RUSTUM KOZAIN

      This Carting Life

      KWELA BOOKS/SNAILPRESS

      Nog eenmaal wil ek in die skemeraand

      weer op ons dorp en by ons dorpsdam staan,

      weer met my rek óp in die donker skiet,

      en luister, en al word ek seer en dof,

      hoe die klein klippie ver weg in die riet

      uit donker in die donker water plof.

      – N.P. van Wyk Louw, Nuwe verse

      [Once more I’d like to stand at twilight

      in our town and at our town’s dam,

      aim my catapult once more up into the dark,

      and listen, and even as I grow dull and ache,

      how, far away in distant reeds,

      the pebble drops from dark into the darkening water.]

      Home

      February harvest: Boland

      1. The grape picker

      Her calves hard as stumps of vine

      an old woman heaves a basket

      like a hump to her back and hacks

      a pearl of phlegm from her throat.

      Daybreak. She yearns to taste

      that warm and sweet sulphuric wine

      and dreams of empty rows of vine:

      one tot for each tenth load of grapes.

      But the rows hang full and wait.

      One foot in front of another

      she stoops, bends knees and waist.

      Soon, her brown and stick-gnarled arms

      alternate to pluck and toss

      pluck and toss fat grapes

      from vine to back-borne basket:

      her limbs akimbo, like broken swastikas,

      like vine barbing the still, persistent land.

      2. Wine’s estate

      The early sun bloats the long drop to such glut

      odours clamour over the bluebottles’ buzz.

      In the distance, a slit-eyed cock tries to crow

      chokes on a crackling phrase, heaves for air.

      At ten, the sun slows, hangs just there

      like God’s diamond brooch to robes thinned by wear.

      Under her fifth basket of grapes, the woman

      bends so low over shrivelling leaf

      she hears her sweat seep into the ground.

      Thirsty, she lifts some grapes to her mouth

      and feels them burst like a flush of blood

      against her palate

      her blood that’s fed the sand.

      Family portrait

      Family portrait

      Aunt Gwen sways, rocks herself to and fro

      like a baby, chafes her heart on worn linoleum

      in the corner of my ma’s small kitchen

      where one-hinged doors hang limp to the floor.

      She lives there now. Her husband

      imports the latest lover,

      keeps her as his

      arrears for buildings and new cars pile up.

      Brother and cousin Joe have guns

      and make babies with one eye open on the door.

      Old enough to afford them, they now wait

      for a twenty-year-old black onslaught.

      Buckie and Mo are doped again on Mandrax.

      Buckie robbed a bottle store, implicated

      in his friend’s suicide note. He still drives

      the neighbourhood, waving at passers-by.

      Two children strong, Gail and her husband

      still want to finish their studies;

      they mention this all while I

      wipe braaivleis juice from my mouth.

      Sonny’s a school principal carrying joints

      flattened in his file. He spins out to a house

      empty but for fish tanks, dog turds, double mattress

      and a friend’s pregnant wife now his lover.

      Ma says, God, she’s switched off,

      can’t take the strain of everyone’s problems

      as the family close their eyes and stroke

      their lashes according the latest fashion.

      I’ve switched off too, light candles

      and drive whisky and loud music

      into me, dancing with my shadow bent

      against the ceiling of my room.

      Blood thicker than water runs thin

      now, hardly holding us together, all of us

      flung from poverty, slowly making it.

      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.