A Hundred Silences. Gabeba Baderoon
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his mouth, he lifts the coat from its hanger,
seams pressed but not yet finished
with buttons and hem.
She puts it on, turning
the cloth from two dimensions into three.
Always this taking shape around the body,
this translation again of breath into fit.
To watch my mother as she hurried
out of the house on her way to work, the swish
of her dress in the slipstream of her walk,
was to discover a rhythm too fine to see
in the steps themselves. To grasp it fully,
you had to watch her coat as she left.
5. The mirror in the front room
The mirror in the front room
In the front room above the grate
and the slate mantelpiece stands
the huge, gilt-edged mirror,
one hundred and thirty years old, moved
three times, each time losing something
– the flower at the side, the angel on top –
because the ceiling is lower, the walls closer.
If you stand in front of it, you see
cracks as fine as grey hair. In it, things look
like photographs from the fifties,
the tones softer, browner.
You can see the whole room in it.
Unwatched, the old carpet fades in the corner.
On the sideboard, photographs of different generations,
the same shyness, the same eyes.
6. Devil’ s food
Devil’ s food
to Mai
Pay attention to where you walk
– the filtered light through trees,
the kind of moss underfoot,
the roots of trees, moist and quiet,
where the caps of mushrooms crowd.
Learn which mushrooms are perfect, poisonous,
and which, misshapen, brown, are best of all.
Test the give of the flesh
– too soft means they are bitter and useless for eating.
What’s not for eating haunts them all.
Devil’s food, says my aunt.
Use your hands.
Feel for the spiky underside of the head
and the soft stem, thinner than your finger.
Probe for the base, push aside
the giving moss, reach
right down, learn by touch alone
when to pull, when it will yield
and come up whole.
Brush off dirt.
Do not eat
until they are cooked.
They taste of the soft metals of the earth,
themselves, not themselves,
the presence of older things.
7. two sounds on the edge of hearing
two sounds on the edge of hearing
slight flit and rustle
bats loop away at sunset
and come back
after the mosquitoes
two sounds on the edge of hearing
8. Primal scene
Primal scene
The murmur of my father and mother
in their bedroom down the passage,
her 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
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