Desire

Desire to walk into the sea again, and wash clean the wounds of his mind.
Desire to learn how to listen for each fifth wave, until he grows still and forgets himself.
Desire to somersault into those waves, until the laughter rings from his belly.
Desire to dance, on beaches at dawn and under bright lights among strangers.
Desire to dance in one place, holding empty arms out in front of him.
Desire to learn to trust silence again, when there is no music at all.
Desire for the faith that life flows strong and clear through him, whether in the arms of someone or alone.

 - Jacques Coetzee

Toffee ice cream

This is to say that, when
I congratulated you the other day
for being vigilant about your intake of sugar,
I really meant it.

But for me we will probably always be
in that ice cream parlour, in a much too quiet suburb
in the days before my divorce.

I remember the flow of conversation—
all those new intimacies finding speech—
but mostly I remember the moment when
that rich, cold, clotted sweetness
insisted on spilling over the edge
of the bowl, until I lifted it
to my hungry mouth, and we both laughed,
signalling we were fine, still knew who we were.

As a child, the important thing about eating
was keeping my hands clean, or washing them
as soon as possible if all else failed.

Now here I was, my hands already sticky
with recent failure, bringing this bowl
of unearned sweetness closer to me,
to swallow one more bite
of this incorrigible,
mind-numbingly beautiful world,
and then another.

 - Jacques Coetzee

Aniseed rusks

Oh, that sweet spiciness,
suggesting a loving, orderly house
centred in its kitchen.

Good on a plate, yes, but always
best taken from a loved hand—
the trusted hand of someone who loves you
without conditions.

I can still taste the brittleness of them:
the way they melt in the mouth, unlike anything else
I’ve ever tasted;
that spiciness, until you can believe
that the whole world might be edible after all.

That fragrance, that taste still takes me back
to the stoep of the holiday house in Margate
that was ours for such a short time, when I was eleven or twelve.
Those treats made by a very favourite aunt

before the family was broken, before I’d seen
through to the terrible fear of the other,
the blind prejudice against so much
barred from the kitchen, against those
not offered a seat at the family table.

 - Jacques Coetzee

Katharsis

When we’d turned away from the maudlin guests
at the family reunion, my companion said:
“I don’t approve of this much drinking.
They will wake up tomorrow morning
and feel undignified, embarrassed. This isn’t
catharsis, though I know you disagree.”

All I could do was shrug my shoulders. In the next room,
the old ladies drank their glasses down,
told their grief endlessly, like worry beads;
showed the wounds, the scars, the helplessness
they’d never shown even to each other
while their watchful husbands were alive.

 - Jacques Coetzee

These hands

So what will you do with them, these hands of yours,
when the beloved has left the room?
They lie in your lap – so large, so helpless, so strange —
as if they belonged to another. You raise them,

as if to make some large gesture, to point
towards some object beyond the horizon, and say:
“This is what it means when it all comes down to it.
This is what it really means.” Instead of which

you drop them again, because you know
that the connection is broken – the thread
that invisibly linked you to her body.

When the beloved has left the room, when the bank
has broken, when the ship has sailed –
you let your hands fall back into your lap
and you learn to sit very still, your gaze
turned inwards; your voice, for the moment,
dried up; your mind on pause,
waiting for the dam to burst,
for the poems to emerge in the place where she used to stand.

 - Jacques Coetzee

THRESHOLD

I step out of the car like a man who knows
his own mind, a man who has learned
how to frame words in a sentence,
how to draw the circle of power around himself
and not to step over it into disarray.

I take one step inside your door—and immediately
begin to come undone without a sound.
If I must fall, then let me fall
like a man who knows just enough to be quite certain
that he’s a fool; that words fall short
of the mark, unable now to say
anything worth repeating, and what does it matter?

I have given myself twenty minutes to offer yet again
my unconditional surrender
in the face of this wave, carrying me
across your threshold and into the unknown.

 - Jacques Coetzee

SMALL MIRACLE

(after Guy Davenport)

Some time in the 1950s,
during a visit from Tom Eliot
to St Elizabeth’s Asylum,
where he’d been confined instead of standing trial for treason,

Ezra Pound—who had sought to command
presidents, reform governments
in accordance with the dictates of his will,
ranting at the entire world, insisting it should change—

put up his feet on a table
in a small room in a long, dim corridor
(Tom Eliot did the same) so as to make enough room
for one of the inmates, his name lost to history,
to manoeuvre an imaginary
vacuum cleaner.

