HET TOE TE PASSEN SYSTEEM VOOR DE FUNDEERING WORDT IN DE EERSTE PLAATS BEPAALD IN VERBAND MET DEN UITSLAG VAN HET GRONDONDERZOEK. (1)

[for claire]

she hasn't asked for easy anchors, pins
dropped from the gunwales of her womb to grasp
homesoil, its thyme- and tidemarks on her shins,
the staple's quick conjunction with the hasp.

she charts her course by no-one's reassuring
and when she docks she'll be herself her mooring.

081209: stellenbosch

these oaks were never sacred. and the young
summer legs of women, and their com-
and elsewise pliant berries, always hung
beyond the grasp of tantalus... and from

these mountains' clefts, of course, there never sprung
the stream which dulls the blade and whets the tongue.

081106

her halfvoice calls. the dissonance of certain
ears is tuned to just such ciphers: howl!
and, howling still, bring down (arse-first) your curtain...
assimilate, for fairness's sake, the foul.

GET BEHIND THE MULE

pin your ear to the wisdom post
pin your eye to the line
never let the weeds get higher than the garden
always keep a sapphire in your mind
always keep a diamond in your mind

[tom waits, "get behind the mule"
from "mule variations", 1999]

TWO LA CHAIMS FOR A SODDEN EID

1.
the holy drinker cracks his third for auld
lang syne, and crackling for his rosh hashanah.

2.
let boland raingods piss on this his cold
and unmooned mecca, let medina call.
he'll slit his styx-dipped tendons just to fall
on trojan soil: tonight he is no runner.

acrostic exercise 2.5.6: rachel, fifteen

risk every notion which your catalogue
accumulates: allow fit lambs their legs.
contest the unexamined truth, first dog
his heels who claims your bent knee, or who begs…

endure the small weight of an empty sky.
live this your life, with your own heart comply.

HAIKU FOR HILTON

this morning i woke
the red moon was slightly full
going, i will stay

TENDERFOOL

[for claire]

wise women shrink back meekly when the bill
presented them exceeds their honour's scope.
tender, fool, your coin (untenable):
the indefatigable curse of hope.

T MINUS FOUR

the first glint, always, is alluvial.
the camera pans his rivered bed, it gleams
the fool's gleam... mahmet's mountain moves: he will
be driving piles into the darker seams.

UNKNOXING

none have i corrupted, none defrauded;
merchandise have i not made. i've spurned,
to glimmer in his heaven, all things sordid
lest (his saints forbid!) i should have burned.

THE GREY AND DAY-LONG MYTH OF MORNING

the grey and day-long myth of morning, keeping
faith with every other vague prognosis,
suppresses thought and elevates the sleeping:
a godless, sterile, clean apotheosis.

acrostic exercise 2t.5/5/2.3: chloe rose, thirteen

clocks and calendars - machines which capture
hours, and cages for our bird-free days -
let these slip by

(overlook, in their precision's rapture):
every unguessed laugh, spontaneous phrase,
resistant cry...

once you've found your own path and you've mapped your
self's course, freed from time's and custom's ways,
expect to fly...

COGITO, ERGO ABSUM

he is the exile-king of undefined
space. undisputed sovereign of the pith,
he abdicates the fruit and spurns the rind,
this fact-shy felon, master of the myth.

WHEN I CONSIDER

the clarity he woke to spans the west,
a low midmorning cloud obscures the bay
uncommonly, and threatens to ingest
his light. he sees he'll labour through this day.

THOUGHTHAWK

[for claire]

she's learned the winds in order to betray
the winds. today she drifts less frugally,
this unknoxed, disencalvined, no-god's-prey
whose spirals widen centrifugally...

