A Hundred Silences. Gabeba Baderoon
Title Page
GABEBA BADEROON
A hundred silences
KWELA BOOKS/SNAILPRESS
Dedication
To Rafi
1. Give
Give
Before dawn, low voices briefly loud,
my father and his friend the ambulance driver,
his days off always in the middle of the week,
drive away from the house
with thick sandwiches and a flask of tea
and my father’s green and white fishing rod
whipping the wind behind the ’76 Corolla.
Camping by the sea,
we’d see him take his rod further down the beach,
walk waist-deep into the water, plant
himself with legs apart in the breakers,
reach back, cast the line
baited with chokka, and pull,
giving then tightening the line, nudging
its weighted stream of gut to the fish.
But in this place on the West Coast
they never disclosed,
they stand unwatched, out of reach
of each other’s lines, at their backs
a fire on the beach not stemming
the dark but deepening it.
Often it would come to nothing,
their planting and pulling,
but sometimes the leather cups holding
the ends of their fishing rods strained
as they bent back against the high howl
of the reels being run to the limit
and holding.
Bowing forward and giving
and leaning back and pulling,
their bodies make a slow dance nobody sees.
And at home the scraping of scales
from galjoen and yellowtail
and slitting the silver slick of skin
to make thick steaks for supper,
setting aside the keite for breakfast,
the head for soup and the gills and fat for the cats
while they tell us how they landed them.
I wonder about the empty days, more frequent,
the solitary standing in the dark at the edge
of something vast, sea and sky,
throwing a thin line into the give of it
and waiting, silent and waiting,
until something pulls
against your weight.
2. Learning to play frisbee
Learning to play frisbee
In any case I was a child
who did not look up from books
and frisbee required
the full inhabiting of the body.
But today when you throw
the circle of yellow plastic
into the air with the ease of a child,
something young in me starts
out of its blocks.
I watch the spin of the disc
in the wind, the sly dip
at the end of your throw,
the body’s ability to read and run.
I learn to move backwards to arrive
beneath the parabola
and not to close my eyes
at the last moment of touch.
Standing, I swing
my body back, look away
from the line of the throw, wind
the arm in a pure arithmetic
and, at the end, whip the wrist.
I watch your whole body read
the arc and the speed that signals
your readiness like an animal’s
unafraid alertness,
your soft hands that do not block
the curve of the throw
but complete it.
3. Old photographs
Old photographs
On my desk is a photograph of you
taken by the woman who loved you then.
In some photos her shadow falls
in the foreground. In this one,
her body is not that far from yours.
Did you hold your head that way
because she loved it?
She is not invisible, not
my enemy, nor even the past.
I think I love the things she loved.
Of all your old photographs, I wanted
this one for its becoming. I think
you were starting to turn your head a little,
your eyes looking slightly to the side.
Was this the beginning of leaving?
4. Fit
Fit
Dim light of the tailor shop, small bell calling
him from the back, shelves with their bottles
of buttons, a thimble, dust and thread
of cuttings on the floor.
To make a coat, search
in all the fabric shops from Wynberg
to Town for cotton, linen, wool.
He licks a forefinger to turn a new page
in the small black book with red binding
and, holding a thick stub of pencil, measures
the arm from collarbone to wrist, elbow bent.
At the waist, two fingers go
on the inside of the measuring tape
to allow a give of flesh between
the measure and the fit.
He translates the length and hardness
of the bones, the breath and change
of the human body
into the flat numbers of the pattern.
*
My father loved to see
my mother wear the clothes he made for her.
At the fitting, holding pins at the side