At Kalk Bay, Cape Town

The white-haired man who scrapes and ploughs his ballpoint words into the page (overcome by the pathos of his age): ‘Outside the old sea sighs and soughs and grudgingly begins another day.’ The young not-yet-poet with wanderlust who walked to Spain and played the violin - his journey now a book among the books that line these shelves, arranged in dust. The surfers biding time out in the bay; the double tracks that run through the train station; the dealer, whistling as he packs away creaking tables, chairs, unsold once again, like the over-priced paintings, framed and hung and collecting time, fading, becoming past. All of these I see, remember, intense their presence, comical the place of my epiphany: a library two metres long, a metre wide where books give place to square white tiles and a basin, water dripping from its taps. The antique house that is an antique shop; its bathroom holds the knowledge of the ages. A souvenir election ballot yellows on the wall. I turn to the rows of books. Union Castle Guide to East and Southern Africa, 1938. Defeating the Mau Mau. Jungle path-finder: A Biography. Mackay of Uganda. Pith helmets on the spines, safari print on the khaki pages. Though they are not the stuff of empire, my words will also make anachronism one day - one day be ancient, lost, forgotten - but if they end up in a bathroom-library in a dusty corner of an antique store with surfers and trains passing by unawares I will be glad if someone stops to browse through my decaying lines if only to laugh, or cringe.

 

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