III
How can I say all I wanted to say,
when the lightning flashed,
while the thunder tore my question into halves?
Thinking of history in the present,
of beauty as a present….
Roaming the botanical garden, with you in mind,
not in tow,
beside those rocks cast in millions of years afore,
like irrevocable natural justice in the entrails of time,
broken into patterns in stunning beauty,
like the rectitude that is nature’s beauty.
Beyond the garden,
still on the road, remember the pub,
yes, the whitened pub, the one that English-fies the countryside?
Your driving, despite its ferocity,
reminded me of your silence and calm,
and the cool efficiency of the Zim-ed!
The cheering serenity of your inner self,
mixed in a mélange with the full efficacy symbolized by
the black eagle with its white background
valorized by your Teutonic ancestors.
You are like a riddle that remains unraveled,
even unwrapped
like a Christmas gift, with a note:
“To be opened at Christ’s return!”
But the returning, like the repeating, is in terminal excess,
objectifying, yet annotating, every gesture
as if processed by a forensic machine,
a Prussian invention.
Racing through townships that mock the mortality of race;
and the morbidity of colors;
townships that shift the advancement of the age,
mocking the tenure of change.
Townships that charge into the conscience,
breaking into the heart, like a practiced Western Cape burglar.
If I could burglarize your mind and steal its secrets,
I would return in the morning,
temporarily penitent like the Pentecostalist, until the next sin.
I am bewitched, seized by the elements
composing African sorcery, which long tantalized
diseased Western ethnographers,
the product of their ethno-science.
In the throes of the bewitched and the bewitching,
I recall the slashes of the Indian Ocean at Port Alfred,
that rush into a combination, rising
as if in a choreographed salute to Providence,
coming to attention in a multitude of crests.
A rush of waves crashing against the barricades,
erect like Botha’s Security Branch.
But I couldn’t ask the question that
Coetzee’s Michael K. asked from the nurse
while she was stripping him and washing his bare body:
“And who is Prince Alfred?”
Beyond the sea-side cottages raised by privilege,
and sustained by fetishized capital,
do you remember the poser to the fishers by the ocean
when they confessed no catch in all evening:
“Come, I will make you fishers of men!”?
And your gentle reminder that the pretense catechism eluded them?
Quite an educational piece…
If I could burglarize your mind and steal its secrets,
I would return in the morning,
temporarily penitent like the Pentecostalist, until the next sin.