From our house in Athlone on the Flats go up Kromboom, Crooked Tree, toward the mountain and onto the M3, then turn left for the road along the sea or right for the shorter route over Ou Kaapse Weg to get to Cape Point, the furthest part, the part where my grandparents camped at Buffelsbaai, Buffalo Bay, before it was made into nature. There they fished and swam and made a fire to cook the kabeljou and hardes and in the photos, time didn’t seem like time. Even if their way of standing shoulder touching shoulder and answering to the camera, even if their brylcreemed hair and tweed jackets weren’t from the forties, the size of the fish my grandfather caught told me they were in another world, those fat, abundant fish that are a dream of the sea now.

This time I chose the halfmoon turn up the mountain and the crags of Silvermine, some straight as blocks of slate and others stubbled and stacked but with something not of nature about them, as though they were people who had just stopped moving and had arranged themselves for us to look at, more formal than they would have been otherwise. Once I drove this way with my husband and he said, this place reminds me of Angkor Wat, and I laughed. How could this backup route we took when we didn’t have time to go along the sea, the one we hurried through on the way to the Point, how could it be compared to temples, to exalted ruins?

One day my aunt, visiting Athlone from Uitenhage, the town 500 miles away on the southeast coast where I was born, asked, Haai, maar wat is hierdie klein bergie in julle agterplaas? Hey—haai is not quite hey, but English doesn’t have a phatic for the affectionate astonishment of a sound that isn’t a word but a beginning—so, Hey, but what is this little mountain in your backyard? She meant the small rise called Table Mountain, which she couldn’t recognize because my grandparents were removed from its slopes to the lee of it, to here, behind its famous face and the tablecloth of cloud falling over its steep slopes. Unknowable from this angle. 

On the Flats, everything is background. It’s the place you leave behind to get anywhere. I left to go to school because the schools were still in the places where people lived before were removed. I left Athlone to go to the University of Cape Town on the lower slopes of Devil’s Peak, where the land was bequeathed by Cecil John Rhodes. Before students protested, his statue used to look from the University across the Flats all the way to Cairo. Up on Jameson Steps, you could sit and see the pepper pot towers of the cooling station just down Thornton Road from my mother’s house. I left Athlone to fall in love and leave forever. 

I know exactly when I started to notice the world, three streets from my house, when I turn left toward the mountain. From Athlone, Lansdowne—names of minor British royals banished to the Cape now pasted over the land—from the Flats, you always have to aim toward the ridge, and once you reach it, cross a kloof or neck, always go toward some impermeable barrier that demands you ford it. That is the story that the Flats was always telling me. How to leave, how to aim toward the mountain. But coming back, flying to Cape Town, you land in the Flats, have to drive through its unnerving sameness, its absence of a focal point, so you hold the mountain ahead of you like a direction through the present tense. 

What is the point of this leaving and returning, this old circle from the Flats to the peak it doesn’t recognize, and then back? 

I leave again for the mountain that someone from elsewhere showed me was smaller and closer than I knew. And then I come back. Back to the home I knew as background. The Flats with its 200 square miles of levelness, with mountains to the north and east and sea to the south, that I abandoned for school, then university, then love. In the backyard where my aunt stood looking at the mountain, fenced in by unpainted grey vibracrete walls, the only color the tired grass and the weathered side of the neighbor’s garage, a speckled white tinted by the low sun and smudged with the shadows of sparrows, the most common of birds, unnoticed birds, darting at something in the grey sand then flitting upward to meet themselves at the top of the wall. The sound is of background fluttering, murmurs, phatic noise. Everything is unimportant, passing. I am standing next to her, young, invisible—time is tangled and striated and doubled—as I see what I couldn’t see at the beginning, the ground on which she stood when she called the mountain ours.

How quiet 
It is in this sick room 
Where on the bed 
A silent woman lies between two lovers—
Life and Death, 
And all three covered with a sheet of pain. 

Since I am coming to that Holy room, 
    Where, with Thy choir of saints for evermore, 
I shall be made Thy music; as I come 
    I tune the instrument here at the door, 
    And what I must do then, think here before; 

Whilst my physicians by their love are grown 
    Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie 
Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown 
    That this is my south-west discovery, 
    Per fretum febris, by these straits to die; 

I joy, that in these straits I see my west; 
    For, though those currents yield return to none, 
What shall my west hurt me?  As west and east 
    In all flat maps—and I am one—are one, 
    So death doth touch the resurrection. 

