Leon De Kock
REVERSE ANGLE
From an aeroplane's porthole
suburban swimming pools
shrivel to pricks of glue;
or postage stamps,
smudged down at odd angles
on fingered envelopes of land.
But when I float on the lilting
ripples of a pool's skin
and look up at the sky,
framed by flagrant jacarandas,
the world expands
beyond peripheries *
the labile depths below,
the swirling skies above,
keening into folds of eternity.
FOR IAN, GONE TO ENGLAND
On the way to nowhere
in particular,
we make a lattice
of words.
When you're gone,
and I must write,
the words swim
awkwardly, from pen's fountain
to page. When you're here,
our words fly,
trapeze artists,
diving, gliding, alighting.
COMING AND GOING
It's coming and it's going,
come-going,
it's a feeling like ...
I had it a second ago,
now it's gone,
but the taste lingers,
the aftertaste,
phantom of a pleasure
detected in anticipation,
or in the trace
of vanishing regret,
still-lingering scent,
the sense of something,
that snug warm feeling,
remember,
remember?
FOR JOHN
AND SHARI
AT THE MATOPOS, ZIMBABWE
With your older boy dangling
over his death in a gorge
of the Matobe, his legs
tingling down the sheer fall
from tree's branch, taunting
the depths below,
and with you younger boy
scuttling up rock faces
at the edge of the dead drop,
my stomach plunges down
its own valleys of love & longing,
a free-fall stopped by a clunk
like a tin, when distances
re-assert themselves.
UNBLOCKING THE DRAIN
(For Mark)
Is it a glop of glub,
a gunk of ghee,
or a glub of slop?
No, it's too compact,
this dissolving grey slime,
teasing our retch-buttons
(located just below oesophagus),
curling its tendrils of
fungal rot
delicately around the throat.
Subcutaneous to the film
of every day's life,
it is a margin of festering filth
abraiding the horizon of beauty.