 - Jacques Coetzee

FLOWERS FOR WINTER

“Ah, where will I find flowers
come winter…”— Friedrich Hölderlin

There’s a cold hand round my heart as I write to you,
even though it’s still high summer in this room;
even though you are the one
for whom I swore to forsake all others.

Everyone knows you turned me out of the house we shared,
summoned your lackeys, signed the papers
and cut me loose like an unprofitable servant.

(Who would I have to become, what voice
would I have to assume, before
I could make poems out of those battering days,
when you had absolute power to hurt, and used it?)

And then, on the day I finally faced you again,
when I closed the passenger door of the uber car
that would take me away from you, wherever the hell I wanted,
away from the narrow room you’d chosen,
I slowly began to see: it was my hunger
for experience, for more life
that finally hurt you into malice.
You must have seen my hands were finally empty,
that they could find no flowers for you anymore
now winter had finally claimed you, claimed our house.
And so you turned me out of doors,
possessed, perhaps, by some ghost
of your old generosity—

knowing I would smell my way,
sooner or later, to a place
where the seasons still turned, where spring
was still possible.

 - Jacques Coetzee

AT PIRATES BAR AND GRILLE, PLUMSTEAD

Half past midnight already, and whatever
critical faculties he ever had
have long deserted him. These past few months he has learned
to be glad of the disco shlock
that pours into the room from the loudspeakers:
Gloria Gaynor vowing for all of us
that she’s indestructible, can survive anything;
Abba’s promise that we’ll sing like we did before.

Last year he would have hunched his shoulders, scowled
at the production values of such sweetened fare.
Now, with the old heartache finally behind him,
he is ready to swallow it all down—
the glamour, the reaching out for new horizons,
for desire that has forgotten the blinding rage
twisting its face.

Now Whitney Houston is belting out again
that she wants to dance, to feel the heat
with somebody who loves her, and all he can do
is swallow back tears of gratitude for this
rough magic, still somehow accessible
even now; for the disaster
that shattered him into pieces
just in time.

 - Jacques Coetzee

In the orthopaedic ward

I brought so much here with me today,
so much I wanted to put down
as I walked into this hospital to find you:

the invisible wounds I carried,
and the way I’d invested in them
in order to be right about something, anything;

whatever I know about negotiating
for power or leverage;
the necessary ways of listening suspiciously
I learned from Marx and Freud and Nietzsche
and their beautiful, high-minded children;

the swaggering confidence that comes
from being the new thing, the bright, beautiful stranger
with the golden key that can unlock the castle –
that, that most of all.

Ah, but you know as well as I do
that you can’t put down your past or your learning –
can’t put down anything much at all.
And even so, I walked into that room
feeling lighter, estranged from my voice;
strange enough not to know
what to say, how to hold you.

And all I remember clearly of that visit
is the astonishment I felt –
my one hand gently holding your bionic knee,
softly humming a James Brown fragment to you –
slightly breathless, slightly out of tune:
“I feel good,
and I knew that I would.”

 - Jacques Coetzee

A basket of love poems

In the spirit of Valentine's day, Ecca Poet Silke Heiss collected a variety of love poems from the Ecca Poets. Herewith the selection.

Catch him

As the mists at last clear,

a robin comes to the troughed aloe leaves

to drink.

 

You can’t see him from your seat

– splashing, sipping, flipping away –

so I write this poem

 

to catch him

for

you.

 

– Norman Morrissey

 

(published in To the Far Horizon, Hogsback: 2015) 

 

Namibia

 

Pitched camp. And the mopani bush is quiet;

the evening still, the clouds adrift –

the first clouds we have seen these two weeks.

You have taken the kids out to see the cheetah

at the research centre: some breeding project

for an endangered species. I sit amongst our things,

with day’s heat setting in the west,

a Windhoek beer a-downing for my thirst:

I’ve worked up quite a heat, pitching the tent,

in this desert land, spreading our sleeping gear,

laying out a meal, for you and the boys. 

Ah, my love, you are encamped in the fenced

wilderness of my heart. Our place is made. 

Come home now, and rest. Love is such a rare,

endangered beast, we must deliberately protect,

so that coming generations may know.

 

– Brian Walter

 

(published in Brood, Ecca Poets, Hogsback: 2010)

 

For Clara, 19 months

Language is an envelope:

inside it you might find

a tiger, a dragonfly,

or a smooth river pebble.

 

By now

your own naming of the world

is gathering pace like a river . . .

 

Just when the sound of the words

“Mond” and “Sterne”*

became, for you, moon and stars,

I do not know,

 

but there is wonder

in your eyes and your face

as you look to the sky and say

“Mond”, “Sterne”.

