Читать книгу This Carting Life - Rustum Kozain - Страница 10

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 aftertaste

of talk: Che 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 sharkskin 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 dumdum; 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 eyehooks.

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.