“Tangled In Hope”. A poem for Amitabh Mitra. She is like the forgotten city of a woman under the northern star. She tells herself that poetry is an art. The art of mapping out survival and waiting in a microclimate to construct memoir. Her vision is crystal. Her hands are gold. Man constructs woman. Father constructs mother. And she was tangled in hope, in breathless anticipatory nostalgia, in the fullness and magnitude of her own destiny. Instruction swims out into a forest of self engulfing her depression and everything in its wake. It doesn’t even begin to rival her mother’s beauty. Everything overwhelms. The eye, the rival, mirrors, the shallow kept on flowing up to her to meet her until the inheritance of their dance gathered up inside of her. She should have bought new shoes. She should have loved more when she had the chance. Now worlds are inside of her and she doesn’t know how to let go. There’s a picture of them together in the archives of memory and desire. Father and mother. The phone is ringing but inside her heart is nightfall and the wildflowers are growing in the museum but they are also playing a kind of imitation game. She cannot tell the difference between summer or winter, if it is kingdom come or avocado season but Pan’s Tinkerbell is on the right. To the left of her is the baptism of the sun. The tangled-in-ceremony-and-writing-instructions crocodile is pointing the way to the atlas.
“Triumph”. In response to Don Beukes live poetry reading from Paris. The words carry with them the power of now, baptism and ceremony and crocodile on my left shoulder. On my right shoulder in my line of vision is kingdom come, an atlas shrugged, love letters to God in the language of all of the potentialities of the poet. In the face of this invincible challenge there is a stooping tumult, heaped up vertigo, fight songs falling all around me like birds defying the essence of gravity. Birds like robots and the art of robotics found in the wilderness. I think of my paternal grandmother as an angel even in the face of the nature of her illness. I think of my paternal grandfather as dust, as dust, as dust, a dandelion clock and an obituary in a newspaper. This is all coming from my soul, I want to declare to the universe but perhaps you were expecting greatness. I found it there in the poetry reading, the political way of human lives, how temporary all of life is really, the separation of discipline all these months and I want to read Virginia Woolf and Eugene Skeef all over again. I want to listen to these poems from the live poetry reading from Paris again. And I am thankful for the shine of the morning with its own tapestry, the snow on the epic mountains, this poet mapping out an age of iron with skill. I think of the poet in his sacred space. A disciplined and thoughtful and principled legend as I face up to all the beauty and the aftermath of my loneliness of the day.
“Mr Wonderful”. In response to Anthony Minghella’s films. At work you are exquisite, a force, a wandering soul that is now encompassed by fulfilment and satisfaction and happiness. And my every response is to the Greek poet Virgil, to the ancients who understood love, its purpose, is this. Go stand in a field of wildflowers, a field of summertime that carries the tenderness of the day, stand in the same field in winter and feel the pensive aloofness of the sky. You make me strong, my romantic. You exhaust me with living, my beloved. I live for you for you are a symphony of life. I look at you and all I see is this. The materials of the sun, the sun, the mastery of the sun and I know I will go on loving you. You are my peace of mind, my reverential awe, all of my responsibility and you are all of my world and my earthly possessions. I live to love you, to honour you as I honour the world around me, my father’s house, my mother’s expertise and all your romanticism. I think of the novels I will write, the love I have inside of me for every blissful characteristic of your soul. You are the divinity that blooms continually at will found in all the seasons of my harvests. You are awe.
“Dust”. In response to every Merchant Ivory film that I have ever watched at all the lowest points in my life. I am the bird. You think I am unlimited but I am not. I am a weakling and suffer and have experienced much sorrow until I met you and happiness standing at my door. You are the poet. You are the poet educating me. How I love you, all of you in sickness and in health. You are all of my impossible longing for life. You are the song I must sing and the world dances around me as everything falls into place. The continuation and renewal of life, the art of enduring and redemptive love found in your arms where I find all my reasons. For you are both vigour and excellence, Virgil, the Greek poet. You are effortless. You are art. I speak to all the energies in you. I speak to all the dreams that you will manifest. You are everything that matters to me. And you make me laugh a thousand times in a day. This you will never know. How I think of you as belonging completely to me but also to the world. How much I love you. How my head spins when I am in your arms, and can think of nothing else when I am far away from you. My heart has only this to say. That I love you with a bright sense of urgency. The brightest sense of urgency that I have ever known.
“Community”: In response to the life of my mother, grandmothers, Brenda Fassie, Emily Dickinson, Meralyn Barry and every artist’s wife. Dear Astronomer, I have turned my head away from all my arrogance and fear, my limited thinking and awareness in the arms of the universe. There are still subjects difficult for me. Sometimes it is hard to love the people you find yourself with. Sometimes it is hard to get hurt but I always return to the great matters of the wildflowers. You are my quiet awe, you have my heart, you are my responsibility and I remember the imprint of my deepest wounds as I turn to you and it is like a dream now. For you are the river that provides the sustenance of water for my soul. You are blessed with authority and power, authenticity and greatness. I gather the harvest. The reward of obedience.