Echoes in the forest

Saturday morning,  brilliant sunlight, the garden watered. More inconclusive test results. The housemate is on the sofa sharing a bunch of sweet hanepoot grapes with the Great Dane. She tosses her head back and flips a grape into her mouth, then the dog puts his head back and opens his mouth wide and she flips a grape into his mouth. Happiness.

Hanepoot is a Muscat grape with a flowery  fragrance  and taste of honey. The name  means ‘cockerel’s foot or testicle’ and refers either to the shape of the leaves or the grapes themselves. Grapes have been grown on dry mountain slopes here for  four hundred years or so. Napoleon loved the sweet muscat wines from Constantia and took many bottles into exile on St Helena. Hanepoot grapes make good raisins too and I buy large brown paper bags of sundried raisins in winter, along with sticky slabs of dried dates from the valleys of the Klein Olifant River, named after the small herds of elephant that used to roam there

This morning I was washing my face with some aromatherapy almond milk bought last month and  noticed how dry and  tired my skin is at the end of summer. When I was a child my mother’s English friends would complain bitterly how the  harsh sun of Africa ruined their complexions and my mother would shake her head,  blow circles of cigarette smoke and  say it was  a small price to pay for the  joy of being able to live in Africa.

She was right and I feel the same way.

Last night I lay and watched the half-moon  sailing like  an upturned cupcake through the night sky so crisp and clear –  the Afrikander bulls were roaring and bellowing amongst the reeds on the far side of the river, the hammersmith plovers clinking in the ditch over the road and .somewhere in the distance there were voudoun drumming ceremonies. The sound of drumming is one of those sounds I have  listened to since early childhood and it brings me such comfort and nostalgia, like the sight of cooking fires at dusk or the clopping noise of a blue eland coming down to the river from the  mountains or that forlorn mournful cry of the fish eagle over the Zambesi..Sounds that signify home.

And this is what I’m reading, drinking green tea, sitting by an opne window, letting go all over again.

This Ecstacy

By Chard DeNiord

It’s not paradise I’m looking for

but the naming I hardly gave a thought to.

Call it the gift I carried in my loneliness

among the animals before I started

listening to the news. Call it the hint

I had about the knowledge that would explode.

In the meantime, which is real time

plus the past, you’re swishing your skirt

and speaking French, which is more

than I can take, which I marvel at

like a boy from the most distant seat

in the Kronos Dome, where I am one

of so many now I see the point

of falling off. There’s not enough seats

for us all to attend the eschaton.

This ecstasy that plants beauty

on my tongue, so that if it were

a wing, I’d be flying with the quickness

of a hummingbird and grace of a heron,

is so much mercy in light of the darkness

that comes. Who would say consolation?

Who would say dross? Not that anyone

would blame them. All night I hear

so many echoes in the forest I’m tempted

to look back, to save myself in hindsight,

where all I see is the absence of me.

Where all I hear is your voice,

which couldn’t be more strange.

How to go on walking hand in hand

without our bodies on the path

we made for our feet, talking, talking?