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Translated from Afrikaans by Richard Jurgens
Car Thief
Sunset. I'm peacefully on my way to Eldorado
in my old sixties car when a hitcher
stops me. “Are you a traffic cop?” he asks — pissed, he adds, “I'm a car salesman... Hey, way to go!
This hippy-buggy's got a left-hand drive!"
Delirium, I reckon. We pull off. “My wheel's on the right.” Says he, as we go: "But whitey, you're the passenger..."
and holds a pistol to my head. “Relax, nothing serious,
JUST GET YOUR ARSE OUT OF HERE OR I'LL LINE YOU WITH LEAD!" I turn. "Wa-wait, I'm no nuclear storage tank … "
He asks: “What you want to take with?" I say: "My piggybank.” “Sure, I'm not a thief. I love God too. Soon we'll all be dead.”
Refrain
"Ag please, polish her tyres with yellow margarine!"
“Okay. What's her name?” Unashamed I cry: “Yellow submarine …”
I Hate My Bank Manager
I hate my bank manager, that good-for-nothing.
Wish lightning'd strike him down, but its bolts
are so choosy. A nasty disease, the kind that chews
everything to nothing, wouldn't even touch
the ignorable little bug. He checks out my torn
clothes. I say, “Relax, I'm no Robin Hood
and I'll pay you back in your own coin,
after the revolution." His response is classic:
“You're not being funny." The swine's interest rates
are also not so great. So between him
and that other barnyard thief, the State, I'll
perish. “You're treating me unfairly,” I say grimly.
“What if I were an angel in disguise?”
“You don't look like one…” he says with vague surprise.
Brave New World
There are only two women.
The woman that you have and the one that you don't have.
Only those two unfasten their hair and weigh it on the ultimate balancing scales.
The folding open and the folding closed, only two folds; two languages, talking and hardly speaking at all:
an invisible open-plan house, with two distinct roofs.
Only two people are home,
the one who's present and the one who's absent;
I turn back under this lonely veranda light with its glowing double bulbs.
I can work out only two truths:
delusion and belief, there is no
master of ceremonies, only a moustache tells these two stories.
The earth is a horizontal door
that I can't pull open under my curious weight;
its not-opening and its not-closing are its closing and opening.
Except for the connecting spaces, everything's just a ruin. The unconnected passage. The tatters of the front porch
trompe-l'œil. The outside room with its San Andreas Fault.
I am a cat-thief measurer, measuring-tape in hand.
There's a wet spot, older than the house, where two shadows cross.
Tonight I measure the little garden bridge, two statuettes, both sides.
People say the heart is just a phantom pain.
But here, in the passage, in the loose straddling
of connection, I sense a groin vein beating.
All Bearable
That spring morning will stay with me,
the simultaneous warmth and coolness.
Not so much the previous night —
that I could forget, and maybe she has.
Something was going to happen, it was in the air. We went to bed together.
That day a protest march was going to happen
and the terror that divided us.
Although I wasn't thinking of it, that evening
Why should I?
I remember stroking her, and half-asleep
she stretched.
Maybe it was too late, and the body-sails were never raised on our agreeable vineyard water.
Later, on overseas streets,
so I heard, that lovely woman had to
submit to the love of the well of desires with its metallic sounds. But as I was saying, it's the next morning that I remember.
Something was going to happen, it was in the air.
In the distance two stepped onto a private tennis court. …
We barely knew each other, but in that bareness,
from her eyes to mine and back,
a backhand accord was struck between the narrow tramlines. In gaol later I was so sad
Not for the little children who'd been shot dead,
or an afternoon's self-multiplication
of thirty years in those days of so many others,
nor about the clank of iron on iron,
the slow hands of the clock.
That was all bearable, forgive me.
A deeper melancholy had welled up in me
while the other prisoners sang revolutionary songs: that girl's tender breasts in the morning wind,
never seen again, pure dandelions,
and a merciless change of season.
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