Alex Smith

I was delighted to receive an email from Louis Greenberg earlier this week, he said: Looking through my archives, I find I have written very little in praise of my environment – I’m usually more concerned with expressing its difficulties or writing psychic escape to other, easier places. But here’s an old poem I thought might suit your guidelines. The poem, Spring Oak is part one of Carnival Note of Affection #5. Louis said of his novel, The Beggars’ Signwriters that it was a positive and intimate portrayal of Johannesburg suburbs. Melville1 and Melville2, extracts from the novel are part two of this Africa love note #5.

Spring Oak

Oak trees flick into life
like
I don’t know
like a jump-cut.
One day they’re all bare wintery twig fingers
next, they’re green-essence canopies
covering me and my
lurid thoughts
of suggestive girls
as I walk home this spring afternoon.

Last week’s jasmine is rancid now,
fly magnets on a dust-blown evening
waiting for rain.

And the girls and boys jostle
sultry tease and innuendo
eye-locks and tongue-passes.
We are now extruded out of our smelly duvet hideouts
and into the warm glare.

And the pristine verdance
shimmers and shelters
me and my thoughts
waiting for ripeness
and a feast of insects.

From The Beggars’ Signwriters:

Melville 1

As she walked a luxurious loop back to the station that day, the long, late afternoon turning into night, the candles of the restaurants, the lights of theatres and pubs glowing, Renée thought of Melville. Two or three little roads lined with cafés and restaurants, jazz clubs and dinner theatres, bars, hangouts and dives, like a little West End. Sometimes she missed home. Its low-key glitz seemed more genuine, less desperate to impress. Each little eatery there had its fairy lights, its strung bulbs, candlelit pavements and attempted avant-garde. Back home you didn’t stare at the local celebrities, and they could have a quiet drink and chat on the pavement just like anyone else. This made-up part of London, on the other hand, was painted in broad, billboard swathes. Renée read in a review somewhere that a particularly delicate film showed life in its detail, with periods of “thinking feelingly, and feeling thoughtfully”. Back home, like she had never managed here, she remembered having the space and time, the quiet, to think feelingly and feel thoughtfully.

Melville 2

She walks down 5th Street, and there’s the old woman behind her low wall, filling her bird feeder from a large bag of mixed seeds. A grey cat lounges on the veranda’s ledge, the red-polished tile baking its flabby belly. It peers with no intent, tail idly flicking, at the weavers and mossies clamouring nervously on the feeder’s blossoming peach tree. Bigger, shyer birds, the doves and pigeons and loeries, perch carefully on the razor wire of the neighbour’s wall, while the rackety mynahs squabble and traipse cannily along the top strand of electric fencing on the third corner. The woman’s made it all these years. “Good afternoon,” Renée calls to her, but she doesn’t hear her. Maybe her words are too choked up.

So, Renée’s back home again. Nothing she does or loves here in this urgent land is important, neither her art nor her painstaking self-defeatism. Photography. Collecting troubling lovers like charms. Here, at home, it’s all a bourgeois luxury, a diversion like poodle-keeping and hybridising tulips. She’s been put in her place; she’s nothing more than a dilettante. It seems her life is bound to a little circular track. She keeps coming back to the same old place, but with different eyes. Maybe that’s what home is. The one place in the universe that knows who you are, that tells you the truth after the whole world has flattered.