AND SO BEGAN

and so began the rest of his life. here was the coffee-shop table, wristwatch, two measured spoons of sugar and-a-bit-for-the-spirits, broadsheet crossword with the old unsolved seventeen blank blocks: the appurtenances of an older man... breakfast in observatory. four-seater, void of finger-wagging gods, un-get-thee-hence-boyed, small beneath my sight, and a slice of urban roadway which you know begins dead and ends dead and entertains angels between with the old the ancient threats and the uncommon blessings and so began the next of his life observing angels and no angels and the shit of observatory dogs softly softly moleculing away down black sidewalks westward blackriverwards under april showers sooted black to the looned river the full-mooned the ultimate dumb bay drubbed guguletu-sooty-black… newly-coated saint-patron of the peri-urban slice through which pass but once the no-good do-good any-good-therefore-that-i-can-do prophets of prosperity and indolence, the negligéed and the negligent, weird bearded queer seared holed-soled scrabblers for the colonel's secret wingspan's radius the sacred ulna the four-leafed unbroken breastbone of the groundbound trill-streeted orthogonal each-man-in-the-cell-of-himself free range fowl among eagles wheezing stealth-machines through blistered stratospheres… get thee hence, boy, and snag thou eagles for thy trophy-room. snare thou eagles and angels and fairies and tooth-winged mice for thy specimen-cabinet and all manner of wingèd thing and every any beautiful beast hovering sootily over the dark hearth of this your day. be thou. be thou the air about them. be thou, cloaked in its smoggy lining's stealth, the hound of these heavens, sound thou the horn of the heavens' beasts' hound, the leavened breast's unbroken groundbound horn's sound… and so was a beginning, newly-cloaked in the forbidden alternative, newly-armed... in your left hand a neither, in your right the nor… don thou the eagle's harness, boy, and feather your fingers into the tree-rat's sign. resist, new-plumed, the cigaretting of the sun and the winestaining sea.

TOO LATE

and will he buy her urbane optimisms
while the street sells uncut uncouth hope?
has he not traversed the real schisms:
breast and bottle, crow and phalarope?...

ii

one garden for strong men
or two pretty thursdays free
to be remote...

i

civil days,
unfurnished or not:
long july entertainment
from kitchen to bachelor bed

308

three hundred and eight words for the son of thunder. and when, upon st catherine's heath, do we dare meet again? on anne's, or emily's, or fleance's waxwinged, charlotte's harried, web?... but wait! flies lindbergh through the eastering sun, or snag his healing righteous wings on crosswinds breathed by mountains in the night?... yes, wait, for eight-and-hundreds-three of words do no da vinci make. nor he, unmade, his ornithopter cause to sail black-rigged, cliff-clear, heath-hovering through a kittyhawk dawn bronze-fleeced and dry while roundabout-and-not-a-drop-to-drink affianceds fly and barrel-rolling banquo's boldly bank… hail to thee, and every glamorous cloudburst be upon your unumbrellaed cinderellaed jack-o-lantern. damned be him and damned be he: may sons of thunder blessèd be? accused, arraigned, condemned those are who spurn the rock to kiss the star and hail and hail and hail to thee, appropriating destiny. in thunder, lightning, reign you still, pandemonic gristle-mill… but, barber-basined knight erroneous, keep the vigil, burn your books: don quixotic cardbox vestments against these post-socratic crooks… and reign and reign and reign thou meekly ever, sweet heir of dulcinean weather…

SO THIS IS WHERE THEY ROOST?

so this is where they roost? between the pages
of our m'aidezs and our cold july,
in the unyoung plumage of their ungreyed ages:
anni nostri sapientiae.

HER RED-FLUSHED FLIGHT

[for isebeau, 17 june 08]

no god distributes party favours at
her thirtysomethingth, poets only write
their frailties. all there is is chance, and that
endows the lizard with the knack of flight.

ALLE GODEN ZIJN MIJN BONDGENOTEN

another cannon-cart, another dirge:
jij weet misschien niet eens ik zing voor jou.
another vincent fallen at the verge
of daylight. let the paparazzi know

but keep unlit, until we've rid the rye-
stalks of our stalker (one more thaler tagged
for one more dismal day), the salesman's eye...
give theo what is his. this body's bagged.

AND FROM THE WEST

the weather and your plane are coming in:
the coucal murmurs of your e.t.a.
at ten to six. the breaking of my drought
is fifteen minutes and two k's away.

