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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Voortvlugtend, Driving on the N2 with Ghosts in My Car, Die Nagorno-Karabakh-blues, Satelliet, Last Days Of Beautiful, Walk Fast, Whistle, Verkeerdevlei, Limbs Gone Batty, and 5 more.
1. |
January
15:43
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JANUARY
out of the sunshine climb the moths of the night into the ground into the flood into the thorn trees and bracken and bush by the gravel dam the lean-to goat shed and its sisal-poled shantytown sail through the stranded koppies and deeply ploughed ridges and the riches of the veld come in speckled lichen and dark-winged buzzards and the captain leguan calls a silent tongue along the ground for the souls to follow a small light at the bottom of the winding pools the silver line snaking slaking shaking the yellow pollen the exploding cloud the nightmouth open the wind cool and the moths back in.
-----
sitting inside a happy old tired thought
and the cars and buzzing flies
on the wet-lipped mouth and pause
the town a sliced open fruit
droplets slo-mo through the sky
the sky is the sky of the mute
a flock of starlings grow in number
swirl above the caravans and then
someone leans over and says
‘this is the end, this is how the end comes’
------
now you will come around the corner
and your smile will be alive and open
and from your hands will come words
‘shall we touch fingertips?’ I’ll ask
and you’ll say ‘yes, let’s do that’
sun will cut slices of cake
from the world around us
and daily troubles and tax
and Syria and gunmen
politics and hate
will for a moment not be here
there will be nothing
just this
just us here
gathered tonight
----
from inside the dying light
from the ping of the glass
when the shots die down
when the door of a home opens
sunshine and birds
spread across the world
of the hand of a man
and the heart of a woman
and the tongue of a child
and the wild woods will crackle and pop
animals swim underwater
and fly above it and sit atop cliffs
and bark baboons and kudus
and bushbuck and dogs
down to the movement
of the cars and the cities
and the moonlit pipes
of the deepest down dark
of the mine and the murk
the money and the smirk
and the lazy swinging punch
the rubber bullets and armoured cars
the koppies and the knobkieries
the overalls and beanies
the gumboots and torn shirts
the lips and teeth and zol in there
the language the speaker
the listener the word
spit and shine
and toe the line
----
and what we say is not all we are
but billboards, wings and black
the black of the night at our backs
as we turn around the blind corners
and we see laughs, lipstick and hair
but beware:
where the eye combs not
the world is a knot
it’s a puzzle and a nail
a nest of words and hail
and what the eye smooths out
curls up between our shoulders
where a monster is knitted
with no gloves to hold it
it just coals and smoulders
it smokes and foals
like a filly in brine
----
skuins uit die halfuur
strompel ’n soldaat
met ’n been in die mond
op die straathoek staan en kou
kon die minister nie maar net
brode bak en grou
met die hand wuif waar hy wou
en die misrabelheid weg kon jou
soos in Bybelstories nou
in ’n ou geweeklaag
’n ge-arme ek ’n ge-arme jy
die gemene deler die gemene gene
die gemeenskapsaaldaknatmaak
die uniforms en die vlae
die party-t-hemde gespan oor party-mae
in ’n party-straat met ’n party-naam
word die partytjie geteken in ink
en op die stippellyne gelaat
deur die strompelende soldaat
se stomp bloedvoete
getatoe tot die donker
met die eensame gefluit
deur die holte van die been
skoongeblaas van murg
en skoongesuig van wit
----
skuinsgeslaan deur die son
en uitgedraai deur die paaie van die land
verby die doringdraad en die pale
verby die klinkers, die sparre
verby die heinings om die skape
en die bokke en die beeste
en die beste van die verderf
stap hulle met koppe op lywe
en lewens op stokke
en donkies op verslae hoewe
deur die stof en die reën en die wind
na die naderende golf
en die kind
op die heup op die rug op die wa
met die dooie woorde van mossies
opgefrommel in broeksakke
die golf van haas en gryp
die golf van nie haat nie
maar nie liefhê nie
die golf van nie omgee nie
nie omkyk nie
nie opkyk nie
die golf van oormaat
en glans
van goue gans gaarmaak
op gods akker
en gods wagbeurt
waar die drenkelinge
in stadige aksie
uitspoel op die strand
met net ’n hoedjie
in die hand
----
an aeroplane flies over the slow warm night and the bay and the lights a broken black dance of here and not here and I sit and I think of a small house on a mountainside with a fireplace for a heart and a flock of birds of books shear down the slope cutting the time into mahem minutes and osprey seconds and wind-swallow split seconds and feathers and squeaks and the thought rushes across my face and down the lining of the inside of my shadow percolates through the broth and blood around my organs the crow’s nest of sinews and veins around my bones and leaves through a tiny hole at the back of my skull back into the small house into the fire into the chimney out into the kloof in amongst the birds in amongst the books and gone
---
onder die bestek van my gesig
is my skedel ’n fossiel
en die spore van my frons
en die rimpel van my oë
dieselfde as die lyne
wat ons oopkap uit rots
dieselfde splinters bene opgespoor
oopgeboor en afgestof
pas in die dele van my skelet
waar skrapnel en tyd en kanker
oor die eeue my voorskadu
oopgeskiet en hand na mond
aangespoor het om te swoeg
en wakker te slaap
en in die hande te spoeg
en met ’n fyn onfeilbaarheid
’n spies in die huid van ’n dier
te forseer en te draai en te dood
of met hande uitmekaarskeur
en eet of vreet met bloed
wat by die punte van
die elmboë ontmoet
en soos ek hier staan
saampoel soos ’n fyn net
en oor die aarde span
al stywer en trom
met die liggiese wip
van die wiel
van die mensdom
----
and now
when I fall asleep at night
and the sediments of sleep
sift down upon my face
cementing my body to the sheets
and my bones to the mattress
so that i’m there but not here
at the bottom of a river
but afloat in the sand
of an upside down world
the roof of a cave
where ferns and bats
can walk and squawk
or slipped into the hem
of a cloud which is about to
unburden its rain
on a fire in the berg
or
I stand silently
on attention
inside the trunk of a pine
in a forest
submerged by an avalanche
on a planet we’ve never noticed
in the blind spot of our own
I am a small owl
inside an egg
I am a disposable cup
and a nut in the cheek
of a squirrel
inside an elephant
balancing on one leg
in a circus
with no whip
hooray
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2. |
Pay Back The Money
06:20
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PAY BACK THE MONEY
greetings, friends, family, fellow humans
welcome to the parliament of the people
the open-plan world, a sky with no fence all the way to Venus, the open-source transfer of common sense all around our ears and tongues and eyes and minds,
welcome to the give me a hug when I’m feeling bad place
the happy place
the place where it’s ok that if you owe your friend some money
you pay it back when you can, maybe after payday, sure, because here
we pay back the money
I come to you with good news tonight
because as much as our country is broken and divided and limping on last electric legs – we’re whole, we’re one piece from the Cape Flats through the tunnel all across the as yet unfracked Karoo with its starbedonnerde night skies, the waving fields of GM mielies in bloom – GM mielies that feed more of us for the waste of less land and the application of less pesticides than before, you better believe it, fistpump, GM mielies, fistpump – beyond that, beyond the Free State, Joburg’s kaleidoscope of money and mense, the bushveld’s warthog herds with their own little undiscovered curves of ivory all the way to Musina where it’s but a gate and a passport that deliver you over an imaginary line into yes – more of what we call home, more Africa, more unbroken country of our collective skulls, yes, the unbroken country of our collective skulls where we so happily pay back the money
we pay back the money
