Stephen Symons Spioenkop
[2]
Spioenkop A collection of poems by Stephen Symons
Always for Jules
All photos by Stephen Symons Copyright Š 2014 / All Rights Reserved stephensymons@gmail.com
[3]
Introduction This collection of 59 poems is the culmination of two years worth of writing, with many of the poems making up part of a collection submitted for a Masters Degree in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town. I live in Cape Town, South Africa with my wife and two children. I have been published in many of the local and national journals, magazines and a number of South African anthologies. These poems hope to serve as my debut collection; they explore the frailty of human existence within the natural and built environment. Many of the poems involve some form of human exposure, and subsequent response, to the effects of the natural elements. The collection is divided into nine sections which encompass themes including landscape, natural topographies, specific localities within South Africa, inter-personal relationships, and aspects of human conflict, both historical and contemporary. The presence of the ocean, whether obvious or nuanced, is offered to the reader as a constant; and serves as a point of entry or departure, and even inquiry, for the poems. Of special interest, are the visual properties of the poem’s form on paper, as well as its association with poetic style and narrative function.
[4]
Acknowledgements Thanks to the editors of the the following journals, books and anthologies who first published the following poems: Spioenkop first appreared in Umhlanga magazine. Tinnitus and Glass first appreared in Carapace. Rain Song, Death of a gecko, South Easter and On reading a war poem before sunrise first appreared in New Contrast (South African Literary Journal). Imagining snow, Dust, Heat, This is a country and Death of a surfer first appeared in New Coin Poetry (Rhodes University) journal. Wordless (South African townships, 1990) first appreared in the anthology, Africa Ablaze. Special thanks to Professor David Keplinger (Department of Literature, American University) and to Professor Kelwyn Sole (Department of English Literature, University of Cape Town) for their expert guidance, enthusiastic encouragement and invaluable critiques of this collection of poetry.
[5]
Contents Letter home, 8
Spioenkop, 11 Sniper, 12 Table Mountain, 13 Commute, 14 Darkroom, 16 Boyes Drive, 17
I
II
Death of a gecko, 19 On reading a war poem before sunrise, 20 Driving home, 21 Wheat field, 22 Bees, 23
III
Second hand bookstore, Cape Town, 25 Muizenberg, 26 After the storm, 27 Tietiesbaai, 28 Holiday houses , 29 Beta Beach, Bakoven, 30 South Easter, 31 Camps Bay, 32 Elands Bay, 33
Tinnitus, 35 Wide windless sky, 36 Rain song, 37 Glass, 38 Against forgetting, 39 Lies, 40 Words, 41 Heat, 42 Weight, 43 Mapwork, 44
IV
continued overleaf
[6]
Questions for the Sea, 46
IV VI
Birth of a daughter, 52 Lucidity, 53 Mother, 54 Into the real poems I have made, 55 Sleeping son, 56 I wonder..., 57
VII
The Gale /5th December 2013, 59 Morning sketch, 60 Days, 61 The prospect of a dreamless sleep, 62
VIII
Compound eye, 64 Nothing but movement, 65 Wordless (South African townships, 1990), 66 Dead bird, 67 Death of a husband by drowning, 68 Not dark yet, 70 Death of a surfer, 71 The day after, 72 The keeness of water, 73 Far below, 74
Autumn, 76 Mist, 77 Imagining snow, 78 Dust, 79 The tide, 80 This is a country, 81 So it seems, 82
IX
Notes, 83
[7]
Letter home 1 The shadows of the steel window frames are drawn back then released by a sea-breeze to reveal the sun-cracked gauze that lets the flies and mozzies in Pretorius sits in a slash of light brushing the opvok out of his boots whistling — more spit than sound — as his hand blurs over the laces scuffing his palm to the colour of his overalls We’re all here some in shorts that have slipped their drawstrings others in vests with the life hung out of them cleaning rifles or licking lies into envelopes Out there beyond the base churches are pealing for believers drunken notes tumble into the bungalow swirling motes of home-sickness and drawing memory into sunlight So a happiness that masquerades as dust is held briefly by the doorway
continued overleaf
[8]
2 ‘Ja, julle vokking naaiers gaan nou lekker afkak’ is how it would begin But before that a shuffling line that dribbled fucks and voks would form in the after-lunch heat so we could drop a sandbag into each others pack and slowly the weight would grow bones gather flesh sinew and gnaw at our backs. Pretorius always stuffed a wet towel under his webbing to ease the rasp and clots of Vaseline too that would stain his browns — a bitch to wash out 3 A week later they found him in the heads door ajar still sitting on the throne skull flopped forward revealing a cracked bowl of bone and a chrysanthemum of brain that had dripped pools of blood to explore the flecked tiles and the butt of his R1 And it lay there in the snuggery between his toes the blackened brass casing of his final letter home.
