Rustum Kozain

      Groundwork

      Kwela Books/Snailpress

      for Hetta

      Crouching

      deep in our jagged-dagger dreaming,

      we find a thick-cloaked skeleton

      of the sunrises that were never to be,

      whose impatient roar

      we must now explain.

      – Khulile Nxumalo, ‘The Great Discount’

      Regret

      I am regret, that slow vulture

      that comes too late,

      that skirts the congregation,

      the carcass well past use,

      a wrong choice long forgotten

      that passes now

      as abstract of history,

      malleable to anyone’s interest, or mine,

      picked at, turned over and over,

      until its shrivelled tendons –

      dry as bone –

      turn white, then fine as ash

      soon taken by the wind.

      That regret, the slow vulture

      that came too late,

      that must itself die

      but lives as shadow,

      a shade that flaps

      inside the head’s chambers

      where I leave the unsaid unsaid,

      conjuring instead

      the absent word

      into that old, old flinch.

      I am that regret.

      This is the sea

      After a photograph by Victor Dlamini

      There is that sea, deep sometimes

      as the heart at dusk,

      the shine on its face soon to fade.

      There is that caravel drifting in

      and all it brings: a load of good

      and the bad unreckoned by the quartermaster.

      The homing birds that come or go.

      The sun that’s set,

      now only a shade smudged by fog.

      From empty rooms, frosting windows,

      no one saw

      its dying spectacle.

      There is something of this sea –

      its cold and darkening deep –

      in the human heart, in me,

      that lies unfathomed,

      beyond all sounding,

      that does not know its own dark treachery.

      Storytelling

      Speech 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