I
Yellow-smocked Capricorns
disembarking on a soon-to-be
Afrikaaners Only beach,
made lonelier by the flutter
of a weatherbeaten flag.
Worse than the plague and tone-deaf
to the local sirens,
nothing escaped their ledgers.
Everything they touched,
and saw, and heard about,
received a brand and a homesick
name and anyone who asked them
what they were looking for
was told to go to hell,
or stared at with oxlike
premeditation.
II
Luxury has fed on darkness.
Wafer-thin as a beginning doubt,
a strip of trembling light
splits water from sky.
The disoriented explorer
hoped for sunrise but counted out
a chimp’s minute like a charm
against murderous sunset.
The hagglers, the fishers of men
saw everywhere the handiwork
of the rude, rulebreaking tribe.
And leaping from dog to dog
the snapping fleas, intent, serene,
knowing that nothing was without
its price, from anger to chastity
to terror at its final stopping place.
III
Would you grudge me a living,
a scraping by, a crust of bread,
a life so free of care
that sin becomes necessity?
The string quartet nods itself to silence,
prelude done and now a fifteen-second
pause. Or make that fifteen years
of calling everything to order,
of calling out the traitors with the saints,
to cull against an unexpected list
of attributes, love and courage
left like luggage at the exile’s dock.