The Tranquillity CD

Gail Dendy

You can buy the sound of the sea for less
than a hundred rand. The voices of whales.
Here is a box of glowing songbirds
comically whistling the dance of the hours
morning, noon and night.

And do pears sing?
asks my four-year-old child, her thumb
pink from too much sucking. The sea is
swollen with moon-ness and her voice
is sleepily pinned

to the breast of the ivory thrush that I sometimes
wear, or keep secure with my jewellery,
together with garnets, moonstones, amethysts
and pearls.
My daughter demands

that I play her favourite CD again.
I try another, instead. This time there are musical rapids,
idyllic mountain sounds, volleys of streams
and a lyre of covert crickets.
She likes it less, she tells me.

Her hair
appears spun from proverbial gold thread
trussed in the thicket of natural forces,
her plastic bracelet a henge of stones
in lurid colours.

She has never been to the sea.
I tell her it sounds of blue, that gulls are
white, that whales are a long way off.
Soon she will learn to read, her fingers
treading lightly on papery pebbles

as she roams through a lifetime’s darkness,
incurable, inherited. Generations ago
our family’s eyes were bluish-grey, green sometimes,
with a splash of iris.
Then a wicked frost, vigilant

and undemanding, unsolicited. It was the dullness
that bothered him. Descending the mountain,
the doctor rode through the night, changed horses twice.
Stumbled on the road. On the way home,
he refreshed his smooth white body in the sea.

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