Is the Pacific sea my home?  Or are 
    The eastern riches?  Is Jerusalem? 
Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar? 
    All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them 
    Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem. 

We think that Paradise and Calvary, 
    Christ's cross and Adam's tree, stood in one place; 
Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me; 
    As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face, 
    May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace. 

So, in His purple wrapp'd, receive me, Lord; 
    By these His thorns, give me His other crown; 
And as to others' souls I preach'd Thy word, 
    Be this my text, my sermon to mine own, 
    "Therefore that He may raise, the Lord throws down."

The hard ways of that summer,
palpitations that knocked my body down
and held it level with the water
mouth skimming breath for months

a tired I didn’t know existed,
one that tied my bones to the
ground with heavy quick fingers,
one that bound my brain in gauze.

I couldn’t leave the house for months then,

so being able to walk now past the end of my block,
to stand long enough to wash the dishes,
able to read more than subtitles, to write any words at all—

these are blessings I didn’t expect.

Guilty Guilty Guilty for actions that took my sympathy
Shackles around my wrist shackles at my feet
Prom and high school graduation these eyes will never see
My heart said, Oh well
At least you will no longer have to endure your daily home abuse
I grew into a woman unbalanced behind those wire fences
Recall (3xs) that’s all I knew
Always committing some illegal offenses straight to the SHU
These eyes have seen the bottom of boots,
Mace in the face,
The heavy blue dress while people watch you 24hrs a day,
A lock in a sock,
Shall I go on?
My heart was always heavy
when I constantly placed myself back in the same abuse
I thought I would escape
I knew I had something in me worth showing the world, but what?
Fighting my demons was real tuff
A peaceful life didn’t feel so ruff
I opened my mouth and people was shocked
That I could read, count, think, understand, listen, play chess, learn a trade
They started to see my worth
My eyes have seen a life the majority would have failed surviving
Rape, abuse, homelessness, parent-less, drugs, prison, mental health, failure
My heart became strong enough to finally love myself
And I finally looked up to the woman in the mirror 

Translated from Portuguese by John Keene

Time
is an essence
I carry within me
Time and its strands
They've been coiled inside me since my navel was knotted
It has as its complementary counterpart
The space between time and its options
Time, lord of the hours
reigns sovereign
Subtly, on a silver cord
People don't kill time
He is the killer.

5 AM—the world is silent save for the heater 
in the hallway, the cars wooshing
down the main road, the vibrato of
every single driver. Every creak of a settling
house. Lay my head down, press it into pillow.
On the window sill a jar of coins,
sunlight crawling through the
water in an empty spaghetti jar.
A spider settles itself into the warmth
of my house. Inside the body: ghosts
of IVs, needles, feeling
breathless in a hospital bed. 
Somewhere inside my brain aware 
of the machine pumping oxygen,
beeping, attached by wires to the chest.
In the chest, an animal. The animal
forgetting how: to howl, to crawl, 
to find the words.

          for Leslie Scalapino

I keep gardenias 
By the Kwan Yin 
Though magnolia was her flower
On my steps where
In ordinary life
Last but once 
I saw her alive
We had tea and sweets
Stuffed with bean paste
Years gone 
Following pleasure 
Wherever it worked
We had tea again
And she by then
Only angel food
And determination
Would live still
But wildly
If she could

Beating his lead with the blunt 
end of his axe, flattening it
in order to forget that he is

a child of death who wants to weight 

his net. Until it is suddenly
done and the one who did not disappear
stands in my room, taking me
in; still lying whether I am,

and how. Just as you might ask
a fisherman returning with nothing:
So where's the fish? And for him to reply,
without resentment, without envy:
The fish--it's in the sea.

Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.

Four be the things I’d been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.

Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.

Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

The gold March dawn
and below my window 
a man carves his car
from the snow heap
plowed up around it.
So easy not to envy
the cold muscled task

but then imagine—
feeling your heartbeat
alive like a chipmunk
at work in your chest,
imagine the whole day
arm-sore and good
with accomplishment,

the day you begin
with heavy breath
and see it linger
outside your body
like a negative of
the dark air cavity
in you like the spirit
in you like the ghost.