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]