A different time


We invert time
                after love fall
asleep as the muezzin calls
the diligent to daybreak prayers.

Night fails. Dawn comes
                         in strides.
Guinea-fowl skirl and caw
into another day

        from which we turn.
A curtain billows over us,
like a chimney vents
sweat and our sighs to the world.

Wind, candid with light rain,
        falters onto our skins.
Then someone’s 5 p.m. angle-
grinder dredges up our morning.

We straddle time, the bed.
Like starfish, beached
in the sulphur of sunset
                       you said.

February Moon: Cape Town
1993

1.
The heavy heat today.
At night, voices cool down
but my house holds the sun.

On my table, poems
are coasters: whisky rings
blur and blot the pain.

You’ve left. Seared an ocean.
Left for your small hometown
Savannah, Georgia; left me

your one-cup coffee filter
books of poetry, the after-taste
of talk: Ché Guevara, the IMF

how my modernism limits love.

Now I eat from your plate
hold its blue to shore up my day
and rummage for my particulars —

budget, salary, tax form —
in a bin filled with plastic,
ash, mango skin and condoms.

2.
My land’s an expanse of rubble
and slogans, charters, accords.
Handshakes commit chattering guns
to obscenity and soap operas.

Every day, violence kitsches itself
onto front pages while, caught
in the sublime, the stars twinkle
and our minds race to countless edges.

The radicals drive limousines,
are driven in them, and host dinners
to court capital, promising restitution.
But we’ve seen the shark-skin suit

and the flashing smile, as we become
more and yet more, still, a people
of squatters, building zinc
and cardboard hopes over the words

that scratch at our reformed lives:
heroes bought by your country’s dollars,
by gold and dum-dum; heroes leaving
our shacks to rickety revolutions.

3.
We all stumble on favourite poets,
by chance come across their books
scattered in someone’s wake
on worn carpets, or hung from eye-hooks.
And within a week, we make them our own.

4.
I dream in poems,
small, short quatrains.
I dream of waking
and writing them down.

I wake and lose them
like leaving and suicide
like wiping dry
the blade of the knife

5.
At night, bougainvillaea leap at me.
Moon waning fast, there’s no colour.
But I know, by feel and voice, that flower
slashing through a hoped for night out

and caging me between the buck and warp
of language and the real: how yesterday
the moon hung, in a word, hard-boiled
above phone-lines taut as an egg-slicer

6.
We lose again, dusk purling
clouds over Table Mountain;
lose again, though Venus is
twice brighter than ten years ago.

Bam bam bam. LKJ’s bass
pounds anger into the gloom,
clutches the gut. Martin mulls
the cannabis, rolls the bone.

Willie smiles and twitches
to the reggae. Amanda fires
tangerine rind
and Martin lights the joint

inhales, and lifts his thumbs:
Okay. But I, I dissolve outwards,
wander the sky. And wait for you
to come to my ever-hungry land.
__________
Previously appeared in:
Atlanta Review, Spring/ Summer 1999
An earlier version appeared on the UCT Poetry Web,
Part 4 appeared in New Contrast, 21 (2), 1993

Home Again

Through Du Toit’s Kloof Pass I descend
with the first of winter’s mountain air.
Below, the sugary, neon web that’s Paarl.
The night is ice, the car drones beneath my feet;
my feet, like my hands, more blunt than stone.
I descend, to detour through my childhood town.

The sugar crystals grow into streetlights
under which the town now sleeps. Sunday Night.
Along Klein Drakenstein, doors have shut,
to poverty lurking outside, hard, unflinching.
The poor I left ten years ago now poorer.
Small shops’ shelves empty as pews

in hard fluorescent light. The petrol station
boarded up, neon still blazing, burning
away the distance across the street, the years.
These years in which I’m lost, somewhere,
unfolding nappa wallets to taxis in foreign towns;
before, with grubby hands and bitten nails

I pinched for coins from small pockets
and walked. Walked everywhere
while youth raced past in their fathers’ cars.
But I still walked, in a hometown,
believing it kept me close to the earth
and close to people I’ve grown to love

in fiction; in life, grown to disdain. And me nowhere