The Washing Tree
Here linens are strung in pairs to blanch, white
lead to wet chalk, and shirts bear the ghosts
of arms, empty cuffs opening like crocus heads
in spring, a frangipani offers branches – a waiter
balancing tea or silver service on wrists
scalded smooth by the grate of thin-wire hangers,
two tortoiseshells sleep in turquoise shade, lazy
under leaves of pastel cottons, a red dress
faded pink, olive chinos slack about the waist,
and when she brings a basket, gathers
these sun-dried fruits, their fibres throw dusts
of citrus and mimosa rinsing each thread
anew, first in milky buckets on the stoep,
then a second scouring in the veld’s wildflower
breeze, tincture of dark gulleys, Drakensberg
meadow-stars, watsonias, gladioli, arum lilies
that leave the lungs laundered of stain and tarnish
the mind raw, stiff starched, neatly folded.
Arcadia
We left early that morning, looking for blood warmth,
sugar beet fields, pedals and crankset muttering
under the weight of two, the grass on the green anointed
with chrism: a snowdrift of blossom heaped and greying
like a paint water jar,
__________________past booksellers buried in dust-jacket
towers and vellum, fishmongers cocooning rainbow trout
in shallow scrapes of ice, through bell tolls from St Mary
the Great and St Mary the Less, to the small reserve
they call Paradise – washed in willow, butterbur,
the blue wink damselfly:
____________________ a girl could float like a leaf
on this diet of spinneys, wood-smoke, summer, or dance
behind a laurel hedge and thicket,
___________________________as I once did for a boy.
The Kindling 