[9]
I
[10]
Spioenkop Climbing the koppie on a birdless dawn with summer dragging behind us Hiking through the work of spiders spilling dew beads and skinning the same wet earth where soldier’s hobnails crunched and slid to reach a summit spread with death — Squinting away from the sun razed veld I look back down the climb to where the last breaths of night still shade the slope in slate and umber And in that moment morning hews the incline to a hedge of stone light splintered and still twisted deep into the flesh of this country’s history.
[11]
Sniper Up there his days rifled to a burst window with its glass teeth still fixed to a shattered frame And from his height he would marvel how man had managed to dismantle the sun with war At night he aimed his scope at a coal sky stretched over a ribcage of trusses and he watched the stars tremor as their light arrived like luminous rain on the barrel of his rifle He died floors up in that shell-shocked room that leaked stars and memory — A space that freezes the echoes of pigeon’s feet.
[12]
Table Mountain This evening the mountain is an amphitheatre conjured from rock and mutable light Clouds pour over its ragged back as colour slides from every surface leaving a topography chiselled by the elements by the incessant wrenching of gales pulling at its skin and a white gush of water after winter rain Dusk falters giving the crags time to loosen their last tongues of sunlight till all detail bleeds into shadow and liquefies under the soaked weight of cloud Further down a blackening wind unbuckles the belts of roads houses butted against its incline slip away till suburbia is undressed its belly laid bare to the elements Light inverts and thickens into night only the suffused apertures of yellow windows remain punctuating a darkness that wills hands to draw curtains decorated with nightingales and foreign flowers across the emptied view.
[13]
Commute The city watches there is only the low thrum of incessant motion and routine the way wind and light anneal the morning while above the sun coasts aimlessly; becalmed by a clay fog as white and red beads of traffic stop-start their way to hours congealing to screens coffee machines and phones until the day rises to midday then ebbs and beaches itself on the afternoon hours cold whittles away warmth catalysing buildings into shadow and everywhere cell phones are waking shivering — trembling — slim pocket bibles ringing out their end of day annunciations slowly the city re-discovers its night time vacancies beginning with continued overleaf
[14]
a mob of gulls pecking away at the last bones of light tossed into the streets.
[15]
Darkroom Bored by three days of rain he stole into the half-light of her darkroom into its red alchemy of images He paused — a woman and a boy lay curved into each other in sleep Mother and son perhaps? She dreaming of the stone wall all parents build around their children He imagined their sleeping shapes on the gleaming wall brushed by shadows of black leaves attached to the even blacker limbs of trees Beyond the room was wind — coalescing far-off shoreline fluorescence to a brilliance that poured from the photo and filled the darkroom with a light unlike anything he had seen.
[16]
Boyes Drive I rub away the splashes of salt that have tightened the skin on your shoulders Your smile looks out towards the bay where a trimmed fingernail of moon teeters on the fog At last a sea breeze releases the heat from the throats of the sandstone boulders behind us Below spades have stopped skidding over the gravel And that fucking lawnmower is done with the grass.
[17]
II
[18]
Death of a gecko The night has turned to concrete and the city is a curtain still as the breathing of birds a cat pads over moonlight in search of prey through the thinning heat past pine needles that float on freshly cut lawns your hips are sketched in tenuous veins of streetlight that play like jazz over the sheets rhythms of shadow that rise dip and slip into imagination sleep now cleaved by the click of an electric fence I head into the cold barefoot with broom in hand to brush the gecko from the fence and stop that metronome of death.
[19]
On reading a war poem before sunrise A good time to read or write; when the house sleeps and everything is made of stone and thinned breath A poem could begin here in the dream-lit waiting of branches and birds Stillness hangs from the cold walls and frames the drone of a lone car — or is it the breathing of the sea? No it’s the rush of the poem’s blood and its words fastened to the quiet like beach sand in minute increments of roughness crystalline and salt-sticky You brush the words away trace the rules of light seeping between the blinds let the first accolades of bird song in and wonder how many storms would scour a beach of sand and expose its granite bones — and wounds.
