Читать книгу Groundwork - Rustum Kozain - Страница 8
Storytelling
ОглавлениеSpeech is irreversible: a word cannot be retracted,
except precisely by saying that one retracts it.
– Roland Barthes, ‘Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers’
In indecision we drive a block,
then stop at the end of my cul-de-sac
to look at passing cars, graffito tags
on vibracrete, and curious neighbours.
The sun draws water, a seagull
flies its sorties looking to scavenge,
a skittish lemoenduif
launches in fright from a garden wall.
We try again with logic to loosen
a knot, our complication: you
will stay with your lover;
I will return to waiting
for that empty click of the snug fit
and the faculty of abstract nouns –
love, death, God. And time
that will not freeze. I speak as if
I can speak, presume, and speak for you.
You flash with anger. Like a child
I wish I could reel back time,
turn it all back by the one click
needed to return words to inchoate limbo;
to watch again curious neighbours;
to watch again a skittish dove
launch in fright from its garden wall;
to look again at you in sunlight;
or regard our complication, this complication
we call our bodies that we’ve flung
into the same orbit, one, two, several times.
Nothing can be more complicated
than this. Or more simple. Nothing
is more simple than the spangle
of two bodies hanging in orbit, in sunlight.
But no. My words now float
somewhere in suspension,
unthought colloids
troubling the last sunlight behind you,
the bright frame of the car window
darkening; you, cross-legged
in the driver’s seat. And cloud
as the day fails and dusk deepens
to purple, then prussian. The roads
sudden trails of light and busy
with weekenders, cars filled
with youth who still roar from windows
in their agony of looking for trouble.
The roads and the world and all that backfires
counted and catalogued
in my book of the dead . . . I tell you
of a moment’s suspension, the dark
strong grip of my father’s hand
as my own fails on a mossy ledge –
a child for a moment hanging free
and who sees in his father’s eyes
something beyond the human:
it is this look that saves him,
something in the father’s eyes
that softens from surprise and anger;
and framed by the coal-dark face
against grey winter cloud.
The father caught finally
recognising his role.
But that is one moment, one click
and the years will darken
like they do between father and child.
You tell me of your own father
eaten by the age-old cancer
of this land, running
from black vandals into the past
and finding himself drawn life-large
in the grudging cross hairs of white vandals;
of brothers like eels slipping
from nest to nest, their father’s sons.
And your grandfather, the first man
you loved; his agony
that could do nothing but follow
its male expression
in the predictable fist, like my brother;
your grandfather who taught you
how to measure out beer in a moving car
while he watched the road for cops.
Man and granddaughter you hold
to me, palms opening on what
I imagine your own
brief, bright kingdom.
Then, an expletive of delight
as you jackknife into that memory,
come upright again.
So night falls, you laughing,
cross-legged in the driver’s seat,
and dipping in and out of the years,
reordering time until, unknown
to you, a man’s eyes soften in your own
and you too are a child again.