And then on the horizon
from behind the dune
two jackal buzzards
two parachutes backwards
if you can believe me
thermals taking them
from underneath
southeaster so strong
parachutes floating each
back into the sky
holding them easily
ecstatically –
no poems but of necessity
my friend said
the one I believe
I was once in love with
poems
arising
from need –
who’s to believe him –
who’s to say
who needs to notice this evening creeping
with the spring sun setting
closer and closer
to the south
the angle of the lit dune thicket
the clouds blown backwards
across the window
what’s necessary what we need, you, me
what’s a parachute what’s easy what’s ecstasy –
Strangely
from out of fatigue you come to me
concentrating, consciously coming
out of your skin
like in the middle of the gravel path
snake in the thick of the country –
tired, tatty, this city I visit –
the shit kicked out of it –
coming back along the walls
lined with electric fences
as if I’d come back from the Dead
no way to walk without wariness.
All my old friends getting on
with their own lives
as if they can’t imagine alternatives –
eight people in the whole of Pretoria
come to the reading –
wake to this strange suburb –
plane outside, new leaves blown weirdly like a gum –
so alone in the house who says I can even see –
You lay along the length of your body –
like these Langeberge – lining up along the length of horizon,
ridging behind
the wheat, the oats,
rebuffing unfolding fields –
under the keening trees I stop my car
under the quick wind – quickly :
note within the slope of your thigh
my sigh –
so who is this stranger
small pack on his back
into the open
into the sun
here he comes now
loose legs arms sleeves
rippling along the empty tar
as if everything were open –
shall I call out to him shall I call
to the ploughed stone
the deep running of the nervous oats with the wind –
you unfolded your words
like your shirt at my feet
swept me off with them, taking my words, receiving,
running with them, rippling, like running
beyond body
beyond words
only words
running away from my body
as if you know you have no idea
what this means
as if to say where will it end
my god : you come up
with the right stuff
every time
you come in my dream
I come to you in fact
in a dream
and how I come :
your cock down my throat like a snake
could not have been dreamt
by any adolescent :
old snake of a woman’s
wide open throat
past childbirth past propriety
snake of speech of course
way down the throat to where the breath comes
like bitter truth
coming
like shock perhaps and far past effete healing –
this is not the tongue of split suffering
not the dark night of anything
more like the dark itself opening
nothing to do with obsessing, thinking
I need you I love you I want to fuck you
nothing –
(this is the dream the dream
and you crying
joanie joanie like I am the tenderest)
