COLD FRONT - Stephen Symons

Cold Front

New poems Stephen Symons

Cold Front New poems - Stephen Symons

Always for Jules

All photos by Stephen Symons | Contact: stephensymons@gmail.com Copyright Š 2015 / All Rights Reserved

Acknowledgements Thanks to the editors of the the following journals, books and anthologies who first published the following poems: Far below first appeared in Aerodrome.

White lies first appreared in New Contrast (South African Literary Journal).

Mapwork first appeared in New Coin Poetry (Rhodes University).

Special thanks to Tyrone Savage and Prof. Kelwyn Sole (Department of English Literature, University of Cape Town) for their invaluable critiques of some of the poems included this collection.

All photos by Stephen Symons | Contact: stephensymons@gmail.com Copyright Š 2015 / All Rights Reserved [5]

Contents Acknowledgements, 5 Lies, 9 Mapwork, 10 The keeness of water, 11 So it seems, 12 Sleeping son, 13 The liquid clarities of surfaces, 14 Far below, 15 The tide, 16 Into the real poems I have made, 17 Wide sky, 18 Dorp, 19 Reticent tongue, 20 White lies, 21 They wake too early, 22 Lying on the grass at 3pm on a Sunday, 23 Fathers are mostly absent, 24 Taxi stop, 25 South Africa from the window seat of SAA317, 26 An architect cheats on his wife, 27 Photoframes by night, 28 Our ears deceive us, 29 Knysna, 30 Poetry, 31 Clifton 4th Beach, 32 Uncoupling, 33 Rorkes Drift, 34 Call up, February 1990, 35 Two owls roosting, 36 S N A K E, 37 At sea, 38 Cosmos, 39

[7]

Lies A tired light.

A sky that has paled to salmon slivers.

Beyond steamed glass there’s the slight tonguing of pine needles by a breeze.

Larger branches sway almost imperceptibly out of the corner of a raptor’s eye followed by the blunt barking of dogs and wash of traffic All of this is carried towards the far-off cawing of Hadedas Over a stove untruths are being told by a wife of an afternoon spent with a friend She turns from the pots and coughs

as if to clear her throat of all conscience —

Just like the hawk

before it takes the dove.

[9]

Mapwork Your body is a map spread out on a sunned table hands try to iron out its crisp fold lines — like a sail snapping as the wind swings in an attempt to comprehend its way It breathes of summits measured by fingers ringed by whorls of contours bunched into steep inclines that slide towards veins that wend into what could be lakes, dams or even larger organs of blue — the sea perhaps — defined by light into warm climes of luminous line And here I lie closer to fifty — still lost within its darkest terrorities.

[10]

The keeness of water In the shower contemplating small continents of splashes coalesce on the tiles as a draught pricks at wet skin with windows yawning at another exquisite sky and everything glinting like a clean blade in the sunlight even the sudden surfacing of a memory gifted as a moment of complete lucidity is soon lost to your talk from the bedroom which builds, lapses and disassembles into the crystalline keenness of water and light and is washed away along with so much more than the smell of sleep.

[11]

So it seems Days are books of many voices of mostly foreign accents arriving and leaving until they too eventually become as faint as the warm bare feet of a sleepwalking child over cold wood in those hours when the light of long extinguished stars flounder and sleep turns from its familiar cadences to make love to death and we dream on

— unawares.

[12]

Sleeping son All ten of his years firmly fastened to the fetal curve of sleep the immaculate skin, perfectly firm yet scuffed and grazed in all the expected places — that stubbed toe of blooded black skin twitched at by boyish dreams I have long forgotten the slightest frowning of his brow as a fleck of moonlight catches the rise of a freckled cheek How everything is centred on breath

Even the tightening of a sleep clenched fist alters the frailty of this moment of just standing here transfixed by life’s ability to displace even the darkest spaces with love watching his breath pushing and pulling at the the taunt skin of his dreams and realising that is as close to peace that I will ever come.

[13]

The liquid clarities of surfaces We crave more ­ hoping beyond happiness and ebb and flood of the present To purchase the impossible ­— the perpetual warmth of mid-summer

its familiar greenery

the conversations of light and leaves

and a blue ocean Yet standing here as daylight wanes almost alone within earshot of my shell-collecting daughter

watching the grappling of kelp

and rocks at low tide

the constant tugging at granite roots

and slow swaying release

of bronze limbs

to an oily surface watching histories drift over the lucidity of every surface perhaps all we have are these drunken imprints of beauty momentary footfalls stretched along the coastline of our lives.

