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      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.

      A different time

      We invert time

      after love fall

      asleep as the muezzin calls

      the diligent to daybreak prayers.

      Night fails. Dawn comes

      in strides.

      Guinea fowl skirl and caw

      into another day

      from which we turn.

      A curtain billows over us,

      like a chimney vents

      sweat and our sighs to the world.

      Wind, candid with light rain,

      falters onto our skins.

      Then someone’s 5 p.m. angle-

      grinder dredges up our morning.

      We straddle time, the bed.

      Like starfish, beached

      in the sulphur of sunset,

      you said.

      Leaving

      You brought me mangoes, overripe

      with a fizz in their yellow flesh:

      the tang of home-made ginger beer –

      my childhood – you took from your bag,

      opening your palms to sunset.

      *

      The day breaks. We move into

      each other, huddle in every known

      hollow, and make love one more time.

      Then we drink the last of the wine,

      our favourite, for breakfast …

      Afterwards, I look at your blood

      pearling small berries in my hair

      drying on my thigh in patches

      darker than my skin: like wine

      this blood that numbs the cut

      of our parting.

      February moon: Cape Town

      (1993)

      1.

      The heavy heat today.

      At night, voices cool down

      but my house holds the sun.

      On my table, poems

      are coasters: whisky rings

      blur and blot the pain.

      You’ve left. Seared an ocean.

      Left for your small home town

      Savannah, Georgia; left me

      your one-cup coffee filter,

      books of poetry, the

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