This Carting Life. Rustum Kozain

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      *

      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 СКАЧАТЬ