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You are here A bin a concrete table half a pigeon wing a eucalyptus tree. Standing at the edge of the gravel I look into a valley. It floats and folds like the cloak of a story. Words wander through it harvesting the air – rustling ants, furrowing worms, just, just audible. ~ I put in petrol, get the windscreen cleaned, give R5. You overtake me wildly, I hug the yellow safety lane. Thank you, your hazards flash and my brights flash, you’re welcome. ~ Only here, only here in an enormous country love is a small and private thing running freely between cars, across valleys, up and down the Shoprite aisles finding its missing parts in the wire bins with the Special Offer crowns. 144
page 155
Balancing How much does it weigh, this ribbon of hours slipping into the sunburnt sea? grains of air, splinters of blue water – The woman in the orange skirt – her hands like flying fish laughing as they splash the sea over her hot shoulders, how much, how little do they weigh? we try to balance them, but how – on our own hands? on the light? And the toddler’s screams of upside-down rage in his sister’s arms to be put down, set free to wriggle into the jewel bed of shells, do they weigh more than the mine shaft his father’s father dug? – or count them, but it’s like counting your own breaths, you get lost in the breathing of them, each one is the first – How much does the beach weigh, relative to the hectare of houses queuing at one old standpipe? How light is this single day spread out on a striped towel, relative to three centuries flooded with loss? Between and between, the taxi van stands with its doors open, its dusty mats glittering with the salt prints of feet clambering in to fetch a sunhat, jumping out again. – and this is where we’ve got to, and this is where we are for now 145

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You are here A bin a concrete table half a pigeon wing a eucalyptus tree.

Standing at the edge of the gravel I look into a valley. It floats and folds like the cloak of a story.

Words wander through it harvesting the air – rustling ants, furrowing worms, just, just audible.

~

I put in petrol, get the windscreen cleaned, give R5.

You overtake me wildly, I hug the yellow safety lane.

Thank you, your hazards flash and my brights flash, you’re welcome.

~

Only here, only here in an enormous country love is a small and private thing running freely between cars, across valleys, up and down the Shoprite aisles finding its missing parts in the wire bins with the Special Offer crowns.

144

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