See the Bushman Copyright S.Body 1 of 4
You are twelve when they bring you
to a white man’s school.
Boys of your own kind laugh at you —
you cannot speak the narrow words, your tongue wanders
all over your mouth.
River song, the sky’s story
spills from you
like coloured birds, like beads
you roll from the water stones;
you cannot walk without dancing.
My grandmother’s smile lilts
as she tells this story,
the one I cannot believe.
You are the father who stands in a suit
and asks for my report card.
I have never seen the dancing boy.
She says he was driven away
by your teacher, the wooden rulerhe brought down on your head
to keep your eyes from the window,
so you would learn to think without the open sky.
See the Bushman Copyright S.Body 2 of 4
Now, above us, that sky.
In the distance a long muscle curve of hills.
Around us, a valley that rises like a lion’s giant sides,
rough skin slung loose on raw mountain bones.
We move like fleas across its hide — I feel tiny, awkward
prey at any moment for a restless paw.
For my twelfth birthday,
you’ve brought me to the place
where you were born.
You tell me we might see someone, a Bushman.
Not your father, you say, but a kind of king to all men.
He lives on the first of the hills.
Now I think of this man, hope we will find him soon.
I can’t remember a time
when I didn’t want to come here.
To grow up in the North
is to learn hunger, the gleaning of light.
We live on shifts between clouds,
on vapours, dividings
small particles of hope.
Africa was a warm glimmer
my grandmother raised on the air,
a rare light
I watched for in your eyes, the muscles of your face.
I knew nothing of this giant energy, this urging
that insists itself now into my skin, my lungs,
that wants to live in and through me.
See the Bushman Copyright S.Body 3 of 4
By noon, the heat comes in rhythm, a slow rising of breath.
All around, its rough presence
seems to watch, and wait.
My mind seeks out a weapon for this king,
a heavy stone tower
that will dent the earth, lower and cool the savage light.
This, I tell myself, will be the Bushman’s home.
Without buildings, the sky swings open, a wide trapdoor
I won’t look at—
I’m afraid to fall.
I keep my eyes fixed on your legs, your footprints
as they mark the soil.
You try to teach me to walk softly, tap the ground
so my feet will find answers there.
You tell me that here, each child learns to live
as the spirit of his own body, learns to lift
into the inner music
piped from this strange, live air.
But my thoughts are bouldered, heavy as monuments
in the shape of a Northern man.
I shrug tight into myself —
my body wants to close over, sluggish, solid
as the cold city where I was raised.
See the Bushman Copyright S.Body 4 of 4
When we move up into the cooler hills, I hardly notice
how a new growth sings out from everywhere —
I’m watching the Bushman’s hilltop.
When we reach it, it is bare.
I become the shape of my mouth:
a round, childish ‘O’.
But you’re behind me now,
your hands on my shoulders:
He is here..
You cover my eyes,
free my ears
for what I refuse to see.
Listen.
For a long time, nothing.
Only my own heart, the stubborn plodding
of my climb.
Then–
Small sounds, rhythms
lightly played, the click and whirr
of wings, a leaf’s flic-flac —
between the beats
a silence
small enough to fit a man.
Amnesiac
i)
I hear on the radio how you’ve been found: wandering
on the beach, soaked to the skin, in full evening suit.
They take you in, search every inch of you –
mouth, skin, clothes – find no labels, no words,
only your trapped eyes,
their path as aimless and undecipherable as the waves.
On the notepad they give, you write nothing
but a feverish sketch – a piano. So vivid
it takes form under your hands only minutes later
when they lead you to the organ in the hospital chapel.
Here your hands find the paths
your tongue could not:
a pressured, tumbling vocabulary,
the pure upheaval of waters
— your life, your urgency —
channelled through a tunnel of skill.
You who are a phantasm in words — helpless, infantile —
become in music a being of power, forcing a language
once arcane and classical
to speak the unruly ocean truths
your core still trembles with . /2
Amnesiac
ii)
No woman could hear your story without wanting
to know more. Perhaps the mother in us
longs for what you could be:
a lover and a child in one .
The playful ones among us envision
how you might go through life speaking only piano:
trying to buy marrows, or fruit, drumming endless long-fingered rhythms
as the aproned men at the market shake their heads.
What kind of friend would you be, unfettered by words,
formed only by music, leading me
into a wild whirl of notes
where I’d be talk-naked, new-skinned, learning the world
through your fingertips.
The CBC announcer interrupts my daydream,
says they know how to find you: already
someone is reading your music
like fingerprints, like blood.
But I want to know you now,
before they name, place and time you:
While you are still pure life,
waves crashing on the shore.
Nature's Path 