[14]

Far below I knew a man who slipped off the edge of a mountain and slid from his camping chair and its crisp view into space In that manic fraction I imagined his life uncoupling from the disbelief of a single misplaced step on iced snow and how within seconds his flailing form had already resigned itself to calm and floated for an instant in green birdsong before the shadows accelerated to gather him up far below Onlookers came to view his slippage over the flashed whiteness before the heat softened his terror to liquid And some ventured perilously close to the precipice hoping to catch a glimpse of his illegible form stretched over the sharp black rocks far below.

[15]

The tide By late afternoon the fragile sentences of birds are barely audbible — broken by a slewed sky.

I watch them leaving, leaning into the incline groping their way home along high walls and lamp posts stung with rain as the mountain is swept away by low trains of grey — Here, in the wet familiarity of crash landed clouds sunlight spears the wind whole houses, even streets slide from the windscreens of careening taxis carrying the tide back out leaving an endless coast of damp linen and gleaming kitchens.

Into the real poems I have made Again.­Washing away what’s left of day — work, the actions of irrelevance and their insignificances As if all that mattered was preventing violence and wondering how a God could never tire at plucking away at life — petal by petal Always the same slow shift of shadows over curtains and walls as the roof turns in its sleep and the secrets of trees are screamed into the night Later birds relax their grip and silvered currents of cloud pour over the city into the dreams of my children

into their sleep gaping mouths —

into the real poems I have made.

Wide sky Loving you was a widening sky — a fraction before dawn with the half-sadness of a sunless ocean turning from grey to a hazed pink expanse There are no clouds or stars just the suggestion of more colour and birds shedding dreams Slowly a breeze coaxes the tips of leaves to brush away the last of a night sky And high up a Rock Kestrel soars — skimming the sunned ceiling

of this memory of you.

[18]

Dorp Halfway there we find ourselves looking out towards a hazed kloof where green folds crumple into light flares of fynbos and stone — an inviting view, like distant music on a summer night.

But here we are, sheltering under a broken shadow with a flat battery, in a town bolted down by midday heat. We wait; you reach for a book and I watch the inertia of life behind the thinnest of curtains.

This is high tide in an ocean of heat.

I swim from house to house, transfixed by the town’s lunchtime motions, how shadows have detached themselves from objects and life — a voyeur treading heat — the heat that disables language, so people simply eat their lunches of bread, jam and leftovers in servings of silence.

Afterwards they seek out their mahogany bedrooms. Dust settles on their dozing tongues, on the thick lips of bedside glasses, brimming with water that tastes of heated copper. Time shuffles. It reeks of mothballs and is rough, like the un-sanded panels at the back of cupboards. Everywhere, blotched photos in black frames stare history.

At the edge of the petrol station, where the concrete forecourt crumbles to gravel, a newspaper burns on a steel table under white sky. Curiosity lures me from the cool of my island of shadow. My wife dozes with one leg just outside its safety; and even though I slip her leg back into shade, the damage is done. She will lotion a pink thigh tonight and smell of tropical fruit for days.

I have decided all this place comprehends is a vertical heat and the shortest of shadows. Have these green roofs ever felt rain or the cold stroking of pre-dawn dew? Somewhere an ancient telephone is ringing and two shadows are making love before their afternoon shift; my wife stirs and a door opens.

At last. Everybody needs somebody.

Dorp (town), Afrikaans for a village or small town

[19]

Reticent tongue November has the just cut grass tending its wounds — there’s the relief of evening thumbing at decaying heat the wetness of bleeding greenery beneath their feet and acceleration of autumn as it gains on summer They both relish the gradual ghosting of flesh, then a final discharge of light ­—

It seems perfectly natural that his fingers skirt her shoulderblade as he whispers skywards, ‘Under this sky

I could say anything.’

She replies with a faint weight on his thigh brushes a gust from her hair and realises all sound has been poured from her voice Time stutters — her soul stumbles over its reticent tongue coaxing her lips into a smile at these first tracings of love.