 

You are the bright star

in my universe,

and a moon, too, often in flux.

 

Together with your mother

we form a triangle, a clan,

a constellation.

 

In the years to come,

whatever they will bring,

may your light keep reaching me

just as it does now.

 

– Ed Burle

 

(published in What It Is, Ecca Poets, Plettenberg Bay: 2020)

__________

*“Mond” and “Sterne” should be heard according to their German pronounciation, i.e. ‘mawnd’ and ‘shtahne’ (‘a’ as in ‘glad’)

 

Each day its reverence

Waking

into my consciousness,

gradually re-kindling my flame,

 

I want to press

my forehead

against your shoulder –

 

innoculate

by touch of pulse

your tissue, vapour, fragrance

against whatever dangers.

 

Ah, Love, let us protect each other

from those moments in our selves

that do not sing –

 

let tender touch of skin on skin

to each day

its reverence bring.

 

– Silke Heiss

 

(published in Greater Matter, Poetree Publications, Johannesburg: 2019)

 

jou borskas

        vir Kim

 

jou borskas is die perfekte houvas
soos 'n warm rotswand waarteen ek hoër en hoër uitklim

my hart spring met 'n swier uit my ribbes
en kom lê polsend teen jou bors

jou sternum smelt weg
my hart skop nes teen joune

in rooi, nat ekstase 

 

– Lara Kirsten

 

(published in Alles is Anders, Ecca Poets, Knysna: 2021)

 

Caving

 

There is music

in the way you say my name

 

sounds of Coldplay

ringing in the air

reminiscing your hands up my shirt

bent over literature,

philosophy

and cups of cold coffee

in our cave

 

Where our bodies share secrets

and our minds made love

to childhood foes

and grown up dreams,

not knowing

if tomorrow holds enough books

to keep our story alive.

 

– Alvené Appollis-du Plessis

 

Love Fury

 

Today the world is coming through the walls again –

through our computer speakers, declaring

that doom is imminent, insisting

that we are turning the earth into a fire –

 

just like the one I used to imagine, burning

on and on into eternity

when I was a Protestant boy.

 

Today it came to me: what if

that vision was accurate? Maybe I’ll find myself

one of these days, in a long line

headed for extreme weather. I don’t know.

 

All I have to exchange with you,

to set down here against the likelihood

of apocalypse as night falls,

is this clear image: the two of us

standing side by side

this day six years ago,

when we promised to surrender

to a different, slower burning,

to offer ourselves up to a different fire.

 

So I’ll be on board when they say

we must cut down on emissions.

When they ask us to leave smaller footprints

of carbon on the earth, I’ll sign up,

or at least sign the petition.

But there’s a secret, sustaining

fire I keep close to me,

guarding an inner space science has not named;

and I guard it every day so it doesn’t collapse,

so the world won’t keep growing smaller inside my chest.

 

 Now, as opinions harden, as feeling

and thought are both blunted from misuse,

may I always carry with me

these traces of our fiery pilgrimage.

May something in me remember

how to be molten, to remain

hot and excessive, in tune

with things hidden under the earth;

willing to change my shape

to contain this old love fury

that makes and unmakes us every day.

 

– Jacques Coetzee

 

Green tomatoes

for Sheila

 

“… apart from that

the house remains the same

since you have gone. I suspect

the clock has stopped in sympathy

with silence, cars at night

on the Alice road, pass,

a distance slower.

I couldn’t find the bread-knife,

bought some rolls instead

(the shop lady said they

would keep forever if I freeze them).

The man from East London came

about upholstering,

I said we’d have to wait and see …

He left his card “in case”.

O’ Yes, I almost forgot, surprise, surprise!

I pulled the curtains back

to watch the rain, hey presto,

there they were, blushing in rows,

the green tomatoes

you left to ripen.

P.S.

When are you coming home?”

 

– Cathal Lagan

 

(published in Sandbird, Alice, Lovedale Press: 1999)

Neanderthal burial site at Shanidar

The time between us and them –
what is it? Sixty, seventy, eighty thousand years?
Or the time it takes a team
of bright-eyed archaeologists
to map this cave and read the many bones in it,
to decipher their cryptic message:
this pollen, surrounding the body
of the patriarch;
bones that have healed imperfectly
after a savage injury? Or the time

they must have had to tend to him,
to gather shards of who knows what stories
to warm him there, unable now
to hunt or gather food himself?