and because of this, we’re also as united as we’re divided because we share the same blood, air, ground, GM mielies, we lean on one another, we work for one another, we love one another, we rock out to the other’s music, we dress like the other, we mother the other until the other is not other but us, and you, me, jou ma, jou pa, an oke in Japan, another in Guatamala – we’re all Nigerians as far as the aliens are concerned, we’re all French-speaking as far as they know, they think we all like soccer, that we all listen to Kurt Darren! – because we’re just here on earth, together, on a soccer ball in space, a place we love and treasure, a place where we with big smiles on our faces, proudly, pay back the money
and because we have the ability to limp, it means we have the ability to walk, and to heal, and to run on fresh ankles and knees and ligaments, and acknowledge our failures and trump up our triumphs and fix things, and make things better, and switch off more lights because it’s not Eskom we’re helping, it’s not money we’re saving, it’s our children we’re helping, it’s common sense, it’s because many of us have too much stuff – ja, we have too many t-shirts and pairs of shoes and crap – and we can do with less, and when we do with less we end up doing more because with less you have to work harder and think harder and lean on friends and family and help and holler and hug and hope and you know what, we pay back the money, which we do, with smiles on our faces
yes, for all the broken and divided and limping natures of our country we are whole, and united, and running across freshly mown fields, for when there’s the realisation of fragility, of failure, of fucking up, then there’s also the realisation of hope, the knowledge that we can do great things without having to have a great leader at the head of our state because we don’t need that, we can’t bank on that, we actually have very little control over that because the leaders of nations are usually people in it for all the wrong reasons they’re there accidentally, or because they were headboy in school and now want to be headboy forever, or because they fought in a war and won, or because they have all the guns and tanks and bombs, or just because they think it’s a good job with good easy money because let’s face it a lot of it seems flippen easy, and also maybe because the politician thought he or she would look good in a suit or wearing pearls or in an aeroplane or it would be lekker to shop in Washington or London or Beijing and though it’s supposed to be about the people – me, you, jou ma, jou pa – it’s never really about the people except when the newspaper photographers are around, we know this, and we should actually not care, we should look after ourselves, and care for ourselves and love one another, and respect one another and fix our own things and fix our friendships and family life and neighbourhoods and towns and farming districts and drug problems and work, work, work, and love, love, love, and laugh, laugh, laugh and try to pay back our friends when we owe them a little bit of money even if it’s only after payday or when our little ship comes in, just a small ship is enough, but when it does come in, we should remember to pay back the money
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3. |
Ek Skryf Hierdie Vir Jou
08:55
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EK SKRYF HIERDIE VIR JOU
ek skryf hierdie vir jou vanuit die maag van ’n berg, waar ek ingedruk en geduldig lê en wag, ’n onontdekte deel van die Merensky-platinumrif, ek wil aan jou meedeel dat ek ’n tiervis is, en ek swem kalm in die warm waters van die Okavangorivier, verby die sliertwortels van papirusse en my tande blink, ek lê met my oog teen die stof by Oppikoppi, en ek kyk na die verslete, vreugdevolle voete van mense wat by my verbystroom, ek is in die klein, vinnige spasie tussen Paul Hanmer se vinger en die klawer van die klavier net voor hy daaraan raak, ek sit tans met my hande gevou rondom ’n perfekte granaat in die verbode boord van ’n Persiese tiran, ’n duisend jaar gelede, en dis volmaan, ek spoel uit op ’n strand, sonder ’n draad klere, omring deur goue munte en wrakstukke van my karveel, en meeue is gou daar om aan my oë te begin pik, ek is in die kar op die Krugersdorp-pad, en die verkeer is opgehoop, en daar’s net kak op die radio, en my vensterarm is al rooi gebrand, en my sonbril is gekrap, en ek dink aan die slagte wat ons saam dronk was, en die wêreld vir oomblikke kon verstaan, en besluit het dat ons vriende was, en altyd sal wees, en uit mekaar se lewens sou leer hoe om te lewe, ek kyk nou hier na my glimlag in die spieël, en dit is, verbasend genoeg, die glimlag van ’n skoonheidskoningin, en ek besef dat ek nog nie my beenhare geskeer het nie, en geen idee het hoe ek wêreldvrede sou kon bewerkstellig nie, as die wêreld vrede wou hê, ek is ’n hond, ’n ou teef, met hangtiete en ’n padwaardigheidsertifikaat iewers in die ou Wes-Transvaal en ek kyk na die karre en mense om my en ek dink ‘Fok julle almal’, en dan draf ek aan, maar stadig, ek is in ’n skemer kamer in ’n bed met ’n vrou, ek is ’n soldaat, en mortiere reën om my neer en die laaste brief aan my ma gaan saam met my in my hempsak uitbrand, ek het ’n vrou en drie kinders, ek geniet ’n sigaar, ek is ’n Kubaan, ek verkoop grawe, ek soek ’n voetpad en vind dit, en volg dit verby hoë kranse en versteekte fonteine na ’n vingergetrekte sirkel in die sand, waarbinne ek kruisbeen gaan sit en terstonds verander in ’n dassievoël, met klein swart ogies soos papajapitte – as jy kan onthou dat papajas eens pitte gehad het – ek is swart-en-wit en wanneer jy my klaar afgeskil het sit die stof van motvlerke aan jou vingers vas, ek is verheug dat julle almal hier is, ek ken al julle name, wanneer ons hierdie vertrek verlaat vanaand, verlaat ons dit met nuwe name, en die nuwe tuistes wat ons in die nanag gaan bereik, bestaan in die geheue van die mense vir wie ons lief is, en wie lief is vir ons, ons bestaan voort in die gloed van middernagpetrolstasies, ons lê almal stil aan die voet van witgatbome ver hiervandaan, in die diep-Karoo se grouste gleuwe, ons is die vingers van babas wat nooit gebore is nie, ons is ’n oopgevlekte snoek op ’n braai waaroor nou ’n mengsel van botter, appelkooskonfyt en knoffel gesmeer word, ons is mikroskopiese tekens van lewe op die skadukante van swerwende komete, ons is as, en as is ons, ons het geen anker nodig nie, want ons is die see, die riviere wat opdraand loop, die druppel wat terugvloei na die wolk, die woorde uit die sleutelbord geslurp, die sinne van ink in ’n tyd van lekkende Bic-penne aanmekaargestring in ’n ewige verlede tyd van gryp die dag aan, van lig jou snawel na die son, van oog teen die meniskus van rooiwynglas, van drie in die hoekie in beseringstyd, van woeker, van fluit, van flink, van sin, van want – en daar, ver terug in daardie oerverlede sit ons nou onder ’n oorhang waarbo die sterre bruis saam om die gloed van ’n vuur en glimlag.
ons is as, en as is ons, ons het geen anker nodig nie, want ons is die see,
ons lê almal stil aan die voet van witgatbome ver hiervandaan,
ek geniet ’n sigaar, ek is ’n Kubaan, ek verkoop grawe,
ek is ’n Kubaan, en dan draf ek aan
ek is ’n Kubaan, ek verkoop grawe, ek geniet ’n sigaar,
ek soek ’n voetpad en vind dit, en volg dit verby hoë kranse en versteekte fonteine na ’n vingergetrekte sirkel in die sand, waarbinne ek kruisbeen gaan sit en terstonds verander in ’n dassievoël, met klein swart ogies soos papajapitte, ek is swart-en-wit en wanneer jy my klaar afgeskil het sit die stof van motvlerke aan jou vingers vas, ek is verheug dat julle almal hier is, ek ken al julle name, wanneer ons hierdie vertrek verlaat vanaand, verlaat ons dit met nuwe name, en die nuwe tuistes wat ons in die nanag gaan bereik, bestaan in die geheue van die mense vir wie ons lief is, en wie lief is vir ons, ons bestaan voort in die gloed van middernagpetrolstasies, ons lê almal stil aan die voet van witgatbome ver hiervandaan, in die diep-Karoo se grouste gleuwe, ons is die vingers van babas wat nooit gebore is nie, ons is ’n oopgevlekte snoek op ’n braai waaroor nou ’n mengsel van botter, appelkooskonfyt en knoffel gesmeer word, ons is mikroskopiese tekens van lewe op die skadukante van swerwende komete, ons is as, en as is ons, ons het geen anker nodig nie, want ons is die see, die riviere wat opdraand loop, die druppel wat terugvloei na die wolk, die woorde uit die sleutelbord geslurp, aanmekaargestring in ’n ewige verlede tyd van gryp die dag aan, van lig jou snawel na die son, van oog teen die meniskus van rooiwynglas, van drie in die hoekie in beseringstyd, van woeker, van fluit, van flink, van sin, van want – en daar, ver terug in daardie oerverlede sit ons nou onder ’n oorhang waarbo die sterre bruis saam om die gloed van ’n vuur en glimlag.