[20]

White lies I remember

a wind slowed by heat and burst stone how it snowed a skin of ashen flakes in our honeymoon week Houses gaped at the flayed black mountains drawing in the leftover smoke and stillness that always follows destruction How songs broke in bird’s throats and language cracked like tinder in the carbon gauze of bedrooms How

even the whitest of lies were flecked grey

by the fired sleet

of its victims.

[21]

They wake too early In summer they wake too early they drag their limbs from room to room reinventing each other with slow uncoordinated movements still unraveling from dreams accompanied less by language and more by a reluctance to enter the day’s current as if they knew that each night offered a glimpse of death and its landscape was warm peaceful and so inviting much like the lighted rooms they now drift through.

[22]

Lying on the grass at 3pm on a Sunday Before the rain a down sky gathers rare colours At the scuffed edges of the view winter branches run their course over ruptured clouds and daydreams Life floats by indifferently ­— more blue than green except for the mutable flightpath of a butterfly Eventually a half-sun is subdued by cloud light bleeds out to shadow and reminds me why Sunday is the slowest of days Even the city’s mechanical thrum defies gravity — and becomes a sad hymn before the rain.

[23]

Fathers are mostly absent Inside, the air is more liquid than gas, crimped by the pool’s heat and laced with chlorine.

KEEP THE DOORS CLOSED!

[Relays of silhouetted mothers and goggled children slip to wet echoes.

Fathers are mostly absent. ] Above the to-and-fro dip and climb of a starling tails the swimmers.

Its manic calls splash over blue tiles — unoticed.

Outside, the birds and children are happy, even the parents are bouyant.

[24]

Taxi stop Waiting bodies — Sound tunes to

insect gossip

answered by the singular

languages of night birds

and blood flow of late traffic Against rooflines

where branches

net a low slung moon Do silent questions circle

the darkness of their mouths —

like where life will be

say a decade from now

or whether their children

will be be spared their waiting?

[25]

South Africa from the window seat of SAA317 Where every geography crumbles into wind scrubbed light At this height the rasped constancies of climate and dust are distant infusions smoothed by cloud and speed Yet some clouds have no means to quench this drought — where every untruth is yet another blanched fracture of land.

[26]

An architect cheats on his wife In a hotel room on a yellow afternoon that opens towards the wind the circumference of his lie is a wedding band on his finger At night, as they sleep he rubs his chest at that point where an ember of pain the size of a bead of blood will eventually take flame.

[27]

Photoframes by night December burns then smoulders in a diffident wind streetlight slides over sunburnt leaves it seeks out a hallway and bisects the planes the smiling frames the intercepts of happiness and sadness half face half reflection half forgetting this is the theory of memory —

[28]

Our ears deceive us Before a half light unpegs the last of the night’s laundry with sight and sound still scuffed by sleep ears are deceived into believing the wind sifting by night colours is far-off surf lifted from the blue boundaries of a dream into the warm bay of a sleeping back.

Later the heat and wind will grapple lifting a skin of red dust and loosening the dopplered cicadas — to shreds of memory still snagged by that fence we call our lives — broken in parts by love.

[29]

Knysna All life hangs between yellow and green pylons of light At the umber edges of the afternoon a dog sleeps with pricked ears — in its road-kill pose Scraps of cumulus float seawards to dissolution their slate underbellies mute the sun — so close a forefinger and thumb could pluck it from its furnace I’ve abandoned this poem to watch a kite weighted by a flower pot inhale and exhale

in a protest of orange and magenta plumage As birds with names I still don’t know turn shrubbery to song — into exquisite impermanence.

[30]

Poetry To write so words flicker like smoothed pebbles beneath a tannin surface

spun with moss — sunned, steaming to know for certain that this is the voice of of love gliding over love that each line is light flared over a lattice of birdsong

untouched by our Gods

and all of these words whether meaningful or meaningless are finite

and gleam momentarily

in nebulous light.

[31]

Clifton 4th Beach A splash of salt water catches the back of an arm — startling and sharp to sunned skin the body inhales it’s mortality at the sea’s frothed edge of granite bursting through surf-smoothed sand everywhere skin is on holiday stretched over muscle, fat, ligament and hearts beating against bone sunglassed bodies becalmed on towels weighted by their cargoes of love, sadness, sickness, even nothingness a glistening flotilla of umbrellas waiting for a wind that will never fill its sails.