[20]
Driving home Hours into the drive lack of sleep slows the hands of the clock I am pulled along the undulations the camber and rhythms of asphalt past shaved farm lands and the Spotted Eagle Owl I swerved to avoid Where each blind minute is stitched together and made visible with white and yellow paint punctuated by cat’s eyes that gaze back Unblinking Rousing memory — As each pole ticks by the shapes and spaces of a forgotten love Sharpen into focus lit by the twin beams of headlights pointing home.
[21]
Wheat field We broke our journey alongside a wheat field that had been harvested to a blond stubble I stood plucking the slack barbed-wire fence and let the view blur while you took to the field with the light skirting your body — sharpening a shoulder blade but softening the milky beginnings of a thigh You stood there transfixed by the arrhythmia of a wind pump’s blades watching it pump dust into a cracked dam covered with tufts of sun-split grass and edged by a sliver of wheat the harvester couldn’t reach Your camera aimed at a Blue Crane — its lens flared the bird startled stepped into the air — a dream taking flight in the first moments of wakefulness.
[22]
Bees Days like this that might prove atheists wrong unsettling their unswerving orbits of disbelief with a single note made of mountain sky and sea So pure bees stumble on the velvet rims of petals and birds will chorus forgotten songs long after dark.
[23]
III
[24]
Second hand bookstore, Cape Town ‘You’ll find the poetry three rows up and at the end of the Classics section, can’t miss it, past History, before Cookery’. He follows an aisle of shelves. Most are moulting chipboard flakes. The quality of their carpentry annoys him. Filaments of paint run over flecked linoleum tiles. They dribble down the aisle of the bestseller section — the quick reads snatched at duty-free or borrowed from a summer guesthouse; holiday sand still snug between a racy plot. Here, bookmarks are gravestones. He fingers out a laminated verse — a water-colour reminder of God’s eternal love — complete with a dove winging its way towards a cumulus cathedral. Other books offer Happy Birthdays in cursive, ballpoint flowers, hearts and ‘I love you’s’ behind covers bandaged in Sellotape. ‘Darling Thomas, Our best wishes on your 10th birthday, love from Mommy & Daddy, 1971’. Handling the books leaves a roughness on his fingertips, not quite dust, more like a fine colourless sleet — the tidal residue of half-memories and forgetting. There are whole shelves letting go of childhood — spineless bedtime stories, illustrated books of knowledge and soccer annuals. A shamble of comics — sun-brittled, buckled and sticky thumbed — lie in a shopping basket. Sunday afternoons of slow clocks and tea in lighted rooms surface and then dip back into memory. There are the books of the sick, the dying too, trawled from the reading trolleys of convalescent homes, and lamp tables of curtained sea view flats. Black and blue hard-backs that have shed their gold leafed identities. Emerald encyclopaedias infused with mothballs and salted air dream of mahogany shelves in sun-trapped hall-ways. He wonders — how whole worlds can be buckled into suitcases or taped into wine cartons. There is no Poetry section, except a coverless Paradise Lost. It smells of burnt toast and carries the signature of a cup. The finger marks of its last reader have gathered on the bruised edges of its cover. He holds the book for some time and looks outside towards the wet street and its glistening current. He shivers and wonders why he feels as frail as a bird’s leg — and then sneezes.
[25]
Muizenberg I miss your cool gun metal skin dimpled and pecked at by a North wind — a shark tooth patina multiplied over lines of surf stepped into sea haze
1
watching walkers and dogs licked at by sea-mist their hunched forms carrying that grey light across wet sand towards anthracite breakfast and asthmatic kettles and the surfers side-stepping the ribbons of kelp wet copper at low tide and the citrus viscera of red bait sucked back into foam and grit 2
always — the complaints of brakes against rail and that exhausted clack into the station of a film strip of train windows reflecting the bay snapping past coves terracotta roofs reefs and doric columns waves into slow afternoons of dulled turquoise heavy and constantly drawing life into shadow.
[26]
After the storm The clouds have slowed — emptied of rain ruptured by light and bleeding a dawn still concussed by the storm’s machinery all cradled within a pink calm where leaves cling to everything but trees even the sighs of routine — the hymns of kettles grumbling dust bins and dopplered wash of streets are sheened in silvered wetness he watches and feels that transaction of cold exchanged for warmth how sunlight floods rooms and turns violence into routine.
[27]
Tietiesbaai This bay searing in its calcium whiteness — the midday heat of talcum shell and bone beneath bare feet like a wind-sucked boneyard of fallen angels.
