Koos Prinsloo [1957-1994]

Johann de Lange

I
Death is the passing ... of a living being into what
Christian Boltanski calls “an absolutely disgusting pile of shit”.
         Didier Semin

Death, Didier Semin wrote in An artist of uncertainty,
is the passing of a subject into the state
of an object; the passing of a human being
into a thing; of a friend
into a corpse, a stranger:
3 o’clock in the morning,
the hour of garbage cans
and jingling milk bottles,
they took away your gaunt blind body
in a black body bag.
The slaughtered morning,
still bloody and shivering.
The hour of carcasses
grimacing on meat-hooks,
of buttocks quivering on the butcher’s block,
when the saws sing piercingly
at the abattoirs, and stray dogs
yelp around the entrails.
The morning after your death
the papers reported in black
on white only the bare facts.
Three columns and a photo.
But it’s another image
that haunts me: the rectum as a grave.

II
In the Great Rift Valley, the genesis,
and the Kudiakam pan
where baobab trees once burned
as in a dream and the lioness
crouches drinking attentively;
underneath the pink tufts
of the wild chestnut bushy
with drooping old man’s beard,
domain of the timid-grey dik-dik,
of “thousands upon thousands of wildebeest
braying and bellowing, their hooves
thundering across the dusty plains,”
in the pitch green valleys and forests,
invisible and frail, your nemesis hides.

III
My eyes roam you Africa
your Masai Mara like a green skin
with clearings like pores
torn green shirt of Africa
my volcanic Africa
rough elephant hide of lava Africa
black sarcoma Africa
Rift Valley and ashen escarpment Africa
my tectonic restless Africa
Africa with the string of lakes
round her wrinkled throat
Africa of the fickle rivers
with rain brief as infatuations
dwindling into riverbeds
Africa your indecipherable soul
Africa of steppes savannahs and forests
Africa of flame-tree and blue gum
Africa bleeding through a river mouth
mute Africa
receive your fair-haired son
joined to a plasma bag and memories
the frightened child in gaunt pyjamas and confusion

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