A Hundred Silences. Gabeba Baderoon

his mouth, he lifts the coat from its hanger,

      seams pressed but not yet finished

      with buttons and hem.

      She puts it on, turning

      the cloth from two dimensions into three.

      Always this taking shape around the body,

      this translation again of breath into fit.

      To watch my mother as she hurried

      out of the house on her way to work, the swish

      of her dress in the slipstream of her walk,

      was to discover a rhythm too fine to see

      in the steps themselves. To grasp it fully,

      you had to watch her coat as she left.

      5. The mirror in the front room

      The mirror in the front room

      In the front room above the grate

      and the slate mantelpiece stands

      the huge, gilt-edged mirror,

      one hundred and thirty years old, moved

      three times, each time losing something

      – the flower at the side, the angel on top –

      because the ceiling is lower, the walls closer.

      If you stand in front of it, you see

      cracks as fine as grey hair. In it, things look

      like photographs from the fifties,

      the tones softer, browner.

      You can see the whole room in it.

      Unwatched, the old carpet fades in the corner.

      On the sideboard, photographs of different generations,

      the same shyness, the same eyes.

      6. Devil’ s food

      Devil’ s food

      to Mai

      Pay attention to where you walk

      – the filtered light through trees,

      the kind of moss underfoot,

      the roots of trees, moist and quiet,

      where the caps of mushrooms crowd.

      Learn which mushrooms are perfect, poisonous,

      and which, misshapen, brown, are best of all.

      Test the give of the flesh

      – too soft means they are bitter and useless for eating.

      What’s not for eating haunts them all.

      Devil’s food, says my aunt.

      Use your hands.

      Feel for the spiky underside of the head

      and the soft stem, thinner than your finger.

      Probe for the base, push aside

      the giving moss, reach

      right down, learn by touch alone

      when to pull, when it will yield

      and come up whole.

      Brush off dirt.

      Do not eat

      until they are cooked.

      They taste of the soft metals of the earth,

      themselves, not themselves,

      the presence of older things.

      7. two sounds on the edge of hearing

      two sounds on the edge of hearing

      slight flit and rustle

      bats loop away at sunset

      and come back

      after the mosquitoes

      two sounds on the edge of hearing

      8. Primal scene

      Primal scene

      The murmur of my father and mother

      in their bedroom down the passage,

      her soft, private laugh.

      9. How not to stop

      How not to stop

      Pa came to collect us from school,

      the stern drive home.

      Pa sat at the head of the table,

      not talking at supper.

      Pa stood in the driveway with his back to us,

      throwing seed into the wind

      with quick slings of the hand, drawing

      the pigeons as though he’d called them.

      Pa carved his own domino set;

      on weekend games sly as chess, slapping

      the final piece on the wooden table.

      Pa drove us home past the house he built,

      from which his family was removed in ’68,

      never looking again in its direction.

      Pa bought his leaf tea and hard cheddar

      from Queen Bess supermarket,

      down the street from their old house.

      Pa rehearsed how not to stop, not to get out

      and walk to the front door he made.

      10. Filming swans

      Filming swans

      You wade barefoot into the water at sunset

      while the swans dip their necks

      like crochet hooks into the sea.

      The clouds turn red

      and this is too beautiful to write

      but it is the order of things.

      The line of wet around the thighs of your jeans,

      the tide and wind in opposite directions,

      cross-stitching the sea.

      The swallows darting after mosquitoes,

      gulls flying straight above the swans,

      the sun’s slow dipping,

      each in their circle, and you and I watching.

      11. Landscape is passing into language

      Landscape is passing into language

      My grandfather was the first

      to build his house on this vlei,

      the call of frogs measuring the evening.

      This was the wild around which

      my grandfather made a fence,

      my grandmother a garden.

      Everything from the kitchen went

      into the compost

      except lemons and oranges,

      the soil already too acid

      for roses to grow.

      Now the sounds are gone

      and the landscape is passing into language.

      A cement canal directs the river.

      Only the high school carries the name Groenvlei.

      Few people remember the sounds of night

      as