[28]
Holiday houses These houses are tethered to driveways sheened — still — freshly hosed large windows reflect sprinklers flick over leaves chrome concrete now lit in parts by the beginnings of streetlight afternoons have slipped high walls hosepipes are coiled tables wait for lives to be laid out between cutlery over linen white as death and salmon walls boast with watercolours frames and glassed smiles outside a breeze stiffens twisting the last of autumn from the branches so it clogs the gutters of these houses.
[29]
Beta Beach, Bakoven There was a moment marked by the exhaling of a last flare of sunlight where everything wore a fine edge of gold and copper detail gelled to a black ballet of cormorants dogs and flirting couples bonded to black granite boulders and the closeness of your sunned skin.
[30]
South Easter In this wind the city is lost at sea mad as a hatter it loosens the bolts of the bay and quilts the mountain in a charge of cumulus. In this wind all comes from the sea curtains of salt seek out the cleanest windows pennants of flotsam form beachheads in watercoloured coves. In this wind the sea is welded to a crazed palette of white noise roads swim beneath drifts of sand like whales and leaves are summoned to pile up in suburban corners. In this wind nature unbuckles rage mugging the dreams of babies with rattling gutters and rapping fruit as sleep corrodes like a nail.
[31]
Camps Bay Within the city a fist of heat is already beating the beginnings of day out of light and concrete Summiting the Nek there’s that buckled horse-shoe of coast below still cooled by the mauve absence of sun Driving past roofs and curtained windows weeping the breath of sleep and kettles Switch-backing down towards the sea’s voice So close you can hear the drawing up of its secret lists as each syllable brightens to liquid brilliance Then the school bell rings and the children rush the gate.
[32]
Elands Bay This is a place conceived by a sky the colour of bone Thick with wind gnawing at a shoreline strewn with tidal slicks of feathers and foamed strandings — mostly dead and picked at Footprints from the high water mark life is wrought into sun-brittled flats of shell and seaweed that fills follicles and mats hair into arguments of salted talcum Above, gulls wail solitude slipping into blinding light re-appearing and then skimming the white capped swells There, over the swaying mops of kelp and glinted thighs of rocks incessant motion is pressed into incessant sound A place where the ocean trawls sound from the land and gifts it to the surf — gulls — wind and then pours the leftovers from shells into our ears.
[33]
IV
[34]
Tinnitus Before sleep with most parts of the day folded away the present steps inside him What he hears is the singing of a needle that rises and pierces the sound of clouds brushing against darkness He closes his eyes and leaves the night shapes of stools and mirrors for the black felt beneath his eyelids And feels the thickening ink of sleep rob him of his feet as the first breaths of a dream lift off the sea.
[35]
Wide windless sky Loving you is a wide windless sky It always begins before dawn with the sadness of a sunless ocean turning from water to hazed horizon and then a bulging pink expanse There are no clouds or pricking stars just the promise of more colour and birds shaking dreams Slowly, a warm breeze coaxes the tops of the trees to brush away the dawn And high up a kestrel soars below the sunned ceiling of this wide memory of you.
[36]
Rain song You step over the notes as they settle on the beach they find your hips and the flowers of your dress Your hand is all I have and the details of your fingers all I want within mine the folds of flesh the scars tanlines grazes the inaudible whispers of pain on your skin This intimacy of fingers is perhaps all we’ll ever have as the tide gathers up our footprints and the rain sweeps its song towards us.
[37]
Glass Sometimes he would let himself wear the fragrance of her on some insignificance of his body like the back of his hand or the fold of his elbow He would lift those parts of himself to his nose Smile And let her memory slip across the back of his mind like a blue window allows clouds to skate over its surface.
[38]
Against forgetting I think he was always against shedding her like a time worn skin worrying his love would eventually spill into forgetting and letters would float from the words they had shared until all that remained were the muffle of strange voices in distant rooms — and a return to separateness from the warm calm of an embrace.
[39]
Lies The light tires colour has thinned to salmon slivers drifting over the palest of skies Beyond the misted 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 blunted barking of dogs and dopplered cars Sound converges and is carried into the evening smog yet the far-off cawing of Hadedas lingers — and he wonders — Do they ever roost? Over the wet heat of a stove exquisitely stirred 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.
[40]
Words Late summer — with evening sucking away a blood orange horizon sea-mist planes the tide-line as you lean into me to cheat the cold those hours between death and waking when a gale is done twisting the roots of the house and birds vanish from the earth I lie awake and feel the warm pulse of your breath on my shoulder — but more than these fractions we have catalogued into a closeness called love are the words we pass to each other long past midnight — into a mingling of darkness and speech that pauses the earth.
