Cape Town, Jerusalem

Cape Town, Jerusalem

Cape Town, Jerusalem

Often now I turn away from things,
from jubilance save that
which from a quiet word
may grant my moment’s wealth:
a hometown’s olive orchard
that shivers in dusklight, the pit-pat
as fruit fall free to the ground;
or the homeless manic’s quiet rage at grace
when a shop-owner hands him coffee.
Most of all, I walk
so I may reach home and try to know
myself, so I may turn to work.

And turn more from the racial rage
I need still in myself, as I turn
from the stone’s articulate act
and seek the sentence long enough
to house my tribe, even as I know
of neither’s existence. These are
rages which won’t still, which need
thought. But thought fans flames.
And action in killing them
kills the word. Yet
in my silence there is
this rage, still this rage.

So I turn away from things
and read, dip into books;
wait thus for reports
from my race, choose not
speech. But sit in my silence
which broods to myself
myself. A self at least. And wait
more thinking not of exile from –
whether inside or out –
but exile through; how inside
the very head the tongue
is exiled through itself:
the tongue its own exile.

And I turn more away from things,
preferring solitude and work
to tongue at stories
from their silent insides: like an orphan
who in a new house senses an old taste
and quietly mulls thus a morsel
that brings memory darting
like a wasp in the head,
then withdraws his tongue
from probing. Back to the mute bed,
the civilizing cradle of the jaw.