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.

It’s neither red
nor sweet.
It doesn’t melt
or turn over,
break or harden,
so it can’t feel
pain,
yearning,
regret.

It doesn’t have 
a tip to spin on,
it isn’t even
shapely—
just a thick clutch
of muscle,
lopsided,
mute. Still,
I feel it inside
its cage sounding
a dull tattoo:
I want, I want—

but I can’t open it:
there’s no key.
I can’t wear it
on my sleeve,
or tell you from
the bottom of it
how I feel. Here,
it’s all yours, now—
but you’ll have
to take me,
too.

My own dear love, he is strong and bold
     And he cares not what comes after.
His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,
     And his eyes are lit with laughter.
He is jubilant as a flag unfurled—
     Oh, a girl, she’d not forget him.
My own dear love, he is all my world,—
     And I wish I’d never met him.

My love, he’s mad, and my love, he’s fleet,
     And a wild young wood-thing bore him!
The ways are fair to his roaming feet,
     And the skies are sunlit for him.
As sharply sweet to my heart he seems
     As the fragrance of acacia.
My own dear love, he is all my dreams,—
     And I wish he were in Asia.

My love runs by like a day in June,
     And he makes no friends of sorrows.
He’ll tread his galloping rigadoon
     In the pathway of the morrows.
He’ll live his days where the sunbeams start,
     Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart,—
     And I wish somebody’d shoot him.

Out of the depths of a heart of love,
     Out of the birth-place of sighs,
Freighted with hope and freighted with fear,
     My all in a valentine, hies.
     Oh, frail little missive
            Of delicate texture,
     Speed thee, on thy journey,
            And give her a lecture! 

Fathom her heart, that seems to me, cold,
     Trouble her bosom, as mine,
Let it be mutual, this that I crave,
     Her ‘yes’ for a valentine.
     Oh, frail little missive,
            In coy Cupid’s keeping,
     Oh! speed back a message,
            To set my pulse leaping.

consider O 
woman this 
my body.
for it has 

lain 
with empty arms 
upon the giddy hills 
to dream of you, 

approve these 
firm unsated 
eyes 
which have beheld 

night’s speechless carnival 
the painting 
of the dark 
with meteors 

streaming from playful 
immortal hands 
the bursting 
of the wafted stars 

(in time to come you shall 
remember of this night amazing 
ecstasies       slowly, 
in the glutted 

heart fleet 
flowerterrible 
memories 
shall 

rise,slowly 
return upon the 
                                red elected lips 


scaleless visions)

We will count on these walls
             to whisper
                           our resumes 
to the strangers who take up
             the work of these rooms,
forwarding them
             past dust.

Our purpose shared,
             suspended in trust
                           to a poem
      that told us a long love
                                          is willed.

Believing such
             we are bound to exit
             flattered
                            by our design,
unmindful that this thing
                            has also always
             been lying
                            in wait,
                 a thing
                            in itself, bossy and brutish
that has thrived in spite of
              sabotage chapters
                                           occasional giddy
                           neglect.

              A volition
                                           apart
        that exceeds
                            dull need
a self-interweaving
               imperative be mine
                             that will whisper
               our love
                             past dust.

If my lover were a comet
          Hung in air,
I would braid my leaping body
          In his hair.

Yea, if they buried him ten leagues
          Beneath the loam,
My fingers they would learn to dig
          And I’d plunge home!

I dreamed that I was a rose
That grew beside a lonely way,
Close by a path none ever chose,
And there I lingered day by day.
Beneath the sunshine and the show’r
I grew and waited there apart,
Gathering perfume hour by hour,
And storing it within my heart,
        Yet, never knew,
Just why I waited there and grew.

I dreamed that you were a bee
That one day gaily flew along,
You came across the hedge to me,
And sang a soft, love-burdened song.
You brushed my petals with a kiss,
I woke to gladness with a start,
And yielded up to you in bliss
The treasured fragrance of my heart;
        And then I knew
That I had waited there for you.

A wave of love for you just knocked me off my chair

I will love you and love you

I will reach out my hand to you in the noise of carhorns and merengue and pull you close by the waist

I will call you my museum of everything always

I will call you MDMA

I love you ecstatic exalted sublime

I wish you were here—there’s an enormous cloud sitting off in the distance

It’s a beautiful walk from there to my place

I’m buzzing but the buzzer may not be working

There’s a raccoon rearing on hind legs twitching its nose from behind a short fence

Let me stew you some tomatoes

As long as I keep moving the overtones don’t jackhammer my skull

I am waiting for something very very good

My phone is like, what, I’m a phone

Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile – the winds –
To a heart in port –
Done with the compass –
Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden –
Ah, the sea!
Might I moor – Tonight –
In thee!

We two, how long we were fool’d,
Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes,
We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return,
We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark,
We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks,
We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side,
We browse, we are two among the wild herds spontaneous as any,
We are two fishes swimming in the sea together,
We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings and evenings,
We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals,
We are two predatory hawks, we soar above and look down,
We are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbic and stellar, we are as two comets,
We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey,
We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead,
We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling over each other and interwetting each other,
We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious,
We are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence of the globe,
We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two,
We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.