[Digital Poetics 4.23] Four Poems by Clifton Gachagua
Image by Brian Muraya
After Reading Tracy K Smith’s Ordinary Light
I find that I do not remember much of childhood. Not to say that it was an unhappy one, just that I do not remember a lot. Not the food, the breakfasts, not the big holidays, not kindergarten, that age before Primary School. Not much comes to mind, not even my mother, especially not her. There were the evening walks where I thought she’d re-appear from work, watching strangers at the bus stop, picking up and smoking their burning cigarette filters in the glorious dust at St. Augustine’s Presbyterian, babysitting a cousin learning to crawl in her red dungarees, same cousin who would years later say uka tuthicane. Come fuck me. In adulthood I tell a woman I’m engaged to about a deacon at Presbyterian who’d put me on his lap, put his fingers inside me, make me hold something, his red gums and brilliant white teeth like an open zipper. How sure I’m I this happened? Were his gums purple, did he wear lipstick? My fiance leaves me a few wakes later after this, says it’s the booze. I remember the pregnant mother who had shopped for a girl, spitting into an vegetable oil tin, eventually blessed with a boy, my brother, now a deacon at a Presbyterian church. There were condoms – government-issued, Chinese-made, we blew up or filled into water bombs, our hands and the rims of mouths glistening with lubricant. There were the tadpoles we confused for fish, the rabbits that died after we fed them molasses, home pigeons we’d skin like chicken, roast them over hydrocarbon fires, eat the burnt skin and still red and raw meat. How happy we were, tucking our small members between spindly thighs, thinking ourselves girls, wanting to be, already certain forms of flight taxiing into the skinny geographies of our fatherless bodies. What if I never looked at the world as a child, Gluck? That I do not remember looking, have no memory of the rest of it, everything else swallowed by the part of the brain responsible for forgetting?
the last hangman
how it must feel, the legacy as Kenya’s last hangman,
although, strictly speaking, you were not the last one,
all those hush hush deaths that get lost in the archive,
the ones that stay with you longer,
but even you memory has it’s own secrets,
something beyond and outside supresion,
much like lapis lazuli is important in history
right before the discovery of the artificial and ornamental.
and if there will ever be a biography
what will it say? how demure you were, collected?
how hot you liked your tea, with honey,
the only simple pleasure in your long, winding life,
would it make a passive mension of the softness of your hands,
how after she held them, the indian clairvoyant
whose husband you had just hanged?
will it mention Venus shining beyond
as life left the eyes, two bad oysters in their sockets,
or your walks out in the country with your son,
walking home to a wife who held you close,
so tight, so long after you had stopped breathing.
will it be more sinister? preparations for a hanging,
much like ablutions, another morning routine,
an Anglican God in your veins,
the favourite navy blue tie and gold clip, shoes shined,
well pressed suit, white handkerchief,
and finally kissing your sun on the temple;
there are places the ferryman can show affection,
before the bones become kindling,
ashes useful for primroses, lost memories turned red,
and those dead oysters, dreaming, staring
at a beautiful God, dicks stiff in the air.
Digo Road, Mombasa
how to carry the sad truth of truth,
this new love of mine, who’ll never know it,
as long as there’s white in my eyes,
the breeze on your fabric, like the prophet's first wife,
an emblem, something tarpaulin and light.
we are walking down Digo,
any open shop will work, any food will do,
how I think of you in Maulidi
writing prose at the shore, your fingers hungry.
the heavy weight of conversation,
of maudlin men hugging, of a quick lecture on slave tunnels.
wale walituuza, where are they now?
we are falling in love with the children of their children.
down Digo, a beggar child being prepared for display,
the mother an expressionist. a street of banks.
later in life, who will he blame?
& now that I have allowed myself the luxury of desire,
you & you, the poet, the commodore, the humorist—
I find myself in the unfamiliar, the damned, has-been.
your face posted somewhere along the marina,
the fabric of it unreadable, always under veils, moth pollen on your lips,
what music do you dance to under those fabrics,
which poets excite you, make you angry,
beyond manga, Japanese prints, Korean drama, what else?
documentaries on birds of paradise? an ornithologist’s voice?
already I have learnt those familiar words
between people who pretend to like each other:
I'm counting what verbs, what superlatives, what curse words,
should your religion allow mine.
traveling man now, always a tumbler in the bag,
vodka for the difficult mornings,
my penance to the catholic god
is that I have given up cigarettes,
still a tired body shuffling among young
lovers dancing to the useless music of our time—
every generation deserves its excesses.