[32]

Uncoupling Day and night a profane wind It draws breath from vapour and stone then hurls shadows made of twigs and pine needles across the unslept side of their bed The ceiling buckles a black light sways on the brink of destruction He wonders whether her death was simply a permanent uncoupling of the present — whether she ended up in the kingdom of a god drunk on divine brilliance —

oblivious of life

and what came

before her dying.

[33]

Rorkes Drift It cuts a history woven of red fabric and black skin hills repeat towards a hint of ocean from the hewn silence of Victorian masonry and a close-cropped lawn bounded by two ranks of stone life thrives — a fly cleans itself on a tall blade of grass the gardener knowingly passed it sways and alights sunlit in the breeze such is the present without blood such is history.

The Battle of Rorke’s Drift, also known as the Defence of Rorke’s Drift, was a battle in the Anglo-Zulu War. The defence of the mission station of Rorke’s Drift, under the command of Lieutenant John Chard of the Royal Engineers, and Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead immediately followed the British Army’s defeat at the Battle of Isandlwana on 22 January 1879, and continued into the following day, 23 January.

Just over 150 British and colonial troops successfully defended the garrison against an intense assault by 3,000 to 4,000 Zulu warriors. The massive, but piecemeal,[9] Zulu attacks on Rorke’s Drift came very close to defeating the tiny garrison but were ultimately repelled. Eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded to the defenders, along with a number of other decorations and honours.

[34]

Call up, February 1990 I remember a day when every father became an Abraham and every son an Isaac there was no poised blade breaking sunlight just the hum of idling buses treading the beginnings of day somewhere rams were caught in the fynbos waiting to take the place of the Isaacs but no Angel of God intervened there was just the shaking of sons’ hands by fathers and the impatience of the engines.

Almost all white, male South Africans now between the ages of around 35 and 60 were conscripts of the South African Defence Force (SADF). Between 1967 and 1994, approximately 600,000 young men were conscripted to perform national service. Failure to do so usually incured harsh penalties. The alternatives were to object on conscientious (primarily religious) grounds and face a six-year jail sentence, or to flee the country.

[35]

Two owls roosting By midnight the wind had collapsed stillness took the form of trembling dew worlds and the surprise of two owls roosting on a fissure across the sky They split the asphalt silence using two sad notes until they had used up all the city’s loneliness How that bulge of flesh above your belt-line became a warm softness to my fingers —

a black map to my touch

Tonight, like most nights, the stars are eclipsed by the city’s glow and sleep stumbles over those two sad notes headlong ­— into this end of season chill.

[36]

SNAKE West of us hazed sea glass glints and trembles into

the ruins of

green and copper distance A wind planed Atlantic distance, Staring

to a blur of amber bodies slung with long

shadows —

fattened and sand rippled The sun oozes over the horizon Then a voice from the green path down to the beach

screams, “S N A K E!”

and for a moment there is just the earthy thump of surf in the clipped light

[37]

At sea This morning eternity is a slow white persuasion of the coast carried by something close to complete stillness licking this cusp of ocean and land until its skin gleams Down below a radio crackles a weather report as first light welds plate steel to a deleted sky Squinting sailors bearing the smell of freshly baked bread and coffee are exhaled by the ship’s doors into the slow drift of this universe

Decades back you said we were two ships, two abbreviated lives forever missing each other

Now there’s only the cry of seabirds arcing between memory and

a diamond powdered daze

of sun and fog.

[38]

Cosmos At the end only a few surviving pieces of furniture float the frames over mahogany or glass Portraits of neither morning, nor evening, of couples; mostly newlyweds — men in uniform and women in bridal white under sun-glared skies Now green veins traffic the same blood beneath mottled territories — a frail flow Towards a dusk light strained through gauze curtains that have held the same view at bay for years What little breath remains tugs at memory and within its ebb and flow a hint of naphthalene and urine too Yet the framed couples smile frozen within their fables of love — oblivious of this slowing planet and its orbit of nurses.

[39]

Cold Front New poems by Stephen Symons

This morning eternity is a slow white persuasion of the coast carried by something close to complete stillness licking this cusp of ocean and land until its skin gleams from At Sea [40]