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4. |
Sit Dit Af
05:59
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SIT DIT AF
is jy ook gatvol vir als wat jou foon jou bied
van hoe dit jou per twiet herwaarts hiet
en verniet gebied, jou gedagtes giet
per Google-georkestreerde order van debiet?
in daai geval, sit daai slimfoon van jou af,
want die glim van daai slimfoon wat vir jou dim maak
is jy ook nou dommer as toe jy jonger was nie,
voller van kommer as toe jy eenvoudig was nie?
en is jy deesdae die verbeeldinglose kwas
wat volgens sagte bevele volg en verf
waar jy eens die kunstenaar was, die individu?
die slimfoon se glim dié maak vir jou dim,
so sit dit af, vriende, kom ons sit daai slimfone van ons af
al is jou vinger op die elektroniese pols van sake
is jy elders ’n skim, selfs ’n morhoon
die slaaf van ’n slanke slimfoon (skerm ongekraak)
jou sprankel verdrink, verstar jou kake
in die geknars van die algoritme
jou droë dopsels oë gerig op die
fantastiese fasade van ’n likeable droom
geketting aan die kletterjoel click-through ads
na aanlynwinkels en Zuckerberg-zones
waar die klank van jou kredietkaart
vir ’n ander ou lyne laat sny en dalk
ook laat droom van ontsnap
van dit alles en vlug
na waar die visarend roep
en soepel vlerkklap
hier in Afrika
ja, sit dit af, sit dit af, want selfs
die president van Amerika
regeer ons uit die palm van sy hand
met die swaai van die towerstaf van sy foon
word kwaad gestook in Damaskus, Pjonjang
en Indonesië, (en selfs hier in Darling) die land van blatjang
die Wildekus van beeste en krewe
en tussen turksvy en coyotegat op die
oewer van die Rio Grande teen
die grens van Meksiko
waar hy mos nou
’n muur wil bou
maar kan jy glo,
dié vent, ene Trump
kan jy afsit met jou duim
net só!
so sit dit af, sit daai slimfoon van jou af,
kom ons sit daai fone af
ja, en die tirannie van
die blokketting Bitcoin
kan jy wegraap met die plant
van rape en radys
heel organies
sommer in die agterplaas
by jou huis
sit dit af, vriende,
en sien die son
daarbuite en in die harte
van jou vriende en jou vrou
jou kinders en jou man
sal jou meer waardeer
wanneer jy weer
weet wat vanaand
te ete is sonder om
gou te gaan soek
na ’n sopresep
op BBC Food
of hoe?
(want is sop dan nie iets wat jy uit jou kop uit behoort te kan maak nie? almal kan sop maak, jy hoef nie jou foon te vra hoe om sop te maak nie, maar tog – daar staan ons en Google ‘hoe maak ’n mens sop?’ jy moet dit uit jou kop uit kan maak – sit af daai slimfone... sit dit af!)
dit is ook onmoontlik om met jou foon
hoe slim of oud, koud of goud,
woorde te kan skryf of te hoor soos hierdie:
silwer in die leivoor
pouveer in die pad
vol sterre en sing
soos spreeus sou
in die sipresse soos nou
val elke vonkel lig
in die lukwartpitswart oë
en:
brons teen die berg
palms teen die bors
die koedoes is op kerk
en die besembosse lui
tot net die suidewind waai
kloof af, (en straaf af, en op met die R27) en koebaai
ja, sit dit af vriende, sit dit af (ons het nie regtig ons fone nodig om te ry tot by Darling nie, maar tog, daar sit jy by die huis en jy maak foon oop en jy sê ‘ek wil ry na Evita se Perron’ en dan druk jy ‘OK, start’ en dan kry jy directions, al was jy al 10 of 20 keer in jou lewe hier in Darling, moet jy nog steeds vir jou foon vra hoe om in Darling uit te kom, dis heeltemal onnodig – ek het dit self gedoen, guilty as charged – almal weet hoe om in Darling uit te kom, jy hoef nie jou foon te vra nie – sit dit af – as jy nou regtig verdwaal vra vir ’n ou langs die pad, draai jou venster af en vra ‘hei, weet jy waar’s die regte pad Darling toe? ek is in Atlantis, ek het verdwaal, is ek diep onder die see?’ ‘Nee, Darling is net in die pad op, ry verby Mamre, jy gaan daar uitkom, jy gaan oraait wees ou maat.’)
so sit daai slimfoon van jou af, maak vir ’n slag weer sop uit jou kop uit. Hei, mis jy jou vriende? Jy hoef nie net hulle fot’s te like op Facebook nie, jy kan hulle ook bel of na hulle huis toe stap en aan die deur klop en sê ‘hei, hier is ek, ek het jou laas gesien by jou troue, ek het nie geweet jou kinders is al so groot nie’ – maar hulle gaan seker besig wees op hulle slimfone, besig om games te speel... sit dit af, vriende, sit dit af
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5. |
Walk Fast, Whistle
05:09
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WALK FAST, WHISTLE
walk fast, whistle
cock your ears and listen
hold your line
hold your own
wind the window down
while you’re driving
tap the beat on the wheel
look up, greet
touch a hand and feel
float a thought
to the rafters
smile at strangers
do not diet
don’t be quiet
eat tomato sauce
do not hold back a tear
drink beer
do not drink and drive
talk less about yourself
talk less
mess up, apologize
eat pie
eat humble pie
open your eyes
look inside your friends
and ask them how they truly are
take a trip round the darkest bends
together, tracking the trail
of the wandering star
to as far as the road goes
or the ship would sail
and the story will then slow down
it will hit a sandbank
and the phosphorescence
in the water will glow
and grow a blanket of silence
in which you can be wrapped
sometimes though be quiet for an hour
sit in the veld and observe
if not ants, then birds
if not birds, then bats
if not bats, then buck
pick up pretty stones
and twisted roots
seed pods and mice skulls
carry them home
arrange them on the window sill
trace their outlines
against the days of your life
have your lemonade, cold
your tea, slowly
your coffee, with a rusk
write with a pen on paper
purchase pencils
send postcards to distant friends
travel alone
travel far
travel to the point
where you can swivel on your heel
and remember where you come from
and who you are
and why you came
phone your parents
phone your siblings
phone your school friends
phone your sick friends
phone your friends with children
sometimes, switch off your phone for a week
do not check email
do not use a computer
sleep for twelve hours
three days in a row
until your dreams return
read a thick book
a 1000-page book
a book with difficult words in it
a book with an open ending
like Roberto Bolaño’s book
walk around the house
in your underpants
or naked
without drawing the curtains
do push-ups, run
when the wind blows strongly
lean into it
and open your arms like an albatross
(and just hang there for a while pretending you don’t live in the suburbs, you don’t owe the bank money, you’re just an albatross somewhere in the Southern Atlantic Ocean, just for a few minutes and then you can come back down and)
burp, fart, shit
pee outside
and especially, next to highways
wipe your bum
with something other than toilet paper
buy the newspaper
even if you don’t read it
support the idea of a poem
write poems, bad or good,
hidden or shown
purchase binoculars, study birds
