What Poets Need. Finuala Dowling

not about you,” said Red. “Never get lost in the illusion of centrality. It’s about her.”

      Herself, herself, herself, I quipped.

      “That’s the spirit,” said Red.

      Saturday 17th August

      8.30 am

      A soupy day down here at the coast, with a thick sea mist in which the smell of kelp is so strong you feel you are moving about in a cold bouillabaisse. Yesterday was a very full day so I’m writing this early to catch up on Friday’s comings and goings.

      I fetched Ryno’s dog from the kennels. The absurdly named Sir Nicholas is a light brown labrador cross with speaking eyes. (Ryno went through a stage of knighting things: the dog’s honorific was the only one that stuck.) Mrs Cloete gave Sir Nicholas an old cushion to make his first night in the shed more comfortable. When I went out to check on him this morning, I saw a snow dog, a cloud of little white feathers with two dark, soulful eyes looking expectantly at me. He must have ripped open the cushion in the night – probably thought it was what we wanted him to do, a strange custom of the establishment.

      I told Mrs Cloete I’d take Sir Nicholas for a walk after dropping Sal at Holy Cross. The old woman said she’d just get her walking stick and then she’d join me. I feel I must be wearing a sign around my neck saying Please take over my life.

      On these winter days, Kalk Bay is its old self, the one I remember as a child. Back in the Seventies, many of the houses were closed up in the winter, or inhabited by mysterious recluses. The atmosphere of stately eccentricity was heightened by two asylums – Victorian honeymoon hotels gone to seed and leased by the state – and one private nursing home. Alzheimer’s patients regularly escaped and collared me, or called to me from latticed balconies: “Let me out! Let me out!” Perhaps these lunatic women had stayed here before as brides, I thought. There was no coffee, décor or antiques to be had in the Main Road, but two banks, a shoe shop, chemist, haberdasher, butcher, bakery, hairdresser, post office. A mountain stream, forced underground, briefly reappeared in the park, where we children would dam it and upset the council. Someone still kept chickens: you heard the rooster crow every morning. The pancake Kaya of today was then the station’s newspaper kiosk, run by an Hellenic supporter we called Billy Bookstore. He was exceedingly grimy. Beth told me he once went to the False Bay hospital to have some of his dirt surgically removed, but I didn’t believe her. On the days of important soccer matches, Billy shouted, “Hellenic! Hellenic! Hellenic!” On other days he was morosely silent, or incongruously sang a tune that went “I’m in love with a gambling man”.

      The bazaar which is now Hennie’s Market was closing down its old departmental operation, where separate aisles sold pointed shoes with covered side buttons, Dutch remedies or fabric by the yard. I would stand in the toys aisle and already, at ten or eleven, recognised that the playthings being discounted were collector’s items. More than a generation out of date, still in their vintage packaging. Never bought because you could get cheaper, newer plastic toys from the CNA in Fish Hoek. Still, the wind-up rabbits with their tin drums and the miniature steam engines had an aesthetic appeal that made me want to own them.

      Mrs Cloete said she remembered it too, old Kalk Bay. The ratepayers’ association had been run by a man in a monocle who used to flirt with her. You were very beautiful, I said, and immediately regretted the “were”.

      On the beach I thought how once long Victorian skirts had swept the sand where I walked. I felt like striding out. “Go on, don’t let me hold you back with my snail’s pace,” said Mrs Cloete. Relieved, I set out at a crack. I like to build up a rhythm when I walk. For a while, Sir Nicholas bounded along beside me. Then he seemed to have disappeared. I turned and looked back. Mrs Cloete had stopped about halfway along the beach and was perched on one of the low wooden fences at the dunes. Next to her, with a quietly protective and proprietorial air, sat the doleful labrador. At least one of us knows how to behave, he seemed to be saying.

