Heave

Damian Garside

It was such an insufferably hot Durban spring day
like standing next to a blast furnace, or four square in the exhaust emissions
of a huge, overheating, industrial machine.

He is mildly aroused by his wife’s naked, sleeping body;
finds himself teasing her labia majora et minora
applying the requisite pressure
with the spruced, carefully-groomed tips
of both index fingers

fantasizes
that interlaced with the flat, grating rhythm of his wife’s incessant snoring,
are messages from afar and (just a couple)
from above
coded in every conceivable human language.

She stirs
as other fingers spring into action

moving across the smoothness of belly, crossing
a frontier marked by a magnificent tattoo.

(Here he grows increasingly worried about issues of penmanship
imagines the indelible artist inscribing
his sign

ink taking root through a thin red film).

       ****

He had to rouse himself to get up and work on his thesis.
Tear himself away from sultry-sweet dream.

Too much time and energies (he pencilled there)
misspent on eschatological exploration
of the possibilities lurking in the phrase “hell for leather”.

Maybe it was considerably less than an hour before he fell asleep.
He will not be able to remember
whether the dream was in hard, gritty close-up,
or shot through filters in
flattering softness of focus.

       ****

The footnotes, endnotes, abstract and appendix
were written with
white-hot speed, full textual ferocity

as if his life depended on it
(which, of course,
in a sense it did)

longing for the
impossible reality of the final
full-stop

that huge and heavy-handed clock
chugging to a halt on Tiger tank tracks,
lifting a tower of millstone off
long-suffering shoulders.

       ***

It was an insufferably average Durban day
too much humidity by far for
the human temperament

at the edge of the pier the
gulls were swirling

some of them dipped
through the last
unbroken wave

final expression, though hardly a crescendo (for poetic purposes),

of sea’s rasping rhythm
and sublimated gravity of moon’s epic heave.




Litnet: 17 February 2004

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