investigate trees
consider different types of grass
stop by a road-cutting
and look at the layers of rock
picnic, own a thermos
wrap sandwiches in foil
eat peanut butter from the jar
drop it like it’s hot
drink coca cola
when it’s hot
drool on your pillow
dance
laugh
cry
dance
laugh
cry
dance
laugh
cry
dance
laugh
cry
but you know cut all that shit
spend money
donate money
but dislike money
earn money and
look after money
but dislike money
do something you like
if it’s an office job
remember who’s the boss
and who’s in charge
and that you’re the latter
swim in the sea
or swim in a river
or swim in a farm dam
hold your breath for a long time
open your eyes underwater
float on your back
and close your eyes
listen to the sound in your ears
the slow, dark, deathly croak
of your brittle body’s
cooked and cracked
organs and bones
and thne, slowly paddle back
to where you can stand
and look at the person
waiting there
and then walk over
and kiss her
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6. |
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ALL THE LOVES / LAST DAYS OF BEAUTIFUL
all the loves
of the season are here, behold
we have to eat our daily mielies
holding them by our hands
spinning the cob under the tips
of our index fingers
like the world
the watermelon slice of world
the fine dust of the carpenter
settling on the shallow sea
of his sweaty skin
his tender wetsuit
of refined wood
there he is
lost in a forest, the lonely pine
all the loves
of the season are here
and they hold hands
and sit in a park
as children
and levitate
as leaves
some of what will come
will be violent and winter
will slow down
the highveld will smell of
electricity and coal
spikes and cold water spit
and dead dog on the highway
pigeons and cordite and muffin wrappers
petrol and piss and skin
but all the loves
of the season are here
and when spring comes
and the sailboats are hung
in the sky
from them will be shook
fresh beers and party hats
wedding vows and choruses
splits of laughter
and palms slapping
on a swimming pool
and then
all the loves
of the season shall hum
and gather their smiles and then
hold you up and say:
we are all the loves
----
the most sensible thing to do
with all the loves is to
write them out a hundred
thousand times on the inside
of paper-thin sharp
bird skulls and walnut shells
the walls of the ruins of
farmhouses around which
lie scattered shards of pottery
and plates, prickly pears and
dried out pigeon wings
and recite all the names
of all the loves
silently in your sleep
in a sleeping bag under the stars
in a cave where the last coals
dance like the black spots
of a genet or a civet
or a black-footed cat
across your docked hip
and back and neck
and lips mouthing
the last loves
imperceptibly moving leaves
just breathing, just twirling there
on their stems on the branch
on their tree
in its place
around which the last loves
gather in a kind of wild
race a formula one
with no track and no start
no finish and no rules
no winner and no last
just a chair on a porch
empty but warm:
yours
----
all the loves swim
and leave their clothes on the beach
hoist their children to their shoulders
as they walk back to their cars
and call their dogs
all the loves sit
around a table without words
moulding their food with
their tongues into
small enough
balls
the loves under the tree
on the summer lawn
look up
to where the crested barbet’s
swallowed alarm clock
shatters the canopy
and the bark into a gazillion
dots and bytes
all the little loves are
on the wall of the kraal
and their small feet
dangle from their
reverse antelope knees
as they watch
a deft hand digging deep
into a cow to slide
a gasping calf wrapped
in plastic slimo-cellophane
into the sun of life
the weary loves stop
at the top of the hill
and look back to where
more are still pushing
their wheelbarrows full
of water and children
bags of maize flour
sugar and tea and soap
and all around the rutted
dirt ribbons of road
of goats and groves
of banana and fields
of cassava and cashew
nut trees and coconuts
they pause to wipe
the sweat from another hour
and all the loves
gathered around the hole
in the ground have had
already now
the cool of the church
steamed from their suits
and their dresses and their hats
as they return
a hymn to the sky
----
all the loves slowly
set fire to their insides, and their ideas
the bar is a palace
the walls are lined
with the heads and horns
of antelope shot
at daybreak nearby
all the loves twirl
with the pale-winged starlings
around the shepherd’s tree
at the mouth of the kloof
where a traitor was shot
a century ago
all the loves lift stones
they disarm scorpions
with a quick pinch
and eat them
all the loves are going
to town on Friday
to buy a new shoe
to take a pocket
of potatoes
to a grandmother
wearing glasses
made in 1962
all the loves are waiting
to catch the bus back
the bus back with broken suitcases
the bus back with bulging bags
the bus back
to where the backs of friends
are pulled up at the stove
stirring a pot of something
to eat something
with someone
somewhere
all the loves thrill
all the loves can tear us apart
all the loves ride on
all the loves rock and roll
all the loves can live as one
all the loves can tear us apart
all the loves ride on
all the loves rock and roll
all the loves can live as one
because we are all the loves
----
in the last days of beautiful
we lick from one another’s
salty eye pans from which
grassy thin trails lead to
other parts of our faces
where the heavier animals
have walked before
----
the last days of beautiful
have galloped from far away
and now rest by the valley’s rim
lungs quietly working life
back into stretched limbs
to watch as we lock the door
on our most precious things
one last time
----
it’s really just that
we are one another’s
Google Earth and I can zoom in
to where your contours pixelate
and your dreams are to be seen
with afternoon shadows
stretching across a sandy lick
left behind by a now gone river
a thousand years ago
this invisible kolk
where in a flood drowned sheep
will twirl and swirl
a funny dance with old tyres
acacia thorns, dip cans
and you and your loved ones
and summer ceilings
freshly painted gates
and the rich, strong
smell of open earth, and dung, wet
I have dropped into Street View
and I am holding your hand
not that you could get lost
or I could get lost
but because it is the only
way to know
that we are both here
and feeling our way down
a familiar, lived-in
land burning with light
sunlight, fire, street lights
and a re-adjusted north
and telephone pole upon telephone pole
upon telephone pole upon
upon telephone pole upon
upon telephone pole upon
upon telephone pole upon
upon telephone pole upon
‘This Is The Last Days Of Beautiful’
I say and you say ‘Why don’t you then
climb into this sand dune with me?’