[41]
Heat Awaking to find the coolness of your skin above the sheets Outside the pines are fossils pretrified by the same heat that sunk a gale at first light A mountain and the triplet calls of a shrike fills the window It was later once the morning breeze began its slow heaving at the curtains that I smoothed the imprint of your sleep from the bedding And realised that the day had turned to no more than a fly thudding against glass.
[42]
Weight It’s that time when night has spent most of its darkness constellations falter birds are shaking sleep from their feathers I lie closer and slip my foot under the weight of your thigh to steal those last fragments of peace from you Unaware of my theft you turn towards me unveiling a second self that speaks a language spun from intimacy with vowels of flesh and consonants of touch I smile into the warm pressing of your body and watch the sky being slowly stripped of night.
[43]
Mapwork Your body is a map spread out on a sunned table It whispers of summits measured in metres ringed by whorls of contours bunched into steep inclines that slide towards veins and spill into what could be lakes, dams or even larger organs of blue — the sea perhaps? I imagine the sound of paper as the hands of a lost man tries to iron out its crisp fold lines — like a sail snapping as the wind swings in an attempt to comprehend its way Your body is a map spread out on a sunned bed defined by morning light into warm climes of language and luminous line And here I lie closer to fifty — still lost within its darkest terrorities.
[44]
V
[45]
Questions for the Sea 16h30 The beach is stunned by a day’s worth of heat — a blue and squinted view jammed with umbrellas towels and glazed bodies framed by the peals of children broken by the collapse of shorebreak. Out in the bay Kelp Gulls bank skywards with gale-frayed feathers; they elbow higher tuck their wings away then dive into a school of mullet caught in a rip. I am standing in the shallows calf deep wetsuited watching the gulls gorge themselves as the last minutes of heat liquefy to a vein of sweat between neoprene and skin. Soon towels will be cracking in the wind and families will slog back to their suffocated cars leaving vacant plots of flesh-smoothed sand. Beyond the surf is an inflatable dolphin skipping past the gulls like a question mark made of plastic, blown out to sea — chasing after an unanswerable question?
[46]
continued overleaf
18h20 Where do you go at dusk? Do you just pour over the horizon into the abyss where you are turned to cloud then followed into death by the sun? 19h00 We always wish for more from the waves we wish that they wanted us or left prophecies for us on the sand or revelations in their spray but all they want is to turn our footprints into white islets of foam Why is it that the waves seduce us? 20h35 Tonight, constellations float in your oiled stillness and you are beautiful Who dreams under this moonless sky? Who do the waves mourn?
continued overleaf
[47]
21h45 Somewhere a fisherman is praying his way through a storm trying to skipper his vessel to safety Yet what part of your body has turned to pewter in this hook of bay as the moon pulls at you and the city lights ride your tides? 23h10 Do you feel the ceaseless rubbing of the bones and boats that lie wrecked beneath your skin Held by a blue tonnage beyond maps and human claim? 00h25 There are so many times you could have taken me, filled my lungs with your blood — Are you waiting waiting patiently for the right moment to sink me like a stone?
continued overleaf
[48]
05h45 What of those days before this city millions of mornings ago when the tails of the first whales would have skimmed these roofs And the shadows of great cartilaginous fish patrolled these streets made of barking dogs and swimming pools? 07h30 Why have we mapped your body into seas bays and oceans — Given you legs and arms where there are only blue and green voyagings of current? 08h50 Are the shells that we hold to our ears still part of you? Is what we hear the rushing of your salted blood and not ours?
continued overleaf
[49]
10h05 Where do you plot your violence summon gales and seduce chop into swell? Who ushers your breath under doors through gaps and vents so radios seize up And windows with perfect views are smudged away and eventually salted shut? Midday Looking out towards a nebula of heat stretched across the horizon I wonder how these slopes can carry the weight of so many houses And whether these words are more prayer than question — unanswerable as death?
[50]
VI
[51]
Birth of a daughter You ambushed your father with a beautiful noise much blood a surgeon’s smile and a sudden ceremonious cut frozen in pixels My daughter you were more than beautiful with your dimples threads of hair and fingernails of silk Still sightless and exhausted by birth you latched to your mother’s breast found the heartbeat behind her smile and swam back to heaven with a new taste in your mouth As all parents do or perhaps not do I thought of you a lifetime from now made infant again and then I wept.
