Aloe

From this tight pubis of serrated leaves
it rises like a tentative penis,
a guilty thin erection filling the air
with green apology. Soon it will swell,
engorge to proud redness and the land
will flash suddenly, indisputably
male - implacable, rock-hard and rampant.

Atheist on the Mount of Olives

'I lead a church,' he says
when we meet by chance on the hillside.

St George's Day and a full English
as here above the Gardens I watch
the hadedas parade their slow gloss,
unperturbed by me or millennia.
Home spreads its languid length in the valley,
climbing a ridge to the township.
The rough and tumble of grasses,
seed-heads in dry semaphore, proclaim
their parables to the distant thrum
of Grahamstown, where the sun itself
is warmth, balm, a benediction.

So I pause, smiling. He means well, I know,
this gentle man who stands here on a rock,
uplifts his eyes and prays for me.

Colliding

If in the next two minutes the world should
end, swallowed up in black holes
of our own devising, and each sub-atomic
particle in that seventeen-mile tube is
somewhere imploding from light, will my blood
have space or time to notice? Their goal's
to funnel cosmic birth pangs while comic-
book villains chortle in their hubris
and wink. So tell me now, do we ignore
the way this sunshine freckles the wall out-
side our bedroom window? How soon before
we must forget that days swell like ripening fruit
into love's warmest weather?
If you'd asked, I'd have told you: Not now, not ever.

Collocations

The breadth of a table, floor;
length of a continent, marriage, life.

The sameness of all things;
the difference.

The words, syntax, discourse,
minds, hearts, language -
the collocations of being.

Losing, finding, keeping:
the love articulated in all of it.

Koi

Bright, of course, by definition there in
the quad beneath the olive drip of thick
water from a dozing fountain: the trick -
big fish, small pond - is one they've cracked, wearing
scarlet robes and big-mouthed smiles to prove it.
Round and round they cruise a grey world bounded
by this circle of weathered stone, gowned (it
seems) in slow moss and algae: remove it
and you find only the fish. Safe enough
and healthy, they move like hour hands around
the clock-face of their academic lives,
disturbing no one. Life seems long and death,
if it exists, too distant for its sound
to register. One surfaces, then dives.

Timbuktu

(after Ahmed Baba)

Write this down:

I, a man, know how to escape the marketplace.
We are not slaves or other merchandise,
including salt, even of the earth.

When judgement comes, watch the scholars ink
measuring itself against the blood of martyrs
and observe how much weightier it is.

Write this down.