Читать книгу This Carting Life - Rustum Kozain - Страница 7

Home town, 1992

We drive into the mountains, knots left tied,

not undone in the churns I push back,

folding clouds to the low sky. You, two-month

lover, and I. There are no postcards

among the fynbos. When you leave, I can send

nothing but calendars checked for tear gas,

closed gates, and flags torn from school uniforms

fluttering on fences in their own ways.

The calendars are unmarked but for when

we were kept from the mountains

by the cold stares

of foreign fathers. But I wish to hold

on to the mountains as any child should;

wish to drag them behind us in our

endless reconnoitres as you sweep my palms

for mines, finding only words that take us,

two haggard soldiers, to the scarred rims

of our silence. I wish to show you

where I want to stay, die, and become

the mountains. ‘It’s so much,’ you say,

‘my fathers, yours. Mine ran the land

as hunters, muzzles aiming at trees, folding

back loam. Ploughshares, bullets, all from the same

smithy, the only words. These words still hang

over our bare picnic, in the wind on our skins

up here in the mountains, and your heart

that dreams of rocks. So much that cannot

be undone.’ We love each other for that ache.

*

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.