[52]
Lucidity Towards the end her voice could not carry the weight of sentences she would slip beneath a meniscus of sound and drift for hours in the sunned silence of a bedside glass Propped up to a sea view she would wish the bedding away watching smithereens of cloud reflected by a wind-scuffed bay And then she would speak her words would make sense again and soar like the gulls — feathers skimming the spray skirting the wet surfaces of lucidity.
[53]
Mother A lone lush tree — you gave shade and always love until autumn came indifferent and beyond healing How it plucked your leaves one by one elbowing out the other seasons A continual shedding until winter — when your speech faltered to the cracking of bark and branches fractured at the slightest breath Finally — the last of the birds took flight in a fantail of white. “It’s better this way”, they said over sandwiches and tea as I watched the last of the leaves swept away by a fresh Spring breeze.
[54]
Into the real poems I have made Again. Remembering the day — work, all the actions of irrelevance and their insignificances pulled by this wind into the darkness As if all that mattered was the violence of this first summer gale and wondering how a God could delight at plucking away at happiness petal by petal
for all eternity
Then a brief respite a slowing of shadows over curtains and night blue walls as the bedroom lights cease to tremble and the roof turns in its sleep Silence dilutes the frenzy the torn muscles of trees burn birds relax their grip on branches and a gash in the curtains reveal silvered currents of cloud pouring over the city and into the dreams of my children into their sleep gaping mouths — into the real poems I have made.
[55]
Sleeping son All ten of his years firmly fastened to the fetal curve of sleep the immaculate skin of those early years 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 slice of moonlight skims the rise of a freckled cheek How everything is centred around 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 blued skin of his dreams and realising that is as close to peace that I will ever come.
[56]
I wonder... There is so much of us that wants more hoping beyond the soluble happinesses and imperfect ebb and flood of the moment We always seek to purchase the perpetual warmth of mid-summer its familiar greenery the conversations of light and leaves and silence of a distant ocean Yet standing here — as evening thickens nearly 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 I wonder perhaps this is all we have these drunken imprints of beauty momentary footfalls stretched along the coastline of our lives.
[57]
VII
[58]
The Gale /5th December 2013 Today the sun has given up manufacturing summer A gale clenches the sky and plucks the feathers from the breasts of birds Every tree is a silver green shoal pulled towards the sea Trawled from its green memory of hope and light.
[59]
Morning sketch From here dawn smudges horizon into skyline into the fire-brittled leaves and bones of fynbos For a moment the sun is snagged ambushed by a barbed wired fence until it slips free diffused to an orange button Dew beads brim with light multiplying the morning into countless worlds within worlds each a perfect clarity
[60]
Days Like a pocket of smithereened glass misted reflections arranged sifted smoothed at the edges that always kaleidoscope to something surpassing what they were with the slightest twist of memory.
[61]
The prospect of a dreamless sleep Leaves Clouds
tire of their trees sprint over a loam sky
The mountain is lost tipped into a bay of pewter by a gale Asleep —
blood rivers beneath sunburnt skin
Windows panes cast away their views misted threaded with breathing and the first beads of rain But
sleep still turns like a great engine a conjurer of dreams not death dust or wind-pitted bone.
[62]
VIII
[63]
Compound eye Stumbling with a dry mouth from a slipknot of sheets sweat and her dreaming back into a freshly painted kitchen
where he admires his handiwork and pours a glass of ice water
he watches a fly rubbing its legs together eyeing the gale beyond the glass the freedom of
the moon swaying through the clouds
the way some trees have slipped their roots
even the broken necks of the daffodils he planted last year seem so alive in the battered moonlight then he remembers a TV programme
that a fly’s eye has a thousand lenses and they have the fastest visual responses in the animal kingdom
he places the glass in the sink and wonders
does the fly desire its freedom a thousand times over ?
— before he swots it into oblivion with the Late Final.
[64]
Nothing but movement The wind knows nothing but movement even in death it whispers to the leaves
[65]
Wordless (South African townships, 1990) He collapsed like a pile of books — wordless without a breath — muffling a clutter of steel plastic webbing and skin A puddle of black grew from the dust and found the muzzle of a rifle beneath his crumpled form He was gone shot through in the dark just 20 kays from my childhood A flare popped and then tracer arced into corrugated black a woman wailed murder in a language I never bothered to learn then more beautiful tracer and the tinned silence of a dog barking and the sweeping of our boots herding spent shells The radio hissed and crackled orders grids a SITREP for Tango Zulu whatever A swelling of quiet followed the contact like a bruise soothed by the guttural cluck of the Casspir And all of us — wordless — like the blanket that bulged at our feet.
