Tired of the pose, her left hand
moves, blurring the slow exposure,
ring flashing out, fingers slowly dissolving.
Body and soul, thought and emotion, the present
moment and hereafter: two sides of a coin
spinning so fast distinctions are useless.
Her eyes invite,
dify,
any hand
to touch her, knowing the soul,
intact,
whole,
subsists entirely
on the meager rations of the physical,
that flesh is permeable to Time,
her visible hand a claw of light and shadow,
as, alone and strangely generous,
she shares the slow death of her body with us.
Peter Sacks
TRANSVAAL: UNDER FROST
Too early for room-service,
we hunch over coffee in the lobby,
warm our hands and slip out
to the car as newspaper
boys untie their bundles.
Eastward from Pretoria, the road
drops to a low mauve line of mist–
Machadadorp, the Kruger National Park,
and Mozambique - while all around
the pale lowveld gleams
dead-still apart from wispy
vapors drifting from cattle
as they breathe, or drop dung.
Past Witbank, bands of grey bleach
to a blacklight for the stubble