so I do, I shut the sand dune behind us
and we pack the word This into a sock-drawer
where it stays with Is and The
and Last and Days are set free through
a small window to fly away
to an Ark of their own and Of
is planted in a pot and watered and
Beautiful is laid out on the table
and lightly dressed with something
and then
then we tuck in
----
(these are the last days of beautiful, and we are in them
but within them, we are all the loves, and that is the nice thing to know
and to remember)
|
||||
7. |
||||
WHEN I’M GONE / WANNEER EK WEG IS
in the corner of my eye
you turn the page of a book
and your eyes follow the words
and soak them up into the corners of your mouth
where the mysterious little waves
lap and swirl
with old thoughtsticks in an eddy
where the foamy memories of long gone
great-great grandparents and their pets – the
cats and dogs and budgies and parrots – still
lick their paws to a silken sheen on a sunny sill
above the sink in the kitchen with the curtains,
you know those curtains I mean, the plastic lacey ones,
and still look at you with take-me-for-a-walk-eyes
let-me-bark-at-the-squirrel-eyes
I-rolled-in-hadeda-poo-and-still-expect-of-you-to-love-me-eyes
feed-me-a-piece-of-biltong-eyes
let-me-be-a-dog-and-lick-you-eyes,
still jump and hang onto the side of a cage
and look into a room, a house, a family’s
possessions and forgotten ghosts,
still repeat words which only sailors use
words a dead aunt used to say
from a discontinued advertisement selling a funeral plan
the ring of a telephone from the late 90s
the doorbell now disconnected to
discourage door-to-door beggars
and you turn the page and touch your hair
and with it the long line of women before you
centuries ago, a couple of thousand years ago
into places we have lost all contact with
places where we would now be strangers
places before surnames and before homes
before villages and streets
even before agriculture
all of those women
who were once birds
and snowflakes
the scented dust in the inner twirl
of the organic watch spring
of a bog fern
up by The-Ridge-Where-The-Goat-Jump-Off
all of those women
who have threaded the yarn through their
soil-hardened fingers as it streamed off the wheel
onto the spool like a warm, milky white gold
as direct link to the land where the sheep graze
and the history that brought them here
the boats, the creaking boats, the shipwrecks
the shipwrecked nation-builders, the founding fathers
and their forlorn mothers
and the offshore, underwater eruptions
which wash up at daybreak
on Runaway Beach
as a grey carpet of pumice
but in actual fact as messengers from
the underworld, the hot world
the lava from the hairline cracks
in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge
which come to say
shhhh
be quiet
shhhh
----
terwyl ek weg is, weet dat die kos anders smaak
dat die geselskap, indien nie heeltemal kleurloos
ontneem is van die vuurballe wat uit jou leeubekkiemond
kan stroom, dat die son bloot ondergaan, en dat
dit ophou om mooi te wees, dat die dae verbygaan
soos wit blokkies op ’n kalender in stede van
leë blikkies op hoekpale flenters geskiet met ’n geweer
dat slaap bloot rus is, in plaas van ineengestrengelde droomtyd
ondergedompel in ’n tipe vleeslike grootdoop
van mensbloed, en tweewees, en tyd
terwyl ek weg is, neem my saam, dra my rond
in jou broeksak, rugsak, en kar-cubbyhole
kougom in mondhoek, Zam-Buc op lippe
en die vinger onder die lyn wat jy lees
word gevolg deur my oog ook, net
’n paar woorde traer en daardie onverwagte
nies, is ek wat nies van die fyn stof
op die blaaie wat jy omblaai
en jou hortende, brandende longe wanneer
jy teen ’n opdraand uitdraf en dan met hande
om die heupe bo staan en asemskep en uitkyk
oor die groen, nat landskap waardeur winde swiep
en die kaart van die plekke waar ons nog moet
saamstap en drink en dans voor jou uitgesprei lê
en stryk dan die kreukels daarvan plat
en laat die son opkom in jou glimlag,
want ek is hier, wanneer ek weg is,
is ek hier
wanneer ek terug is, kan ons soos dolfyne in die lakens baljaar
die laaste lig saamskaar, meng met ’n vag wolk
’n vlak brander, ’n sandbank, wier en bamboes
en uitspoel op die strand met ons koppe in die son
en ons voete in die donker, die een punt nat, die ander pant droog
ons longe gevuur met suurstof maar ons skubbe blink met die boodskappe
van die diepsee, gepoleer deur borrels
en die eenvormige beweging, geswiep van sterte en die gebiep en gepiep en getwiet
van die res van die skool wat soms holderstebolder maal rondom
’n bal sardyne, soms vaartbelyn voortdruk na ’n plek honderd kilometer
hiervandaan, soms, sommer in die nag, sonder rede uit die see spring,
en glimlag vir die sterre, en dan weer terugplas in ’n roerlose
bad waarin die fosfor gloei
wanneer ek terug is, en die skuit omgedop bo die hoogwaterlyn lê,
die spane veilig in die boothuis gepak, die reddingsbaadjie aan
sy haak in die motorhuis hang, die hond gestreel is aan die wange
en snoetmerke op my gesig blink,
of die wieletjietas uitgepak is, en die doeanevry sjokolade uitgedeel,
en die whiskie oopgemaak staan en sooie teug
op die houttafel met die ou mesmerke
kan ons dan op die stoep sit en oor die asemhalende agterplaas uitkyk
na waar die son die papawersade teen ’n lae hoek tref
’n bottergat in ’n sproeierpoeletjie bad op die gras
waar die hond nou rondrol, en ’n molshoop skielik roer
en die buurt om ons brand met die gemeenskap van mense,
braaivleisvure en kinderstemme,
en dan, daar, kan jy my hand vat en my gesig na joune draai
en my soen?
|
||||
8. |
Koedoes In Die Heelal
01:34
|
|||
KOEDOES IN DIE HEELAL
soggens skuif die son ons voete warm
tot in die sy, waar ons strepe hang
ons is bokke, koedoes
in die heelal
uitgesprei oor die koppe, die rante, hange, valleie, klowe, kranskoeltes, knope aalwyn, swart olienskadus
en hierin wentel ons, saam, oor plaasdrade, teen wildheinings af
op soek na oorspringplek, met ou bergpaadjies langs, om besembos en blinkblaar,
oor suurpol en rooigras, verby klipstapel en rotshoop, die planete van
dassies, rooikat, ystervark, vlakhaas, pofadder, bleekvlerkspreeu
en ons kalm oë drink die wip van die uur
aaneengestroom, onafgebroke
nie as tyd nie
maar as leeftyd
by die koel fontein
voed ons die aarde, en die aarde ons
neuse raak aan mekaar en god,
’n skepping, lippe vol intieme
elektrisiteit fotosintetiseer
deur die somer, herfs, winter, lente
ente pyn, seer van hart,
korte duur, elle lang,
tot vul
wat uit
die herd ontsnap
die drade knip
die gewelf ontglip
ek kyk na jou
en jy na my
en ons bene lê die wêreld wit
ons is bokke, koedoes
in die heelal
saans trek die nag ons toe
ons vou ineen en hang
soos vlermuise
in die wind
ons is bokke, koedoes
in die heelal
saans trek die nag ons toe
ons vou ineen en hang
soos vlermuise
in die wind
|
||||
9. |
Eating The Land
51:51
|
|||
EATING THE LAND (THE N1)
(republiek)
in hierie republiek van ons
klou ons snags aan mekaar vas
en hou elke droom by die brug
aan die hand en stap
saam met die nou pad
na die blou lug en
sing die stil gesang
van wintervoëls weg
in hierie republiek van ons
met die donker hart en
swaar gewonde geskiedenis en
bloedspoor deur die wattelwoud
en pyl wat ratel deur die longe en
die honde onder in die kloof
wat spoorkry en vat
en nes uitmekaar pluk
en kis, spyker en hamer
vind die hand van die volk
in hierie republiek van ons
dryf die busse en die karre
vol kinders onderwater
en waai die blaaie van die boeke
verdoof deur die gange
van die skole waar die woorde
op swartborde staan en stol
in hierie republiek van ons
rol die tolbos deur die dorp
met ’n naelstring agterna
en tarentale skreeu en skrou
hou die dag terug
hou die haan plat
hou die stom stil
dek die storm op die tafel
onderhuids of bo-op beens
in die vleis en spier en siel
van die elkeen hier verniel
van die almal hier vermal
van die mal en gek
en doodnormaal
in hierie republiek van ons
is die steen des aanstoots
steeds stadig aan die blom
in die ploeg van die land om
die drom waar die hande
die vuur se verbande
afskil en naderherd
vreet en eet
ieder en elk
sy broer
in hierie republiek van ons
is die laaste kans
die stadig dans
deur die verkeersirkel vleg
van die sterre en maan
met ’n hond onder die arm
deur die smeulende boorde
van die selfmoorde en andermoorde
en moorde wat nie eens
bedoel was
te moor nie
in hierie republiek van ons
die sagte glimlag van die laaste vrou
in die tent van lig
waaruit die poel ’n otter
snoet en duik
en wegdrup
en wink
en weeg
en wik
en wip
en weg
wink en weeg en wik en wip en weg
waar die snoet van die otter wink en wip en wegduik
in hierie republiek van ons, in hierdie republiek
(eating the land)
I roll away from the sea, and the smell of the Cape as the tide at the command of a moon yet to be named pulls me up the N1, past sleeping suburbs and early risers, headlights lashing yellow snakes along the wet road, yet I’m in a dusty dream, kicking my pirogue away from the quay at Mopti, Mali, on the colourful, warm, muddy banks of the Niger River, and I turn it downstream through the smoky Saharan sands towards Timbuktu with my lone passenger, a goat, looking at me with coin-slot black pupils floating in patient yellow orbs. Tonight, we shall read the scrolls together, and the stars.