Our instruments suggest
the timeline, can hope to guess
how often they returned to this place,
how many generations of dead
lie buried here. But what songs they sang,
or what they feared or worshipped
as they brought their wild flowers
we cannot say. From this
or any other distance, it is impossible
to establish the shape of ritual
to everyone’s satisfaction.

 - Jacques Coetzee

Unfinished music

     for Hugh

All day I’ve been following your clearest lines:
walked within easy earshot of the sea,
though I sit at my desk inland, and hardly move at all.

So often you’ve walked the beach at Scarborough,
listening for the sea’s many voices,
that by now you conjure them effortlessly:

voices of drowned sailors; echoes
of spent empires, their arrogance
scattered for all to see; the separation
of lovers, of parents and children; and always
those long, empty beaches, for us to walk
down, down through the seven ages to oblivion.

And you, choosing not to be overwhelmed
by that grand chorus, learned instead
to fasten your mind to each shifting

detail; to pare down language
to its essentials:
everything you saw and heard reassembled
into digestible fragments
of the great, unwritten script –

seventeen syllables summoning, again and again,
hints of bird-calls, salt spray,
ascetic silence, and the silence
after lust and its merciful quenching.

Dear friend, I’m sorry that time
always returns; that in the end
there has to come an end to exploration.
Meanwhile no rock, no bird, no grain of sand,
no gesture of yours or mine
is identical to any other;
each one a fragment
of that great music you still hear
and channel, which must of course
remain forever unfinished.

 - Jacques Coetzee

Gathering

          for Norman Morrissey, with apology to W. B. Yeats

Whatever parts of ourselves we could summon
we have brought to this reading
in your honour, dedicated
to your scattered poems –
lovingly gathered now, distilled
until they seemed inevitable, destined
in a way so few words are. We understood

that we had to start at the finish
every time, and retrace
your steps. Every strong reader knows
that is the only way to approach
a poem: leaning against the door
at the top of the winding stair of another’s words,
then turning back, slowly descending.

Compelled by that brittle music, the way
you transmuted suffering into song,
how could we not
turn and be led down the ladder
into the broken ground where you stood
when you found them? You told us

how you would be transfixed by something
you saw by chance on the side of the road you travelled
on your motorbike, day after day.
Before the reading, a friend described one poem,
preserved in your handwriting, that still bears witness –
your hand shaking so, he said, it’s hard to read those
flashes of recognition, records
of a moment you sucked to the marrow as you went.

And so we finished at the start, as we should:
tracing the movement
from shoulder to straining wrist as you set down
these impassioned fragments to find us
and gather us back into this moment, singing.

 - Jacques Coetzee

Spirit

I don’t know much about the things of spirit,
though each year the numbers
of my personal dead
keep swelling.

These days, when I try to talk
to my upright, sober, dead father,
I never fail to remember
that first Covid funeral – beautiful, harrowing –
six months ago now, in the first summer of lockdown.

Only the ghost of connection
there between us, but
we sat in the presence of pure sorrow
at a life that was suddenly gone; pure joy
at the full life that had been. There was much talk of God
and of carousing into the small hours, until

I could not tell such things apart
in the general intoxication.

“We must stop crying now,”
someone said, in tears, at the very end.
“Sam would have said: the brandy’s waiting.”

That’s when I knew, all the way
along my blood and into my bones:
I’m still a beginner in the things of spirit.
The only speech I truly know
is with the living, still,
though my father’s voice speaks through mine, uninvited;
though the ashes of dogs remain in their urns on the desk.

Always again I choose
that long draught that burns my throat –
while there is anything left on this side
to celebrate or savour.

 - Jacques Coetzee

THE WITNESSES

Throughout the wedding service,

from her seat in the third pew,

the groom’s grandmother held

the right hand of her husband, in part to prevent it

from exploring her thigh.

From behind the microphone, an uninspired

voice tried to breathe life

into stern advice for the newly-weds,

written by a fiery

first-century celibate.

Walking out afterwards

into the heat, the blinding glare of summer,

the grandmother’s eyes found the eyes

of a much-married man, drawn into himself

at the love-feast, unsure

if he himself could commit such a rash act

yet again. She winked at him, said:

“I do find things like these get easier

as you get older.”—meaning

marriage, meaning

the perilous leap into the arms

of another, requiring

some skill and much luck, but mostly

a love of broken things,

of imperfection. Then her own husband’s face

slowly softened and relaxed, and he began to feel

the earth beneath him again, crushed grass

under his feet in spite of his shoes;

and a slight breeze came out of nowhere

to ruffle his clothes; to lift his dampened spirits

again and again, as they all walked on emboldened

into the beautiful, wicked world.

