GABEBA BADEROON

      The

      Dream

      in the

      Next Body

      KWELA BOOKS/SNAILPRESS

      To my mother and father,

      who gave me my love of reading

      True

      To judge if a line is true,

      banish the error of parallax.

      Bring your eye as close as you can

      to the line itself and follow it.

      A master tiler taught me this.

      People wish to walk where he has kneeled

      and smoothed the surface.

      They follow a line to its end

      and smile at its sweet geometry,

      how he has sutured the angles of the room.

      He transports his tools by bicycle –

      a bucket, a long plastic tube he fills with water

      to find a level mark, a cushion on which to kneel,

      a fine cotton cloth to wipe from the tiles the dust

      that colours his lashes at the end of the day.

      He knows how porcelain, terracotta and marble hold

      the eye. He knows the effect of the weight

      of a foot on ceramic. Terracotta’s warm dust cups

      your foot like leather. Porcelain will appear

      untouched all its life and for this reason

      is also used in the mouth.

      To draw a true line on which to lay a tile,

      hold a chalked string fixed

      at one end of a room and whip

      it hard against the cement floor.

      With a blue grid, he shakes out

      the sheets of unordered space, folds

      them into squares and lays them end on end.

      Under his knees, a room will become whole and clear.

      At night, he rides home over ground that rises

      and falls as it never does under his hands.

      Witness

      Mr Dunn arrives early in the white morning

      to clear the driveway of snow.

      He heaves and snarls with the machine

      biting into the mounds, pushing, fighting.

      His truck says Masonry on the side.

      In summer he hauls bricks and rocks and cement.

      When he sees me, Mr Dunn averts

      his eyes, asks if my husband is home.

      I leave them standing

      at the threshold.

      Cops caught me D.U.I.

      Didn’t even have an accident.

      Went through

      that bad patch last year.

      Nothing for 12 years

      and then they catch you.

      He asks for a letter of support,

      a witness to his character.

      He writes down the address,

      the correct way to spell Dunn,

      the judge’s name.

      In his hand the pencil breaks three times.

      My husband keeps his eyes on the words,

      reads them aloud.

      If I can’t do the snow this year

      I’ll get someone to do it at the same price, or

      I’ll make up the difference

      when I get out.

      From the passage, I hear

      what men give each other,

      silence to lean their bodies against.

      Point of View

      In the kitchen she reaches for the nutmeg grater

      and remembers it is in another cupboard,

      another place.

      In the post office she fills in the address

      she has left behind.

      She tears up the form

      and starts again.

      Her mail follows her

      like outstretched hands.

      In the sky on the way home

      a hawk hangs motionless,

      moving, yet still,

      pinning the sky.

      The Dance

      Once in a museum I stood

      at the entrance to a room looking

      at Matisse’s Dance.

      A man walked in front of me,

      stopped.

      He tilted his head, as though

      listening more than seeing

      and, for a moment,

      I saw the dance pass

      through his whole body.

      The Call

      The sound of the phone

      from my flatmate’s room catches

      me on the landing halfway

      down the stairs, my palm on the handle

      not enough to still

      the impetus of the suitcase. It takes

      a bruise on my thigh to stop it.

      From the box of things to give away

      – signs I was once here –

      I grab my phone, plug it in

      in the passage, and sit

      on the stack of phonebooks against the wall.

      Hallo Mama, I answer.

      I am leaving for a new place,

      each further from where I started.

      Across the seven-hour time difference I fear

      I will never see her again.

      I want to say out loud I am losing

      a centre to which I can return,

      but do not.

      She speaks too in a way flattened

      by what is not said, coming only so close

      to the parting between us by telling me

      to leave safely.

      Across the growing distance

      I hear her voice receding from me.

      I make her leave me

      so I can be still.

      Cinnamon

      I fall outside

      the