Sleepwalking, I fill up and buy coffee at the Engen Winelands where I wander the forecourt, like everyone else, just a hungry mouth atop time-fermented organs, watching the low clouds slink away as the sun tries to rise behind the mountains to the east. I remember Mali, it was a long time ago, but I remember handprints on rock walls, the damp darkness inside the Djenne mud mosque, the meal we ate with our hands on the dune. One journey is like the next in the way they loosen us from our skins, sometimes instantaneously the second you step off the plane as if you’re the meat of an avocado scooped from its previously known home. Or slowly, like an orange being squeezed dry until only a semblance of the outside remains while the inside has leaked out of your mouth and nose and ears and eyes and you evaporate – into, for example, the oven-hot, Wolof-speaking landscape of Mali where men, women, children, sheep, camels and Land Cruiser roam and within all this, that Mali, this South Africa, all of the continent and the globe of this earth which was blown from it by a nameless glass-blower, billions of time ago.
I am alone entering the suffocating Huguenot Tunnel where I hold my breath for long minutes – I am in a James Bond film and I must make it through this underwater tunnel and on the other side my PPK must still fire and then I must duck and dodge a bullet and roll away but, as the sun hits the front window from a high angle, there’s none of that, no one-eyed, golden-handed villain, only the tall, skew skyscraper mountains and a change in weather, baboons picking up roadside bits, ticks off the land, tearing along the dotted lines, a stream topped with hundreds of white-sheeted unmade beds flapping along happily under which trout dart from one wet shadow to the next: Du Toit’s Kloof.
Because I am alone my face is not mine, no-one who sees it knows it, and I am as good as a spy, embedded for decades here in the platteland, my stories unfolding on the brittle, fishmoth-travelled pages as the husband of many wives, father of many children, owner of many sins: a man who mows the lawn, one that spits and sleeps in rags under bridges, another whose chin is smooth and eau de cologned. I am air-conditioned, Platinum-carded and manicured but also dirty, diesel-coated and rolled in sand, I am the robber that stole the grapes and the farmer who stole the land and the burner of tyres and the tapper of rubber, I am Belgian and with a whip, I am the teeth sunk into the rubber tree in the Congo, into the rare earth pit held open by the invisible surgical tongs of the AK47’s in the Chinese, Russian, American, Australian and French-sponsored container office blocks beyond the uncoiled barbed wire of the cosy compound where the Wi-Fi helps me to pretend that I’m elsewhere, a friendly neighbour, the life of the party, donating money to the poor.
In the mirror my eyes bounce into the blind spots of the car and on the landscape on all sides flickering its pixels at my brain, its rocks and trees, grass and lichen, houses and roofs, street lamps and cat’s eyes, bridges and pylons, signs and poles, fences and sheds, smoke and dagger – and the second is over and my eyes are back on the road, back on autopilot, back to peripheral vision with my hands here, the vital signs of the car all where they should be, a radio station breaking up and then hissing like water on a hot stove plate as I shimmy into the poort past Worcester, here is a siding called De Wet, there I have bought boxes of peaches, through the narrow, high cleft like the sight of a rifle, through which I’m shot into the hard lines of the Hex River, past De Doorns, up the pass and into the place where the land swirls between one foot in fynbos, another in grape farm and fold mountains, and early onset Karoo koppies, a glance at the Tankwa through a certain gap to the left, onion farms, solar mosaics, the Donkiesrivier, Touws River, Matjiesfontein, Boelhouer and then Laingsburg, where I observe the speed limit, dropping from 120 to 100 to 80 to 60 to a just in case 40 through town past the new chicken place on the left and then I hold my breath again as the car goes underwater, crossing the Buffels River under the 1981 flood-line where, should you stop here at night and unimagine all the air brakes and the hellos of prostitutes and the lingering smell of boerewors, petrol and tardust, you’ll feel the mud-drenched tug of the floodwater and the debris and bodies it carried through here, kolking by the bridge, pulling the walls of mud-plastered houses along, dogs, donkeys, goats, sheep, cattle, dominees, farmers, children, visitors, neighbours: some swallowed all the way down to the silt of the Floriskraal Dam to become fossils a couple of layers up from the Triassic era, when more suitably adapted marsh creatures inhabited the shores of the great inland lake of the Karoo: sheep-sized parrot-beaked tortoises, warthogs with scales, leguans both docile and angry at the rock they had been allocated.
(droomsee)
ver op die droomsee
ontmoet ons in die golwe
met ’n bak varsgesnyde mango
bokkems en melk
lê onder ’n laken
tot die wind bedaar
die blaaie en blaai
die boeke en lees
die verte nader
met ons harte op die dek
waar die meeue daaraan lek
en die boegte fyntjies knaaf
in die wier en mis en nag
wyl ons kerse aansteek en dan
met die hoofgemaal began
en die fosfor en die sterre
uit die ruimte en die spieël
oproep en ratel
klingel en klatel
visweb uitsuig en komeetstert streel
kieu, kop en kosmos-kleinte
oer-atoom en ou peperboom
die speld in die water
die blom in die berg
oer-atoom
en die blom in die berg
(eating the land)
Now the car has settled in and has taken over the controls, and I sit back and ease along between the yellow and the dotted line, the land stretching like wings on either side of the road, lifting up at the tips, the primaries, where the vlakte rolls out to become mountain range and wisp of cloud to the south, where cool ocean air dares to show its face, but not to the north, for beyond that mountain lies more desert, more crows, more prickly pear overgrown sidings, and name boards to towns and farms riddled with rust-eyed bullet-holes through which the wind sometimes sings, to an audience of none, the song of the land touched by humans, once by stone, once by iron and net so gelaat staan.
(die groot verstaan)
net soos die hare op my arm regopstaan
die son en die maan, die groot verstaan
die water uit die poel opgedrink
die voël met die tak rinkink
die duiker in die kloof verdwyn
die oumense in die stede aan’t kwyn
slaan die weerlig die veld aan die brand
en brand die berge die bome tot sand
sodat die verlede se hande oopvou
die son en maan, die groot onthou
die son en maan, die groot onthou
tot ’n beker aan ’n moeë mond
die soldaat se bebloede wond
die graf in die grond ’n reghoek
uit die oond ’n varsgebakte koek
die kombuis is waar die mense huil
terwyl die winde buite huil
hier is die hart vandaan
hier is die groot verstaan
die son en maan, die groot onthou
tot ’n beker aan ’n moeë mond
die soldaat se bebloede wond
die graf in die grond ’n reghoek
uit die oond ’n varsgebakte koek
die kombuis is waar die mense skuil
terwyl die wind buite huil
hier is die hart vandaan
hier is die groot verstaan
die kombuis is waar die mense skuil
terwyl die wind buite huil
hier is die hart vandaan
hier is die groot verstaan
die groot verstaan
(eating the land)
And so I soar on the thermals, the car as the roving eyes of the raptor across the land
of shifting thorns, the gravel upon which sheep subside, single-storey white-walled zinc-roofed buildings, some houses, some sheds, some tiny rooms in which generators used to thrum before Eskom came (the old people still hear them at night), and now also, besides windmills, the only other double-storey structures: cell phone towers, Telkom towers, Eskom pylons walking the land like a chain-gang of robots confirming our reliance on magic channelled from some other place, far from here to where we move, GPS-triangulated over the known map of our own making, visible to aeroplanes above, satellites beyond, and possibly the prying eyes of another civilisation eagerly awaiting our demise.