UNDERFOOTING LEYTONSTONE

[for anna]

she overshoots victoria and misses
her hotel, takes fright at joburg dangers
in the ochre streets of leytonstone.

this london's midnight ebb-tide strands her (this is
not quite kansas): seven million strangers
here, and she is perfectly alone.

exercise 2.5.6: mirrorman

[for francois wherever he is,
the original mirrorman]

this silvering of beards, these graded, guilt-edged
archaeologies of self, re-readings
of our texts of love and vague displeasure:

the mirrored man, confronted with his silt-dredged
simulacrum, shrugs, the sins conceding
of which he alone can be the measure.

THREE IMPOSSIBLE TRUTHS

[for francois]

a body is a flower
but for the looking alone
another man's table
another man's vase

a word is a fish
and the weave of one man's basket
leaves another's gills gasping
another's tail flapping in the spring sunlight

a thought is a hound
and its soft mouth poaches, for trophies,
another man's game
another man's meat

[previously published in the journal SHARP!, port elizabeth, 2005]

MY LOVE IS TRYING

[for francois]

my love is trying
to keep up with you
four minutes
and two
seconds

ago i thought
i had you...

these are the days
of the toothed mango-eaters
of bronze busts
at silver portsides
and egrets
oracling among
the dew-heavy figs

(steak steaming fresh
off the golden calf)

and my love is testing
the solid waters
of your long and arctic isle

COMING HOME (for jpb)

no matter that our journeys' varied routes
and times diverge: we both are coming home.
he'll feast his friends today on his pen's fruits
and, in my absence, he'll not be alone.

exercise 2.5.6: anna

she'll be presenting for their wry approval
(who built camps too) her post-apartheid pass.
they'll let her through, impose no forced removal,
to fill with boland wine the london glass...

and here i wake like lennon, twice alone:
this bird, already distant, now has flown.

HEDGEWOOD

this hedge i raise against my fellows
and i tend it.
this palisade against my friends
and (where it fails) i mend it.

THE HOURGLASS OF GEOLOGY, LIKE THE LINE OF SIGHT

our recollections' veering from the plane
has made an acrobat of gaia. i don
yellow feet and grey my shoulders, feign
a gull's commiseration with poseidon.

LATE DOG, GOD, ET AL.

he grasps too late that he's been here before:
he hits the closing chord two bars too soon.
her pistons strike and he lags in the bore,
his vines shoot berries at a winter moon...

NIGHTHYMN

between the night-him and the morning's them
lies hard terrain. his comrades haul him through
unmoralled borderlands: a 2am
democracy must have its heroes too.

exercise 2t.4/1.3: elegaic

take this burning filament
and douse it,
the apparati deconstruct
which house it.
strip of fire the working wick
and douse it.
nor try to rouse it.

HE IS A LION OF THE SUBURBS

he is a lion of the suburbs,
a rider of the tigers
of the picketed night.
he is the moon's glint
and noonglare
on sleepered iron,
softshod slinker
through his makeshift marrakesh.

exercise 2.5.4: starling

you starled and then you lawnded. i breathed smoke
and, while you floraged, drained my coffee-cup.
you startled then and, fleeing, rooted up
the quiet thing you'd come here to evoke.

[subsequently published in The South African Literary Journal, NEW CONTRAST 142, june 2008]

IMPROMPTU THURSDAY-NIGHT RITUAL (for jpb)

i'll trace a bone-dry circle in this sky
and light a smoke, invoking (inter alia)
old agni, thanatos and jove, then i
will ask you to my little saturnalia...

NOTE TO SELF (heri, hodie et cras)

last-borne flotsam on the evening's tide,
what sly nigerian or cardboard greek
will speak the silvered word which will provide
the crass tomorrow you so shun, yet seek?

LATE QUATRAIN FOR ZOE

while sleeps the safe world, he who taunts the fates,
his conscience and the gods walks soft among
the moon-night's deep-delved evils, and equates
each moment with a new song to be sung.