The Dream in the Next Body. Gabeba Baderoon
GABEBA BADEROON
The
Dream
in the
Next Body
KWELA BOOKS/SNAILPRESS
To my mother and father,
who gave me my love of reading
True
To judge if a line is true,
banish the error of parallax.
Bring your eye as close as you can
to the line itself and follow it.
A master tiler taught me this.
People wish to walk where he has kneeled
and smoothed the surface.
They follow a line to its end
and smile at its sweet geometry,
how he has sutured the angles of the room.
He transports his tools by bicycle –
a bucket, a long plastic tube he fills with water
to find a level mark, a cushion on which to kneel,
a fine cotton cloth to wipe from the tiles the dust
that colours his lashes at the end of the day.
He knows how porcelain, terracotta and marble hold
the eye. He knows the effect of the weight
of a foot on ceramic. Terracotta’s warm dust cups
your foot like leather. Porcelain will appear
untouched all its life and for this reason
is also used in the mouth.
To draw a true line on which to lay a tile,
hold a chalked string fixed
at one end of a room and whip
it hard against the cement floor.
With a blue grid, he shakes out
the sheets of unordered space, folds
them into squares and lays them end on end.
Under his knees, a room will become whole and clear.
At night, he rides home over ground that rises
and falls as it never does under his hands.
Witness
Mr Dunn arrives early in the white morning
to clear the driveway of snow.
He heaves and snarls with the machine
biting into the mounds, pushing, fighting.
His truck says Masonry on the side.
In summer he hauls bricks and rocks and cement.
When he sees me, Mr Dunn averts
his eyes, asks if my husband is home.
I leave them standing
at the threshold.
Cops caught me D.U.I.
Didn’t even have an accident.
Went through
that bad patch last year.
Nothing for 12 years
and then they catch you.
He asks for a letter of support,
a witness to his character.
He writes down the address,
the correct way to spell Dunn,
the judge’s name.
In his hand the pencil breaks three times.
My husband keeps his eyes on the words,
reads them aloud.
If I can’t do the snow this year
I’ll get someone to do it at the same price, or
I’ll make up the difference
when I get out.
From the passage, I hear
what men give each other,
silence to lean their bodies against.
Point of View
In the kitchen she reaches for the nutmeg grater
and remembers it is in another cupboard,
another place.
In the post office she fills in the address
she has left behind.
She tears up the form
and starts again.
Her mail follows her
like outstretched hands.
In the sky on the way home
a hawk hangs motionless,
moving, yet still,
pinning the sky.
The Dance
Once in a museum I stood
at the entrance to a room looking
at Matisse’s Dance.
A man walked in front of me,
stopped.
He tilted his head, as though
listening more than seeing
and, for a moment,
I saw the dance pass
through his whole body.
The Call
The sound of the phone
from my flatmate’s room catches
me on the landing halfway
down the stairs, my palm on the handle
not enough to still
the impetus of the suitcase. It takes
a bruise on my thigh to stop it.
From the box of things to give away
– signs I was once here –
I grab my phone, plug it in
in the passage, and sit
on the stack of phonebooks against the wall.
Hallo Mama, I answer.
I am leaving for a new place,
each further from where I started.
Across the seven-hour time difference I fear
I will never see her again.
I want to say out loud I am losing
a centre to which I can return,
but do not.
She speaks too in a way flattened
by what is not said, coming only so close
to the parting between us by telling me
to leave safely.
Across the growing distance
I hear her voice receding from me.
I make her leave me
so I can be still.
Cinnamon
I fall outside
the