At Leeu Gamka the sun belts down from above and from behind, from the sides and from straight ahead, and from below, where the tar is hot like the Danakil Depression. Everything is hot, the train tracks, the coins in the till at the Ultra City, the corrugated iron roofs, the eyes of a pale chanting goshawk glow like dots of coal, the cheeks of hitch-hikers hoping on a miracle emit a shimmer of heat so strong it feels like a train of trucks shuddering past. The road, the heat, the landscape – it is relentless, there is no respite, I am being swallowed by a boiling python.
And then I enter Beaufort West, or is this Baghdad? Zombies drop their flattened cardboard box shields and charge as I slow down to stop at a robot, so I put my foot down, swerve to dodge their flailing arms and Molotov cocktails thrown half-heartedly, lethargically, hanging in the air like blurry, badly built suns – but then up ahead a trio of bakkies with guns (I believe they call them technicals in Somalia) mounted on the back appear and I’m trying to change the channel but I’m stuck on CNN or Al-Jazeera or is it a channel showing Mad Max or Starship Troopers or District 9? It’s all of them at once and a mortar misses me narrowly as I pull into the parking lot at the Steers and as I jump from the car and run to the door of the shop the cement bricks behind me are bit into by a rat-tat-tat of machine gun bullets from a rag-tag platoon forted in behind the bins at the western end of the forecourt. But the automatic doors swallow me and I’m safe, and in here the air-con half-works and the fridges are half-full with half-cold Cokes and Energades and I take a naartjie one and start drinking it while I order a burger and medium chips.
Five minutes later I leave the shop and the forecourt seems clear, except for a small man asking me for money and a boy lying on his stomach and face by the side of the building, sleeping, or praying, or crying and I’m in the car and I reverse and join the main street traffic up past the church with its white epaulettes and then I slingshot around the circle at the northern end of Beaufort West and I’m back on the N1, ‘the country of our skulls’, the rear-view mirror soon showing the fading horsemen of the Janjaweed, dropping back like tired ghosts, saving their steeds for another day and another less watchful man.
There’s a turnoff to a place called Nelspoort and I take it because I know though the town is now but forgotten except to train drivers who still pass through here, because a train track cannot be picked up and moved with ease, so their choice in the matter is small, and the people who call it home, who have no choice but to know it too, and the hard way, the way through the bottom of a bottle of beer or cheap wine or vodka or brandy or rum. But there was a time when Nelspoort was significant, when the only people who lived here – for the other inhabitants were animals, dassies and mongooses, lions and springbok, leguans and adders, rain frogs and pipits, hartebeest and martial eagles – would come from far away, they would walk from far away, to come here specifically, you could say in a way it was a pilgrimage, though the concept would’ve made no sense to them, for their god wasn’t a god in the way we know gods to be today, and in fact they didn’t worship a god but, in a way of seeing now – because we have to see from where we are now, because we cannot see the way they saw at all anymore, which is the biggest sadness of them all – they were all gods, and everything they touched were gods, what they ate were made of the fibres, sinews and cells of gods, and when they looked out across the land all they saw were gods: the smallest grains of sand were gods, the scraggiest of bushes were gods, thorns were gods, eland were gods, a lone cloud was a god, a tear was a god.
And so when they came here as pilgrims they didn’t come to worship at the feet of a visiting, distant god, but they came to celebrate their own existence as gods in a country made for gods – not by gods, but made by time and the deft and accidental twists and aerodynamic nudges of evolution and chance, of the dice being shaken and rolled across the land to bounce off koppies and along the slight indentations of the Karoo to come to rest here at this place we now call Nelspoort but which they certainly called something else, something that might have sounded like many rain drops falling on animal tracks in a thick path of dust, or like the sound your teeth makes when you bite into a handful of spekboom leaves or maybe they called this place the name they had for the smell of liver, freshly cut from the carcass of a blesbok, now held aloft in your hand and about to be bitten into.
When those people came to Nelspoort they brought with them their favourite memories which they proceeded to turn into what we call art but which they didn’t call art because art was unnecessary then and they took those memories from their minds and tongues and eyes and carefully chiselled them into the charred black outer layer of the dolerite boulders that litter the koppies and hillsides around Nelspoort. In that way, in our way of seeing, the seasonal gathering at Nelspoort was a kind of Venice Biennale, where around every corner you could see creation at work and so the shiny, almost oily boulders would reveal the giant buffaloes that once roamed here, their horns so wide they would almost not fit on the rock itself, or mysterious centipedes, fat balloon-like eland, or elephant shrews carved out to look like humans in disguise, and the humans themselves: some lone figures carrying bows, others huddled together making a plan, some in formation doing a dance while their shaman spoke his heart out of his mouth in little slices of blood so that the gods he or she knew to be the very ants and flies and antelope and predators of the land could understand him or her better.
I drive through Nelspoort and park the car by the roadside about a kilometre beyond the last house. There is a small gate in the fence here and I walk through it and wait for my eyes to pick out the faint path between the rocks and shrubs and then I follow it to the back of a clutter of rocks. I climb up to the top of these rocks and sit there. I am now at the centre of the universe. In front of me lies a gong rock. You can’t see it if you don’t know what to look for. But I have been here before and someone showed me. I pick up a small rock that fits neatly in my hand. Then I strike the gong rock in one of the faint indentations left there by the people who left this place a hundred, or two hundred years ago, four hundred years ago, to never return. The rock rings with a clear tone, and the veld around me goes silent. I strike another indent on the flat gong rock which is at the height of a keyboard in front of me and again I can feel how everything around me moves closer, paying closer attention. A rock pigeon has diverted course to land ten metres from me, and now cocks its red-ringed eye at me, considering me as an alien maybe, or a lost man from a lost time. Around my feet lizards gather, and the curious triangles of dassie faces appear. At the crest of the ridge to my right the figures of baboons stand up, and they settle down with their elbows on their knees to listen as I play the gong rock.
From where I sit and play, a vista stretches to the horizon. If it is the only thing I ever see in the world it will be fine. Everything that can be seen in the world can be seen right here. As the lonely notes of the gong rock ring through the afternoon air all that hear it is invigorated, succulents fatten their leaves, aloes point their leaves more particularly and the bat-eared fox family that paused five kilometres away find themselves entranced, their ears soaking up the rich fullness of the sound and in their hearts stir a previously stifled sense of purpose and urgency and they start making small howls and pawing the ground and jumping up and down: they have missed the gong rock, and now the gong rock is back, the gong rock is back.
Back in the car I rejoin the N1, coast past Three Sisters and settle in for Richmond, Hanover, Colesberg. The sun is low in the west now and shadows flow across the landscape: the koppies like dark pools from which, in places, flaming tufts of grass, twisted firmaments of ancient dried wood (the paused thoughts of slow-moving creatures, century-spanning plants that can name-drop all the way back to the purest of times, of quaggas, blue buck, trekbokke and beyond even that), rocks that glitter and shimmer like golden motorcycle helmets in a 1970s movie, all jump from as if small fish, then dive deep down into the shade as the sun sets another tick, the light cascading off the horizon behind me – unchecked – off the coasts of the continent and into unmarked seas upon which it dances on the smiling snouts of dolphins, and the shadow of the car, bouncing on its unsure wheels which seem to want to leave its tentative hold on the surface behind to tiptoe unseen into the air, first a foot, then two, then ten, then high enough to float over oncoming traffic – a startled truck driver points wordlessly, to no-one, a Translux driver too, but to a half-blind old man who can’t quite see what he means to be shown – and into the last wash of light which now breaks lightly onto the shore of the oncoming night, here on the footprint and spoor strewn beaches of dusk, where the unused telephone poles, the twigs of the unmade crows’ nests and the limp spaghetti-string wires are the flotsam in the ankle-deep waves of thought as the car joins a small flock of blue crane for a few blissful seconds of perfectly synched, slow beat of wing and soft, steel-grey aerodynamicism before the illusion shudders and stalls as the wheel nuts of all four wheels come undone simultaneously, the engine falls from its block and I tumble down to the now purple warzone of a land below surrounded by different bits of automobile and I crash-land in a trench in the veld just to the left of the road behind a row of tall agave plants settled here half a century ago to curb soil erosion in those heady years just after the wool boom bust and the Karoo was left with magnificent shearing sheds, farmsteads, kraal complexes and grand entrances to farms with names given to them by the new owners of the land who got the distant descendants of the old owners of the land – not that anyone ever thought of owning the land back in the heyday of the gong rock (because what is owning? isn’t everything here? isn’t everything that is known held between the tentatively measuring claws of the praying mantis?) – to work for them by a trick of the pen, a quick draw of the line, a deft tumble of coins and brandy.
