soft, private laugh.
9. How not to stop
How not to stop
Pa came to collect us from school,
the stern drive home.
Pa sat at the head of the table,
not talking at supper.
Pa stood in the driveway with his back to us,
throwing seed into the wind
with quick slings of the hand, drawing
the pigeons as though he’d called them.
Pa carved his own domino set;
on weekend games sly as chess, slapping
the final piece on the wooden table.
Pa drove us home past the house he built,
from which his family was removed in ’68,
never looking again in its direction.
Pa bought his leaf tea and hard cheddar
from Queen Bess supermarket,
down the street from their old house.
Pa rehearsed how not to stop, not to get out
and walk to the front door he made.
10. Filming swans
Filming swans
You wade barefoot into the water at sunset
while the swans dip their necks
like crochet hooks into the sea.
The clouds turn red
and this is too beautiful to write
but it is the order of things.
The line of wet around the thighs of your jeans,
the tide and wind in opposite directions,
cross-stitching the sea.
The swallows darting after mosquitoes,
gulls flying straight above the swans,
the sun’s slow dipping,
each in their circle, and you and I watching.
11. Landscape is passing into language
Landscape is passing into language
My grandfather was the first
to build his house on this vlei,
the call of frogs measuring the evening.
This was the wild around which
my grandfather made a fence,
my grandmother a garden.
Everything from the kitchen went
into the compost
except lemons and oranges,
the soil already too acid
for roses to grow.
Now the sounds are gone
and the landscape is passing into language.
A cement canal directs the river.
Only the high school carries the name Groenvlei.
Few people remember the sounds of night
as frogs and silence.
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