To Breyten Breytenbach

The hundred negations
and the four propositions
gone, wordless,
black and white distinctly clear,
determining absolute and relative.
 Zhaojue of Donglin

In 1989 I promised
to buy you shoes
But I forgot, and lost your address.
The Book of Serenity says
"The monk related this to the Great Master
 — Get some money for shoes!"
Please accept this poem for your feet.

i
Breytie,
do you know that your books
are bullets that fly into our hearts
and into the hearts of our fathers
with the speed of white doves,

that all your pages have
slipped from the briefcase
of an old man
crossing the Seine
and the torrents of the air of now
carry them up into the bird high sky
over the tumbling water of the world
to us in Afrika?

that your words are
old leaves blown
on the pain-howling Afrikan wind,
in the emptiness which is full of the world
along the brain-wrinkled road of  words
which webs that void?

ii

Breytie,
how deep can we know
how Ingrid gave herself
into the real wet water of the sea
and became a poem
of dependent arising?

how Uys dwindled to death
and how Eulalia sang at the funeral
and people read poems instead of the Bible
and threw flowers and sand
onto the little box full of Uys
and lots of people cried and it was as if we'd buried Literature?

and how Jack bled to death
in Lister Hospital,
while the spring pushed
green things through the May loam
and not even one person
from South Africa
    was there?


iii

I walked on Clifton Beach
and met Albie, and we talked
overloomed by the raked amphitheater of flats,
(a million bucks a room.)

The drowning kelp waved wet dark hands.

He spoke of building a new country
but I saw you
in memory and in old pictures,
handsome young beatnik
lounging his lean tan, grinning his grin,
(with André and Uys and Ingrid and Jack
and Jan and Marjorie and Bonnie and...
wie die fok wiet wie
of gee 'n fok om)

but I couldn't hear your words
over the wild waves and the shouts
of the volleyball yuppies.

iv

When do the Sestigers turn sixty,
Breytie,
en hoe garrit merrie struggle?
Do you still sit in
zazen samadhi
liberating all sentient beings
with the silent space between the in breath
and the out breath?

And do you know that only last year
Steve Allen Tenryu Sensei,
Soto Zen teacher,
(the dharma successor of
Issan Roshi, of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi,
all the way back to Dogen Zenji,
to Daruma and to the Blessed One
holding up
a single flower)
was marooned
for months
among jacarandas and burglar alarms
in the Jo'burg northern 'burbs
until the contradictions split
and spun him back past ancient China
over the Pacific,
gone into the great blue,
    gone beyond     swaha      .

v

Breytie,
what new words are you sharpening,
an old lag
grinding the edge of a spoon?

Where are the koans
of our liberation?

Breyten, who will hold up a single flower
for Afrika?