halfmens
namaqualand
the halfmens feeds off rare fog
that travels inland from the coast,
and struggles to seed. she is my sentry
to the afterlife: the hills here look
dead but they burn with grievances
and blooms; they paint their poisons
daily. the fog-dust comes to settle
on the lintel and echoes
with the hurtle of ghost ships
against rocks – the briefest
of morning wet; a transient glance
of flood at the boundary fence.
from the stoop i see aloes
and harsh-backed beetles braced
against the dry air tracking back;
the wind has eaten out a tortoise
and filled the shell with glass.
vygies grow slowly, disciplined
by the rain. they stay brightly alive,
strung virile and hot against the sky
like a wish, like stars. for kilometres
around the house there is nothing
real save stone tools and sand.
the halfmens swims on the elastic
of the horizon, on an ochre line;
on a thin float caught in love-making
with the purple muscle of sunrise
– a spindle-thread of lip-licking fat.
if i could have a heart – a latitude
of lust – crafted for me from a scoop
of grave-soil, i would be content
with the salt of it; i would fruit
like an oyster, blush like a sweet,
sweet prickly pear. all women should
be like this: lying beneath a mirror
weathered by a desert tide; have flesh
as beautifully blue as the haunches
of a kudu-ewe slaughtered in heat.
here, in the place where the arid
meets the sea, the living tastes
of scorched honey. some have roots
there; some can withstand an eternity
on the threshold. my sentinel – a bare
silhouette of something not quite – waits
hungrily for dawn, eager to outlast me.
Marcelle Olivier is a poet and archaeologist. She has been listed for the National Poetry Competition and Bridport Poetry and Flash Fiction Prizes, and her translations of contemporary South African poetry can be found in In a burning sea (Protea, 2015). You can read more of her writing here at Ink, Sweat & Tears, and in, amongst others, Oxford Poetry and New Contrast. She lives in Cambridge.
Note: The halfmens (Pachypodium namaquanum) is a large, long-living succulent plant native to the arid, rocky regions of western southern Africa. The name can be translated as ‘half-human’ – descriptive of its silhouette against the skyline.