The science of breath
(for the Dutch poet Joop Bersee)
I have made mistakes in my life. I’m still paying for that
dark interpretation. For them with half-malice and delight.
How cold the stars. The heroic damsel in distress. Abyss
found in dementia’s shoebox. Abyss found in Dominica.
Stars are cold in winter. In summer they begin to warm up.
Show their true selves. Goodbye my eyes, my swimming limbs.
Let me count the grains of sand with my hands. Let me travel
slow then hard and fast in this country. Let me moan about the
unfairness of it all. Look here at this surface of flame showing
off daylight. Flames licking at desire. Look at this earth-dream
that once belonged to the river and then the ocean depth of it.
I think of the lungs of London. The slow and deliberate inhale
and exhale. The busy Amazon-structure to it. I don’t think that
men are safe anymore. Their body language tastes of liver and
sinful things. Marechera liked sex once. His body (shimmered)
like a leaf. His mind a sweet-sweet-sweet journey of shades.
I’m ecstatic about the seed he sowed. The uncommon hero-
leader he was. His anointing. Now, let me count the grains
of sand on this land called Zimbabwe. Ask why the sea.
Kindness is a seed. Obedience is a seed. Power is a fish.
A seed with hope and expectation. The theory of love speaks
to me in Technicolor waves. Shattering clarity. The spirits
of this place needs us just as much as we need them. Love
speaks to me. That theory of falling in love a phantom-sonnet.
You were a careless mistake. The earth moves (inside of me)
like a woman now. Chirping birds gravitating towards
the warm ochre earth. This amount of love. The eternal
song in his river teeth. I know where they are right now.
In the context of heaven. They’re found in a paradise for
the lonely, parched soil, the swarm a language in your eyes.
I’m addicted to poems and funerals, roses and cacti. I can
love you. I can harm you. I can’t promise you I won’t.
On the writer sent to a mental asylum in Gatsby
(for the Dutch poet Joop Bersee)
Lungs struggle. My lungs are struggling against this
Bastille, feeling small, the girl, the girl, the girl, this
avalanche in my soul, this single woman’s anguish.
Comrade anguish does not let up. She mocks my proper
English. I want someone to take care of me. I couldn’t
place you at first. Foe, foe, foe or Robinson Crusoe.
Coldness is this desolate thing like plastic chairs in a
waiting room. Champagne supernova I want to explore
you. But broken people can’t fix broken people. That’s
a figment of your imagination. Our souls are clothed
in sleep now. Moonlight on our skin. We’re living
different lives now. Different cities but there’s still an
obedience there, a love that can fit into a museum
like the straight fate of the stars. I know the challenges
of finding love on a long walk in a nature reserve on a
Wednesday afternoon. You were a kind man. The glare
of light here is something flesh, something bone just
flowing out of the sea like driftwood. It is dividing
the haunting. Dividing the trees into forest and border
of forest. I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed of my sexuality,
am I girl or boy, man or woman, tragedy or dramatic
artist (I’m trying to understand the speck of living with it).
My identity, the men and women that I’ve loved. Trust
me. I’ve been left. And, so, love and friendship I write
about them in my poems. Dirt and grace and worship and
praise. I’m a bird pecked to death by other birds. A bird
who lives under a cold sky casting a net for freedom. I want
to be a miracle. I want to be a miracle. I’m afraid I’m
failing miserably at it. I think of the bones of glaciers and
how I can hear them from far away deep inside of me.
Their frozen waterfall, their icy-mirth in my fist. I close my eyes
and dream of glaciers, delicate Jonah in the whale.
Stern curator of the ghost museum
(for the Dutch poet Joop Bersee)
A kitchen is never dead. It is a living thing. A
Jerusalem. There were no waves. No distant
shoreline. Only a greenness passing through the
climate. Swimmers heads cut off from the rest
of their bodies in the school swimming pool
and I wonder if you still remember me. Skinny
legs. Serious face. Nose stuck in a book. Seriously
curly hair. Books under my arm. Nabokov.
Gillian Slovo. I never promised you a rose garden.
Now you pass through me as if you’re passing
through a reflection. Take your medication.
Make dad breakfast. And then there is this struggle
of loving men who prefer the company of other
men. You’re things that make me happy and
things that make me sad. You’re like a ray of
light, my darling, my sweetheart, my love. I
love you until all my insides are raw, until my spirit
has withered away into nothingness and nausea.
Until the house that I reside in, my ice house,
turns winter into summer. The kitchen sink is
my mother’s wasteland. It is her politics, her flesh,
her prize. She rolls deep in her garden. That’s
her bliss. That’s being honest and after the rain
she’s Jean Rhys and during the rain she edits me
away, censors me, declares me Mrs Rochester.
