Earlier, we stand in a graveyard overgrown
with stories dry and heady as fire hazards.
I don’t know what brought us to this hot
steady Paarl air where stories are caked
tracks, where brush lies cracked and clumped
under heavy boots and stone. You, my lover,
and you, my mother, and I. I don’t know.
Maybe to see you, Mother, stretch your legs
over stone-chips and the prickle of burs
blown onto your parents’ grave; to see you
crouch for coolness in the shade of their tombstone;
maybe to hear you tell where they came from,
these grandparents I never knew: Grandma
dead before her title, Grandpa the unseen
Santa Claus who died when I was six.
What cancers ate at them, Mother? Maybe
I wanted you to cry and touch the tombstone;
wanted you to tell me why you long for them,
so I could own that loss and turn it
into loneliness. Or
I wanted you to turn to that stone
and see a shadow does fall there, over
your parents: they can find no peace
under neglected land. No peace
even in each other, because I want them
to know how this country still crawls
with cancers I somehow hope ate at them.
Postmortem tragedies I bring with me
to this waste where people pay
respect to their humiliated dead
in a cemetery heavy with Boland stone.
I, aware of your age every six months’
visit to you, Mother, stand with one foot
on the rim of the grave. Like a pioneer.
But you call me your prodigal son.
I wait for the moments air thickens
with melodramatic words
and wish for you just to cry; and hide
that wish by pitching pebbles at broken jars
filled every Christmas with hydrangea
by you, I suspect, and now blurred brown
like the windscreens of old, abandoned cars.
We pull some dry weeds from the stones
and shake the dust behind us, brittle earth
dropped along the narrow rows: what we wish
were gestures of respect but, white-hot like
February, the history in even our own
loss. Today’s sun still hardens
the labourers’ blood to vineyard knots
and their eyes like grapes, bloodshot universes.
What did your parents muse as the fruit
exploded against their palates, Mother?
On the cool porch, did they peel grapes
and remark the veins palming off onto their skins?
Yes, our stories fly like sparks from spades
yet ache as a gravedigger’s hobble home.
But your tears, Mother, would not come before
a stranger, only a longing. She carries
her own graves and knows the choking down
of tears; your son’s lover whose father died
kissing colonial loam in Georgia, USA,
hunting with his heart racing on cocaine.
I turn from you both to that fish gnawing
in me: solitude. And my silence.
I am dying too, perhaps come to say
goodbye to these people I never knew.
These losses that never belonged to us
nor the gravediggers. We, Mother, will
remain ants in dry colonies, feeding on grass
in stony graveyards, generations on.
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.
Leaving
You brought me mangoes, overripe
with a fizz in their yellow flesh:
the tang of home-made ginger beer –
my childhood – you took from your bag,
opening your palms to sunset.
*
The day breaks. We move into
each other, huddle in every known
hollow, and make love one more time.
Then we drink the last of the wine,
our favourite, for breakfast …
Afterwards, I look at your blood
pearling small berries in my hair
drying on my thigh in patches
darker than my skin: like wine
this blood that numbs the cut
of our parting.
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 home town
Savannah, Georgia; left me
your one-cup coffee filter,
books of poetry, the