There is music by Rethabile Masilo | Poems Rethabile Likes
There is music
by Rethabile Masilo
in old men's hands, when sounds together
come to crush the caesura,
like an old photograph torn years ago
and now wanting its memory back,
a dermis stretching to help scar the cut
just like goat skins over drums in Africa,
music yet to be born until then, born the way
he filled that bar with it,
a stream of altos that had suddenly entered the hall together.
Low flying. But what had that music to do with us
to require all of this? For afterwards,
his fingers flew, or seemed to fly,
surprising every key in its sleep with a kiss,
a bright roughness that was proof he was touching
only the tops of most keys, like removing a bad heart
to keep it from going worse, to avoid
having to give it spinach and pills, removing it
so it won't wither again like before.
His surgical fingers were prey fleeing a predator,
and they flew to the roof of the smoky room in one despair.
From my table just then I saw it, saw it as if it had been there
all the while, circling like a hunted child with wings,
love dressed in a mauve cape, going after
the broken-hearted of the world,
cape flapping like a hurt wing.
And though the coloured girls giggling in the back
and swaying to jazz like they were having sex already,
did not see it at all, and kept saying with nameless tongues
to the man hunched over his piano on the stage,
to now play some of the rebel sounds they'd started liking:
kwaito music, I knew I wasn't hallucinating despite
the whisky I'd already poured down my throat,
and this to me somehow said that these same women,
dressed in killer jeans, always chain smoking,
wouldn't stop to love me if I were the last man in there.
This I knew. Still I wanted to get the attention of the one
with peeking boobs and in Sesotho try to chat her up
into loving me, the same way I loved the breasts on her.
come to crush the caesura,
like an old photograph torn years ago
and now wanting its memory back,
a dermis stretching to help scar the cut
just like goat skins over drums in Africa,
music yet to be born until then, born the way
he filled that bar with it,
a stream of altos that had suddenly entered the hall together.
Low flying. But what had that music to do with us
to require all of this? For afterwards,
his fingers flew, or seemed to fly,
surprising every key in its sleep with a kiss,
a bright roughness that was proof he was touching
only the tops of most keys, like removing a bad heart
to keep it from going worse, to avoid
having to give it spinach and pills, removing it
so it won't wither again like before.
His surgical fingers were prey fleeing a predator,
and they flew to the roof of the smoky room in one despair.
From my table just then I saw it, saw it as if it had been there
all the while, circling like a hunted child with wings,
love dressed in a mauve cape, going after
the broken-hearted of the world,
cape flapping like a hurt wing.
And though the coloured girls giggling in the back
and swaying to jazz like they were having sex already,
did not see it at all, and kept saying with nameless tongues
to the man hunched over his piano on the stage,
to now play some of the rebel sounds they'd started liking:
kwaito music, I knew I wasn't hallucinating despite
the whisky I'd already poured down my throat,
and this to me somehow said that these same women,
dressed in killer jeans, always chain smoking,
wouldn't stop to love me if I were the last man in there.
This I knew. Still I wanted to get the attention of the one
with peeking boobs and in Sesotho try to chat her up
into loving me, the same way I loved the breasts on her.
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