      On my way home, at Clovelly corner, I was dazzled by the morning sun, catching me right in the eyes. Then, just as we curved back into Kalk Bay, I saw how in the morning haze, sunlight had plated all the windows so that the whole village glinted back worshipfully at the blinding ball in the east.

      I managed to get some work done yesterday afternoon because Sal went to play with her friend Harriet, leaving me with an uninterrupted working stretch. The first e-mailed submissions for The Unofficial View have arrived. I printed them and started sorting them into poets known to me and newcomers. Then I separated the newcomers into those who had clearly written and perhaps published before and those who appeared to be submitting poems for the first time. Very long poems – epics, cantos – I skimmed only briefly as the journal wouldn’t publish them anyway. Experienced poets and in fact anyone who’d bothered to read the journal before making their submissions, would know this. I went through both batches looking for haikus and tankas and sonnets because nothing looks as nice as a short poem on a page. There were only two haikus, both by Red Moffat. Funny, quirky, eccentric. I marked them with a big pink tick and put them in a wire basket I’d marked Publish. I gathered the epics together in a pile and put them into an unmarked wire basket. I’m superstitious enough to want to avoid the word Reject in my immediate environment.

      Then I sharpened some more coloured pencils. I’m trying hard to be scrupulously neutral, to have criteria that any poet, new or established, could meet. So I decided to work on a system of coloured ticks, methodically applied. I slipped the ten poems by Girisha Naidoo into my clipboard. She’s highly thought of, but I personally find her endless troping on light, brilliance, luminescence, lambency and radiancy quite tedious, so much so that I want to say, okay woman, the universe glows for you – what else?

      I put that voice of mine firmly out of the way and picked up a blue pencil for clarity of thought and purpose. Does the poet, however abstruse his/her imagery, know what he/she is trying to say? Interestingly, Girisha used the word “clear” itself and all its synonyms – lucid, pellucid, translucent, limpid, crystalline – without necessarily convincing me of clarity. I went and made myself some tea, trying to work the problem out in my head. Is it because for me everything is muddy, murky, dim, clouded, shady, that I reject her incandescent verse? And hadn’t I, just this morning, noted the play of light with amazement? Concluding that yes, I was prejudiced, I went back and gave two of her poems a bold blue tick.

      I phoned a builder and asked him to come and give us a quote for some basic repairs to the house. Then at about five I went to fetch Sal from Harriet’s house in the Marina. The property runs right down to the vlei and the girls were just docking Harriet’s canoe at the jetty.

      Harriet’s mother came outside. “Can I offer you tea or a glass of wine?” she asked. We sat on the stoep and drank wine from a beautiful stone decanter. Hannelie is a divorcee. She uses old saris for curtains and seems to make her clothes out of them too, but her ankles don’t tinkle like an elf’s cap, thank God. She talks in little Tourette-type bursts, with unexpected, idiosyncratic silences in between. Her hair is the type that can never be combed at all; it is bright red, almost maroon, and looks like it might burst into flames if brushed.

      Hannelie spoke about her ex-husband, an SAA pilot. Driving home one day, almost at her front door, she saw his car parked outside another house in the Marina. All the houses there look the same: whitewashed, Mediterranean, with lush grassy verges, so she did a double take. Perhaps one or other of them had gone to the wrong address? She slowed down. Then she saw her husband come out, accompanied by a woman in an apron, a toddler at her knees. They kissed like an old married couple. It turned out that he’d actually set up another ménage quite close by; in a house with an identical floor plan to their own. He was a happy, if unimaginative, bigamist. Afterwards another neighbour confessed she was aware of the pilot’s co-marital set-up, but thought it must be a sect or something. Both women seemed so cheerful, she reported, she had even seen them nod at one another in the local café when they rushed in for bread or milk. Hannelie said she’d been under the impression that SAA had given her husband a punishing schedule; she had no idea that on many of her nights alone with Harriet, he wasn’t up in the air but around the corner eating kebabs with his other wife.

      As