[66]
Dead bird The bird is turned inside out a splay of bones frail as the veins of sunburnt leaves followed by a confusion of feathers light as sea foam that marks the violence still snagged by freshly mown grass.
[67]
Death of a husband by drowning She stands at the water’s edge feeling the wet sand inching over her anklebones as her feet sink into its icy granularity till something catches in her throat like a small bird She shivers as the breeze nips at the sea-wet skin of her calves or is it the thought of his hands white-knuckled and veined weighted by bags of shopping or a sleeping child? Lemon and cerise roses climb from the soaked hem of her skirt over the thin-skinned edge of her shins curving up to softer territories to those shadowed parts of flesh She stands in the cast-iron light hours before the sun burns away the smell of salted air with the morning sheening on the chilled rocks And alone (except for the distant blot of a dog-walker) watches daylight ignite; looks to the gape of the bay hoping to drown love or the memory of love.
continued overleaf
[68]
Later in those slowed hours between breakfast and lunch as cupboards are emptied and books are boxed the smell of him seeks out her fingers and she returns to the beach across the stinging sand to wash him away again and again.
[69]
Not dark yet Daylight has tipped over dusk is spilt over sea foam as the tide trawls the shoreline tumbling shells and cracked bulbs of kelp No one notices the Kelp Gull with a shattered wing Dogs too drunk on freedom ignore the bird as a fan of flightless feathers draw a perfect arc across the wet sand.
[70]
Death of a surfer Death came in a whorl of cobalt and white It sliced through colour and cold a scarred slab of cartilage like a slash of barbed wire and muscled grey sandpaper against sea-softened skin neoprened and tan lined It took him for no reason other than he too was at home Now shut tight the beach is scoured — there’s just the loitering arcs of gulls forsaken against the fractured bay Every atom is stilled darkened and fathomless as the language of the sea.
[71]
The day after The day after you die will be no different traffic will stutter into town the bees will go about their business amongst suburban pollen the sun might catch the back of someone’s neck tongues will flirt with teaspoons drivers will curse wheelbarrows will ache under another load of bricks blisters will burst trees will throb in the heat asphalt will singe bare feet a wave will break the silence doves will chortle from the shade but in that second called habit you know she will call for a towel from the shower and listen to the sound of your name slide from the tiles into the water at her feet.
[72]
The keeness of water In the shower contemplating small continents of splashes coalesce on the tiles as a draught pricks at wet skin with bright 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 clarity is soon lost to your talk from the bedroom which builds, lapses and disassembles into the crystalline keenness of water and light and is then washed away along with so much more than the smell of sleep.
[73]
Far below Life exists within a latitude where every part of being falters from the present slips into the past as it then gropes wildly at the thin air of the unknown 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 flashing whiteness before the heat softened his terror to liquid And some ventured periously close to the precipice hoping to catch a glimpse of his illegible form stretched over the sharp black rocks far below.
[74]
IX
[75]
Autumn The cold whets its teeth on the blue of the sky and velvet undersides of leaves gnawing colour from petals trees and eyes What’s shed... desiccated veins and fragile spines that crack underfoot brittle as spun sugar Till nothing flows or fills the fissures And everything is sapped Even us.
[76]
Mist The mist inhales light softens sight suspends detail exhales and moistens the air in a a suspension of grey molecules so sound is dampened and summarised to three things: breath the ocean and remote birdsong
[77]
Imagining snow Imagining snow — its weightlessness and texture from behind a misted car window rubbing my breath from the glass to reveal the mountain whitewashed and grazed with cold I have always watched its work at a distance the way the presence of snow awakens the memory of a broken bone sharpens the edges of leaves and hardens the bark of trees against axes and nails The way it exists so delicately between states like water dreaming Yet I have never wrapped reality around the word — s and cupped it in my hand like a butterfly before it awakens and turns to liquid.
[78]
n
o
w
Dust Here in the squinted light hammered into heat the leaves applaud scrubbing the silence stirring the dam from treacle stillness Pigments fused to sandstone crags shift with the sun washing the corrugations of jeep tracks with crushed pink and orange mixed from a palette of valley and scree And dust reigns a floured film of skin breathed over rock water fynbos till it becomes time — iron red ancient coating flesh with the dynasties of stars beneath a sky that has been split wide open.