Slowly I reassemble the car, and with it the parts of my body, feeling around in the dark, scrambling in the dusty, oily, bloodiness for screws and rivets, nuts and bolts though sometimes only finding sticks and stones, discarded barbed wire bits and rusted, flattened, burnt old tin cans, pieces of bent corrugated metal sheets – what’s left of a long-gone shack maybe, or an itinerant road camp – and shards of bone showing signs of gnawing, handfuls of slippery cartilage and hair, shavings of skin and plump, still warm organ, all mine, all fine, all reassembled and now roaring back up the road with sparks showering off the back wheels, the night dark and welcoming, a living coat of past and present, simultaneously peeling and wrapping itself, threatening to eat into the future with every hungry beat of the heart.
I realise I have lost control. The car and I have been masticated, consumed, crushed, fermented and scatted out as one indistinguishable mass. Armpit and cubbyhole, femur and indicator paddle, rubber mat and big toe, dashboard and throat: the clawless otter has eaten the crab, crushed the oily sweetmeats from its egglike shell and left me – us, this – behind to mark a distant fencepost of its endless galaxy of crab pools, shiny springs where nothing but the earliest of mountain reedbuck or latest of robin ever catches even a glimpse of its thick, silky body wriggling along the kikuyu embankments or disappearing like molten lead in the moonlight held in the meniscus of the pond.
Far below, the Free State flickers on: Gariep, Springfontein, Trompsburg, Reddersburg along the highway, and then to the sides, the scattered shovels full of coal, glowing in the brown, wintry night: Philippolis, Fauresmith, Jagersfontein, Bethulie, Smithfield, until Bloemfontein blooms bright and cheerful in the distance, which bring us to the Highveld, which is a shit place to be in winter. The Highveld is a big road flanked by roads and towns and cities and smoking chimneys and empty grasslands which are always burnt for our pleasure. I’m always in a car hands stuck in a cubby-hole fingers in a tape deck clothes to my seat dust and smoke the endless flavour of winter. There’s frozen dogshit in the suburbs where the mornings start white and frosty and the afternoons end white and crusty with streetlamps and Egoli on M-NET Open Time. I panic when I can’t see the stars I panic when the sun is a central smog and my direction is a stoned pigeon wrapped in a map. There’s tea and milktart from relatives in cages good people who sigh in their homes and lock their toilets and hide their doormats under their keys. In the flat parts of the Free State the weavers flock aimlessly under dimmed lights, build their nests dangling from concrete silos and steel pylons. Even in the marshes the reeds bend and break on their own under a heavy low sky waiting for the slime dam to sweep them into definition. Farming here is an endless wait for December rains an endless locking of gates to keep the cattle in and the locusts out and the violence in the paper. Little kids buy ice-cream and NikNaks from the One Stop and their stuffed cheeks full of sharp teeth clatter and glisten and laugh at roadkill. There are places called Florida and Philadelphia and Virginia in the United States, and Monte Video is the capital of Paraguay or Uruguay so why the fuck do they also exist on the Highveld? The people here are ugly in their cars and pretty in their bars where hands are for counting money, changing gears throwing signs and clenching fists. Life becomes a fiddling for frequencies in between disruptive factories for foreigners and the retracing of daily steps to All Bran Flakes and uncomfortable sex. You’re never on solid ground there are people everywhere digging out gold and hiding places and finding bad lungs and unexpected sinkholes in bathtubs. People think of murder when they eat in restaurants, they consider rape when they go for a jog while Golden Retrievers lounge in Northcliff and think of Alaska. The city is littered with untidy people who look at hands on the corners of tables and buildings with the reflection of a cloud framed by a neon triangle. The open veld is rare and littered with derelict pig farms and soot-filled sunflower fields with only remote aspirations of becoming Floro margarine. The cement is a passive smoker with filters growing on it like disorganised ticks and the red dust mixes with smoke at sunset to become sentimental gravel. I’m never here because I want to I’m a co-pilot, a navigator, a shotgun-sitter measuring the miles between historical sites and toilets for my mom. If you sit still for long enough they’ll steal your kidneys and while a friendly nod can kill you, a playful wink can cost you a weekend. If I stay here for too long I’ll become an active abuser a topflight loser a successful gimmick or a professional skunk with labels and a mean piss. The Highveld is a shit place to be in winter.
We lose altitude and slowly descend, alighting back on the N1 with the touch of barely a feather back on the road, which I now realise could be what tears us apart, and that all to the sides of it lies the black abyss of what once was – that is, if the sun will never rise again, that is, if we are all already dead, that is, if the country of our skull has filled with clear rainwater and is begin held aloft atop an outcrop overlooking the confluence of the Limpopo and the Shashe rivers – for that is where the road leads, through the Verkeerdevlei Plaza and Kroonvaal, Grasmere, Pumulani, Hammanskraal, Pienaarsrivier, Kranskop and Capricorn, through the spinning dervishes of Johannesburg, the meted out mundane of Midrand, the ridgetop strongholds of Pretoria, and all the towns that follow, some more broken than others until nothing remains but a deep, dreamless sleep from which the questions rise like smoke seen from a distance, leaving a homely chimney like birds:
Where am I? What am I? Where am I? What am I? Where am I? What am I? Where am I? What am I? Where am I? What am I? Where am I? What am I?
(En in die skaduwees van kremetartbome, in the shade of a baobab, waar ek vassit aan lemmetjiesdraad of ’n haak-en-steek, deep in an aardvarkhole, sitting somewhere on a comfortable chair, driving at night, brights, dim, brights, dim, and the radio playing, and the radio playing and the news coming and going and the weather forecast and the sports result and something about the rand, and the night on all sides, and the road, the road that keeps going beyond Polokwane, beyond Louis Trichardt, beyond Musina, beyond Beit Bridge, beyond Masvingo, beyond Harare, onwards to Vic Falls, onwards to Lusaka, Kapiri Mposhi, Mkushi, and Mpika, and Mpulungu, and Sumbawanga, and Mbeya, and Matubaruka, down towards the coastal flats to Dar es Salaam, and beyond on a dhow into the blue sea, beyond the furthest wave, towards where the sun rises, and the music and the words and the stories slowly run out and sink down and filter down to the bottom of the sea to the bottom of the sea to the bottom of the sea to the bottom of the sea to the bottom of the sea to the bottom of the sea to the bottom of the sea to the bottom of the sea to the bottom of the sea)
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THE BUCKFEVER UNDERGROUND Cape Town, South Africa
The Buckfever Underground is a South African spoken-word band. They perform poetry in English and Afrikaans with experimental music. Current members Toast Coetzer (vocals), Stephen Timm (drums), Michael Currin (guitar). Founder member: Gilad Hockman. Also: Jon Savage, Righard Kapp. Founded in 1998. On Instagram @thebuckfeverunderground ... more
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