searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned And we all knew one thing by being there. The space we stood around had been emptied
105 Into us to keep, it penetrated Clearances that suddenly stood open. High cries were felled and a pure change happened.
8
I thought of walking round and round a space Utterly empty, utterly a source
no Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place In our front hedge above the wallflowers. The white chips jumped and jumped and skited4 high. I heard the hatchet's differentiated Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh
115 And collapse of what luxuriated Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all. Deep planted and long gone, my coeval5 Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole, Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,
120 A soul ramifying and forever Silent, beyond silence listened for.
1987
The Sharping Stone1
In an apothecary's0 chest of drawers, pharmacist's Sweet cedar that we'd purchased second hand, In one of its weighty deep-sliding recesses I found the sharping stone that was to be
5 Our gift to him. Still in its wrapping paper. Like a baton of black light I'd failed to pass.
?
Airless cinder-depths. But all the same, The way it lay there, it wakened something too . . . I thought of us that evening on the logs,
10 Flat on our backs, the pair of us, parallel, Supported head to heel, arms straight, eyes front, Listening to the rain drip off the trees And saying nothing, braced to the damp bark. What possessed us? The bare, lopped loveliness
15 Of those two winter trunks, the way they seemed
4. Shot off obliquely. 1. Whetstone for sharpening metal blades. 5. Of the same age.
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THE SHARPING STONE / 283 7
Prepared for launching, at right angles across A causeway of short fence-posts set like rollers. Neither of us spoke. The puddles waited. The workers had gone home, saws fallen silent.
20 And next thing down we lay, babes in the wood, Gazing up at the flood-face of the sky Until it seemed a flood was carrying us Out of the forest park, feet first, eyes front, Out of November, out of middle age,
25 Together, out, across the Sea of Moyle.2
Sarcophage des epoux.3 In terra cotta. Etruscan couple shown side by side, Recumbent on left elbows, husband pointing With his right arm and watching where he points,
30 Wife in front, her earrings in, her braids Down to her waist, taking her sexual ease. He is all eyes, she is all brow and dream, Her right forearm and hand held out as if Some bird she sees in her deep inward gaze
35 Might be about to roost there. Domestic Love, the artist thought, warm tones and property, The frangibility of terra cotta . . . Which is how they figured on the colour postcard
(Louvre, Departement des Antiquites)4
40 That we'd sent him once, then found among his things.
He loved inspired mistakes: his Spanish grandson's English transliteration, thanking him For a boat trip: 'That was a marvellous Walk on the water, granddad.' And indeed
45 He walked on air himself, never more so Than when he had been widowed and the youth In him, the athlete who had wooed her? Breasting tapes and clearing the high bars? Grew lightsome once again. Going at eighty
50 On the bendiest roads, going for broke At every point-to-point5 and poker-school, 'He commenced his wild career' a second time And not a bother on him. Smoked like a train And took the power mower in his stride.
55 Flirted and vaunted. Set fire to his bed. Fell from a ladder. Learned to microwave.
So set the drawer on freshets0 of thaw water surges And place the unused sharping stone inside it:
2. Channel between the northwestern coast of 4. Department of Antiquities, Louvre Museum, County Antrim in Ireland and the southwestern Paris, in which this Etruscan funerary statue, coast of Scotland. known as The Cerveteri Couple, is to be found. 3. Coffin for a married couple. 5. Horse race over jumps.
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2838 / J. M. COETZEE
To be found next summer on a riverbank
60 Where scythes once hung all night in alder trees
And mowers played dawn scherzos6 on the blades,
Their arms like harpists' arms, one drawing towards,
One sweeping the bright rim of the extreme.
1996