[79]
The tide To say it is what it is that a stone is no more than one among many other stones By late afternoon the fragile sentences of birds are barely audbible — fractured. Almost fraudulent against an ill sky of slewed black wind I watch them leaving leaning into the incline grabbing their way home along high walls and lamp posts stung with long threads of rain As parts of the mountain are carried away by dangerously low trains of cloud — that deepen the fynbos to lush emerald tones Here, in the wet familiarity of crash landed clouds spikes of sunlight are piercing through the mess houses are reflected by the windscreens of careening taxis carrying the tide back out from crisp linen and gleaming kitchens. And to say it is what it is that a heart no more than an bulb of muscle — that it knows nothing other than incessant work
is a great lie.
[80]
This is a country This is a country full of question marks but there are no sentences fastened to the question marks This country is a deep ravine cut into a mountain by the slow steady flow of water A country where the plants and birds have forgotten their names and the trees grow into an impenetrable dusk.
[81]
So it seems That life is no more than a book of many voices of mostly foreign accents arriving and leaving reverberations of memory until they too eventually lose their voice to time and 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 at last flounder to nothingness and sleep turns from its familiar cadences of breath to make love to death and we dream on in the darkness — unawares.
[82]
Notes Letter home, 8
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. opvok (Afrikaans) - or opfok – fuck-up (coarse military slang for a drill) ‘Ja, julle vokking naaiers gaan nou lekker afkak’ (Afrikaans) - ‘Yes, you fuckers are now going to shit off’. See: http://allatsea.co.za/blog/a-glossary-of-military-terminology-and-slang/ for a comprehensive list of SADF army slang. heads is navy slang for the ship’s toilet. All toilets, whether on dry land or at sea, are referred to as the heads.
Table Mountain, 13
Table Mountain is the iconic flat-topped sand-stone mountain overlooking the city of Cape Town in South Africa. In 2011 Table Mountain was named as one of the New 7 Wonders of Nature.
Boyes Drive, 17
Boyes Drive is a scenic drive along the lower slopes of the Muizenberg Mountains overlooking False Bay in Cape Town. It links the suburb of Lakeside with the fishing village of Kalk Bay.
Muizenberg, 26
Muizenberg is a beach-side suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. It is situated in the western corner of False Bay, and the local surf-spot ‘Surfer’s Corner’ is considered to be the birthplace of surfing in South Africa.
Tietiesbaai, 28
Tietiesbaai is situated in the Cape Columbine Nature Reserve at Paternoster on the West Coast. of South Africa. It is approximately 155km from Cape Town.
South Easter, 31
The “Cape Doctor” or south-easter can reach speeds of over 100 kph during the summer months in Cape Town.
Beta Beach, Bakoven, 30 & Camps Bay, 32
Bakoven and Camps Bay are urban beaches loacted on the Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula (Cape Town).
Elands Bay, 33
Elands Bay is a West Coast town located about 200km north of Cape Town. It is a world-renowned left point surf spot.
Tinnitus, 35
Tinnitus - a buzzing, ringing, or whistling sound in one or both ears occurring without an external stimulus.
The Gale /5th December 2013, 59
The 5th of December 2013 marks the death of the South African statesman Nelson Mandela.
Wordless (South African townships, 1990), 66
After national service, conscripts were assigned to Citizen Force or commando units that were liable for periodical call-ups for camps that might have included deployment in the ‘operational areas’ from 1974, or tours of duty in the black townships from 1984.
continued overleaf
[83]
Notes cont. The Casspir is a landmine-protected infantry mobility vehicle that has been in use in South Africa for over 30 years. The Casspir was widely deployed in the townships during the apartheid era and became a symbol of the apartheid regime. The R4 is a 5.56mm assault rifle based on the Israeli Galil ARM assault rifle. It was introduced into service with the South African Defence Force (SADF) in 1980. SITREP - a military abbreviation for a periodic report of the current military situation.
Death of a surfer, 71
Camps Bay bodyboarder David Lilienfeld was attacked by a Great White Shark while surfing Kogel Bay in False Bay on the 19th of April 2012. He died on the scene.
Dust, 79
This poem describes the Kromrivier in the Cederberg; a river that flows from the Cederberg mountain range located approximately 300 km north of Cape Town.
[84]
[85]
Stephen Symons Spioenkop
And in that moment morning hews the incline to a hedge of stone light splintered and still twisted deep into the flesh of this country’s history. Spioenkop
[86]