& what’s exhaustion? what’s left of angst?
what comes after? this acceptance
of bodies in motion, toasting at 1 am
towards the formation of the absolute nothing?
the minimalism of last moments, the last words,
that there was nothing at all to begin with?
do not get me wrong; there’s love and beauty, the heavy curtains from my fiction-dreams, the backstreet sex with someone who’s eaten so much mabuyu the tongue is a permanent green-red, the undercooked chicken tika and biriani, the dharma coming to me in a fever dream, frothing on his lips, the colours of his robes red-green—& you, there’s you. while I know nothing can ever come out this except a literal life of letters, to be posthumously edited by our sons and daughters, whose abandoning will not explain the missing dates, offering excuses for the unfamiliar language, explaining why some graphic details had to be omitted, seeing that shame haunts us even in death.
outside my hotel room i write to another about Venus, the moons of Jupiters, but they do not understand. you would. & since meaning is so important I end up writing the illegible, the crass, the sibilant, the i-want-you, and what are you wearing?
when they play the old music I'm reminded to forget these terrible dialectics, the civil wars going on. tumeuona mkono wa bwana.
there’s the fear. what becomes prerequisite—
the old question of what is, what becomes,
I know I have not learnt anything since my reincarnation,
might as well have been sleepwalking, relying on old memories.
at the danger of blasphemy, the stars say I'll come back as nothing:
I've not been educated in logic—mainly just rhyme and a lack of reason—
if there is a possibility of coming back as nothing at all
nothing and at all, I’ll take it,
& between the bends and straight of your body,
will come the affection, the not knowing,
the voices feeding your greedy fingers.
If the quiet distress of the remembered body,
the single-mindedness of certain forms of abandon,
the one who says: I've been trying for centuries,
no lovers left alive, not in this realm,
can conjure coming back as nothing.
They are saying prayers for you in Aden.
Past Tense
First, there is the treatise you mention, the one about all phallic monuments covered in butterflies, all the past lovers, then the scars, the scabs you like picking at (and eating) until, once more, there is blood as dark red as a confessional. Who is this little boy you let yourself become, who attends evening mass at the Holy Family Basilica, reads about the lives of saints from expensive book’s bought at Cardinal Otunga bookshop? I come to you every night, listen, or pretend to. All the while thinking: how ridiculous you look in all that make up and silk and lace, dolled up in the paleness of a body bound to the crematorium, an orchid on your lapel.
Second, the manifesto on identity, the spectrum, the history of delirium in the men in your family dating all the way to pre-Ludwig Krapf, to the invention of Swahili, so that all we can say of certain things bodies in motion do is nakupenda sana, nakupenda sana. Those cold days in Dar Es Salaam, in a cold room listening to the entire discography of Franco, antidepressants like Skittles, kernel, no one re-fill them, no prescription, night of fevers and tambourines and bells in your head – we are our worst own figurines. Thinking of Mbilia Bel – Nakei Nairobi, Ezali mabe nayoka okomi na pasi naza te. And your years in Singapore, Belfast, New Delhi, Ouagadougou, Kinshasa, leading horsemen and transqueers into back alleys, listening to Charlie Parker and the Soweto Gospel Choir, all light at night, dreary and early mornings, steadfast, memory, bilingual, reading Senghor, alama za dukuduku, liking the pain, moaning like a gramophone, the laughter as we read each other our first president’s ghostwritten memoirs, another traitor of the republic, the Rothmans and Marlboros and double switch Dunhills that now keep you company in Nairobi, all lewd and beautiful, still no hair in your armpits or face, still waving your arms around in sleep, still the quiet concertos, the quiet unending jazz of your body return home.
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Clifton is the author of Madman at Kilifi and Cartographer of Water. His work appears in Africa39, Manchester Review, Africa Writers Trust, Saraba, Jalada, Kwani?, Harvard Divinity Journal, Poetry Foundation, The Gonjon Pin and Other Stories, AfroSF, Sunspot Jungle, PEN America, Enkare.