Her hands smell like spaghetti. These same hands
that tear me apart. Ripping me apart until I’m
raw. Raw! And everything after that tastes
metallic. I brush my teeth but it’s as if I’m doing
laundry or something. I can’t get the stain out.
And there’s a feast of winter in my hair while
I think of Harlem and the African Renaissance.
The wakefulness and faint smell of roast chicken
(for the Dutch poet Joop Bersee)
I think of fruit, good olive oil, pasta, and
glutathione when I think of her name. I
think of overripe tomatoes perfect for sauce.
Of just how much I loved you, and how you
never loved me back. I chose writing, and
you chose pilgrimage. You chose to travel
to exotic places never sending me a postcard
from any of those places you travelled to.
My hands are in frozen chicken pieces in
brine. My hands, fingers are stiff with cold to
the bone. I’m going to grill this chicken.
The streets are breathing after the rain while
I inhale, and exhale, this intellectual black sheep.
Autumn leaves outside my window. You’re
not here. I wish you were here. I wish you
weren’t here. Yes, I was always difficult to
love, and the writing is still an experiment.
I’m reading this book by Don Mattera. I
want to know my purpose, my identity, my
heritage, where I come from. I’m more than
of mixed-race descent. You taught me that.
You taught me to pray. To pray for a publisher for
my manuscript. You taught me many things.
To sow the seed for meaningful relationships, and
how to multiply seed. You taught me to hope
for my name to be known in every home, to reach for the stars,
the divine. I don’t remember the colour of
your eyes anymore, the weakness in you. Only
that you loved all of me for a brief summer.
The sun always shines on television and the
Americans are always eating red spaghetti.
Discern, discern, discern please between your
goals and dreams. I can’t take my eyes off you.
Your works of flesh, of prize and lit award.
The wise will hear. So will the foolish girls.
Wildflowers to tempt Jean Rhys into a good mood
(for the Dutch poet Joop Bersee)
“Tea is better than sex,” said the Indian woman
on the television screen. It was a documentary,
and she was travelling to Nepal to build wells. It
was a documentary series on strong, independent
women who had their own money. Their own
rooms with views to the sea, or garden, or surburbia,
or city-life traffic, and buildings, and motorcars.
And then I thought of Emily Dickinson, and what
she would say about tea, and intimacy, and the
transaction of having her cake and eating it too,
every rigour of stimulus, and impulse of trouble
at home, and I smiled, and then laughed thinking of
her loss, and my loss, her frustration, and mine. Always
longing to belong to be the one rose in the courtyard
in bloom like the heavens, inheriting the wolf’s flock,
inheriting the wolf’s religion, Sexton’s, and Kipling’s
poems too, and I thought of this waiting dance of
husband and wife that I knew nothing of. A universe
filled with hungry children demanding to be fed, the
healing powers of whiskey, hungry souls longing for
a healing room. I go still. Think of Hepburn, and Monroe.
James Dean. Jenny Zhang. Osip Mandelstam. Dorothea
Lasky, and how I continually find the source of the
Nile whenever I am reading Russians, or, modern-day poets.
The people are first out in dawn’s light
(for the Dutch poet Joop Bersee)
Sometimes is it better to let it go. The
glamour of early morning. Mother is
summer rain. Father is a collection of
burnt diaries. Photographs have been lost.
Perhaps they’re the real survivors’ in
the end. The ocean, the light of day, the
river, the moonlight is holy. The artist’s
sacred vision. I am long thin legs. Slender
frame standing in the empty space of a
bright green garden. I slice the red and
green peppers. Red and green chillies
alongside my brother in the kitchen. That night
holding my pillow tight tears taste metallic,
and everything was a mantis-dance. I
think of the Portuguese man in Johannesburg
who gave me the eye. I don’t want to
be in this home. Perhaps it’s time for me
to leave again, and soon. The universe
in which I lived once was better than this.
I’m watchful. Concentrating on the
invisible blue map drawn near winter-
fingertips in the cold air. I think to myself
that a bird’s flight plan is intricate, but you’re
not here to hold me anymore. Perhaps it’s
time to leave soon. I’m waiting for the storm
to come. I pick the book up. I’m reading
re-reading John Updike. I’m still waiting.
Pushcart Prize nominated for her fiction “Wash Away My Sins” Abigail George is a Port Elizabeth-based South African blogger at Goodreads, and Piker Press, essayist, playwright, poet, and writer. Her writing has appeared numerous times in print in South Africa, in various anthologies, and online in e-zines based across Africa, Australia, Asia, Canada, Europe, Ireland, and the United States. She is the writer of eight books including essays, life writing, memoir pieces, novellas, poetry and a self-published story collection. She briefly studied film at the Newtown Film and Television School in Johannesburg in another life.