 - Jacques Coetzee

DIOGENES

Today he appeared

to me again:

the old man who lives in a barrel;

is content to share it with a dog;

eats, drinks and relieves himself

in public places, like the dog;

calls it his master in all things.

Once, according to ancient legend,

when he was already old and disreputable,

world-conquering Alexander sought him out

and offered him anything, anything

his copious mind could imagine, anything

his body could desire.

Diogenes, it is said,

did not hesitate an instant.

“Stand a bit further off,” he said. “Right now

you are standing in my sun.”

This morning, sitting in our winter garden—

yearning for yesterday’s wine,

kisses and long, hot showers—I suddenly remembered

that stubborn old man. Once, it is said,

he smashed a bowl—his only possession—

after seeing a peasant boy

drink from the public fountain.

You—always intent

on what works best, and concerned

with sharing the world—said:

 “Why didn’t he give the bowl

to the boy if he no longer wanted it?”

But Riaz, from the other side

of an ascetic turn

only dimly dreamed of

in my philosophy,

just smiled and said: “Of course.

He wouldn’t want to corrupt

the boy; to encourage anyone

to want anything that wasn’t

essential.”

So now, even in this

quiet, water-wise garden,

I can feel the lashing

of the old man’s tongue.

Brave and reproachful, he stands at my shoulder

each time I click to buy

something I don’t need;

each time I reach out, one more time,

to assure myself that you’re still here—

beyond reason, beyond

anything I could have hoped

to earn or deserve;

just here, beyond argument or philosophy—

just because.

 - Jacques Coetzee

DESERT SONGS

I

Desert fathers, you who live in caves

and grottos, who ran away

in search of silence, hear me.

Slowly I become acquainted with you,

even though an urgent voice calls me

back, always, into the crooked world.

I too know the bliss

when the hard wind dies down;

when the heart has found what it asked for,

and still finds it good, if only for a moment

between one season and the next.

Give me today

just a little of your silence,

although I bend the knee to the things of this world.

Give me the strength

to remain waiting in the same place,

to remain standing underneath the sun

till the song sounds clear again

between the bones of my skull.

II

Desert mothers, you who stand

with empty arms, who dance

with the invisible bridegroom,

by what roads does the heart

travel to this place? What appetites

slowly spent themselves

and were calmed, until you came here?

Can you see me, will you recognise me

where I stand, in the hard light

of my desire?

Is there room for my hunger

there, where you read together?

And when the sombre song finds you each morning,

does it have knowledge of me

and the shadow I cast

across the path,

in this noisy old world?

 - Jacques Coetzee

SINGULARITY

She wanted to slip out of her complex mind;

she wanted to slip

out of the museum of many names,

where each thing is inventoried, ordered, shelved;

she wanted to find a place

where the shell of language was soft enough

for her to edge her way

into the silent heat before thought ever was.

And each morning she would wake

with the half-formed memory of escape

still on her lips, the dishevelment

of her night’s journey.

And the same old familiar world was all around her,

and oh, it was lovely, it was terribly beautiful;

she would stretch her arms towards the sky outside,

try to keep her mind empty and innocent.

But always, before she could stop them, the layers were there:

the thick, multiple scatter of many words,

the sheltering clothes against her naked skin.

 - Jacques Coetzee

THE RAGE FOR ORDER AT CAFÉ GANESH

(With Apology to Wallace Stevens)

Clear heads we must have had still,

stumbling out of a winter night

into that sudden din—

all those strangers sitting at their ease

under the same roof. I imagined

soft, warm lighting, even though

I couldn’t see it.

We had been drawn together, us four,

by the slow, stubborn love of words,

the slow fever in the brain

that sets us raging at the broken world,

to call it to order.

Ah, but the world was stronger that night.

It beckoned to us through the PA system

in the voice of a Bob Marley,

begging us, commanding us to gather ourselves

up into a dance

around a central point without a name

in any book of words.

And we just sat there, sentences left unfinished,

our faces relaxing into slow mirth,

as the faces of men do who think too much;

the place where each of us ended

and everything else began

slowly becoming imprecise, confused

as the wine and music mingled.

Pale Wallace Stevens, so beautifully sober,

composing verses in your Sunday best,

tell us: how could we learn to phrase the broken world

and set it singing, except

from such unmoorings? From where this rage for clarity

and pure, unruffled air

if not out of last night’s dishevelment?

 - Jacques Coetzee