A Hundred Silences. Gabeba Baderoon

      Title Page

      GABEBA BADEROON

      A hundred silences

      KWELA BOOKS/SNAILPRESS

      Dedication

      To Rafi

      1. Give

      Give

      Before dawn, low voices briefly loud,

      my father and his friend the ambulance driver,

      his days off always in the middle of the week,

      drive away from the house

      with thick sandwiches and a flask of tea

      and my father’s green and white fishing rod

      whipping the wind behind the ’76 Corolla.

      Camping by the sea,

      we’d see him take his rod further down the beach,

      walk waist-deep into the water, plant

      himself with legs apart in the breakers,

      reach back, cast the line

      baited with chokka, and pull,

      giving then tightening the line, nudging

      its weighted stream of gut to the fish.

      But in this place on the West Coast

      they never disclosed,

      they stand unwatched, out of reach

      of each other’s lines, at their backs

      a fire on the beach not stemming

      the dark but deepening it.

      Often it would come to nothing,

      their planting and pulling,

      but sometimes the leather cups holding

      the ends of their fishing rods strained

      as they bent back against the high howl

      of the reels being run to the limit

      and holding.

      Bowing forward and giving

      and leaning back and pulling,

      their bodies make a slow dance nobody sees.

      And at home the scraping of scales

      from galjoen and yellowtail

      and slitting the silver slick of skin

      to make thick steaks for supper,

      setting aside the keite for breakfast,

      the head for soup and the gills and fat for the cats

      while they tell us how they landed them.

      I wonder about the empty days, more frequent,

      the solitary standing in the dark at the edge

      of something vast, sea and sky,

      throwing a thin line into the give of it

      and waiting, silent and waiting,

      until something pulls

      against your weight.

      2. Learning to play frisbee

      Learning to play frisbee

      In any case I was a child

      who did not look up from books

      and frisbee required

      the full inhabiting of the body.

      But today when you throw

      the circle of yellow plastic

      into the air with the ease of a child,

      something young in me starts

      out of its blocks.

      I watch the spin of the disc

      in the wind, the sly dip

      at the end of your throw,

      the body’s ability to read and run.

      I learn to move backwards to arrive

      beneath the parabola

      and not to close my eyes

      at the last moment of touch.

      Standing, I swing

      my body back, look away

      from the line of the throw, wind

      the arm in a pure arithmetic

      and, at the end, whip the wrist.

      I watch your whole body read

      the arc and the speed that signals

      your readiness like an animal’s

      unafraid alertness,

      your soft hands that do not block

      the curve of the throw

      but complete it.

      3. Old photographs

      Old photographs

      On my desk is a photograph of you

      taken by the woman who loved you then.

      In some photos her shadow falls

      in the foreground. In this one,

      her body is not that far from yours.

      Did you hold your head that way

      because she loved it?

      She is not invisible, not

      my enemy, nor even the past.

      I think I love the things she loved.

      Of all your old photographs, I wanted

      this one for its becoming. I think

      you were starting to turn your head a little,

      your eyes looking slightly to the side.

      Was this the beginning of leaving?

      4. Fit

      Fit

      Dim light of the tailor shop, small bell calling

      him from the back, shelves with their bottles

      of buttons, a thimble, dust and thread

      of cuttings on the floor.

      To make a coat, search

      in all the fabric shops from Wynberg

      to Town for cotton, linen, wool.

      He licks a forefinger to turn a new page

      in the small black book with red binding

      and, holding a thick stub of pencil, measures

      the arm from collarbone to wrist, elbow bent.

      At the waist, two fingers go

      on the inside of the measuring tape

      to allow a give of flesh between

      the measure and the fit.

      He translates the length and hardness

      of the bones, the breath and change

      of the human body

      into the flat numbers of the pattern.

      *

      My father loved to see

      my mother wear the clothes he made for her.

      At the fitting, holding pins at the side