust roaring at the dying sun. None will chance upon the dried out corpses of these insects’ former incarnations, glued to some exposed branch. No soft feet will be bitten by venomous cobras, that old story will be long gone and long forgotten.

The favelas will disappear first, close to the forests as they are, the shacks flimsy, easily exploded by eager trees rupturing their meagre roofs, the bricks of the walls effortlessly dismantled by figs prising their roots into the interstices of crumbling, poor-quality cement. The churrasqueira of the dealers will contain the nests of small mammals. The old communities will be reduced to plant-swollen piles of rubble before being swallowed entirely by the greed of the rainforest. The slopes of the mountains will be uniform green once more.

The lower and wealthier districts will take longer, many further from the forests or at least more sturdily built. But even in these places it is only a question of time: now or later, sooner or less soon. In Copacabana, on the narrow streets of high-rise apartment blocks, trees will perhaps shoot out of the opposite windows of former sitting rooms and let their branches meet and mingle above street-level, creating a bridge of dense, lush canopy across which the marmosets and capuchins will wander back and forth, safe far above the dangerous, snake and jaguar infested forest floor. The sky-paths over the years will multiply until it will be possible to voyage from Leme to Duque de Caxias without ever setting foot on the ground, of which not an inch will be free of a layer of rotting plant detritus soon to become pure and healthy tropical soil.

Toucans will flap everywhere. Forest dogs will roam by day and by night. Herds of capybara will graze on Praça Tiradentes, oblivious to the many drunken nights that once festered in the surrounding alleys, the young people dancing, the rolling drums, the whores, the addicts, the cans of Antarctica passed back and forth until the beer would get warm and vile. No trace of these voices will reach the ears of these giant rodents as they chew grass loudly and mate and scatter startled at the first sign of danger. For many years, many, many years, the interiors of the grotty barzinhos will persist, the No Smoking sign slowly peeling from the wall, the tiles cracking throughout the decades of brutal heat, ceiling tiles falling in and smashing on defiant plastic chairs — red for Brahma, blue for Antarctica — now coated with white dust. Eventually the walls will collapse and the whole place will go under, become an underground city for mice and cockroaches.

The feral cats and dogs will thrive, mixing bloodlines until the only coat left will be an undifferentiated, mottled brown. They will become wilder, become tough, rediscover in the depths of their genetic spirals the hunting instinct, form packs, mark out territories. Eventually they will be just another wild animal, no different to the thousands of others that have existed on this planet for millions of years, their brief flirtation with mankind long-gone and permanently obliterated from the memory of their species.

On the liberated beaches turtles will bury their eggs in the sand. Crocodiles will bask in the shallow rivers that lead to the sea, their goose-pimpled, leather backs like logs. Fiddler crabs will swarm in the mangroves. Wading birds will step carefully hunting small fish. Orcas and whales and dolphins will crowd the shores, the last of the poisoned lead and faecal waste washed out to the open sea. And countless birds will twit and swoop and sing and cry.

The Rio-Niterói Bridge will be an arch overflowing with green, hanging with vines as thick as thighs, swinging down towards the waters of the bay. Every type of epiphyte and bromeliad will be dumping its offspring until the whole thing, section by section, overloaded with weight, will tumble into the sea to host seaweeds and crabs and fish for the next several thousand years. There will be no more traffic jams on the Rio-Niterói Bridge.

Insects will be everywhere. Leaves will outnumber words. The Museum of Tomorrow will be purely ecological. The hills will forget samba and shoot-outs and bus schedules. The plains will forget completely and entirely that they ever cupped the soft flesh of human creatures. No one will eat salgados anymore. The whole municipality of Rio de Janeiro will be at once more peaceful and more violent. It will be liberated from history, to be delivered to oblivion.

One day the rainforests will return to the city. This much Tag knows for sure. He does not say this to the others but one day this city will finally know peace.

Tag only hopes that then, as now, in the limpid blue sky, frigates and vultures will still circle sadly and without pause the permanent, blazing coin of tropical sun.