"I know the feeling," my friend chuckled,
going through a divorce.
"But bring those midlife woods
to the Karoo, here you'll find yourself again,
where the half-desert sports a green fold
and its ancient leather glove lies inside-out."
He talks like that, my poetic friend.
So I freewheeled down the valley and into a village
founded on the floor of a prehistoric sea.
Past a wagon sunk in on its axle -
the car's brights shining full on a willow,
a huge, suspended vegetable chandelier
beaming in the bend: one of the Big Five . . .
and on the snow-globe of a church, shaken up
for a second with bats and owls.
A place of roots, where the clock hands are all stuck
on a forgotten event in the past.
"Strange," I say.
My friend shrugs nonchalantly:
"Just the customary hour for folk around here
to look at the clock. Nothing is inexplicable."
Palaeontologists have a field day here, I'm told -
one of the most fertile bedrocks of mammal fossils ever,
as old as the dinosaurs. Truncated creatures
prised from the stone are held together with wire
and matchsticks keep their jaws open, in a little museum.
"Soon you'll feel pieced together," my friend assures me.
"No prying claws of a shrink for this town."
Days pass. The roof contracts, expands, smacking -
primordial ghost rain beating in the silver.
"Heard before I came that my grandfather was born here," I say.
He left the valley when he was eight in an oxwagon,
rather late in life, to emerge for the first time
from the seabed of Gondwanaland.
"But time," says my friend.
" . . . was different then." - Anyway, not long before
or even thereafter, the settlers fought and hunted
an age-old tribe of yellow people who'd been living here.
You only have to glance at the names on the graves
to know who didn't really perish in this place.
"Scientists now believe that Time's an illusion - a construct
to render bearable the impossible," my friend says:
"That the future and the past happen simultaneously."
"An odd thought that those vanquished Bushmen might
still be in our midst." I lick my fingers. Lamb of the Karoo.
"Odd, indeed. They're just invisible," (my friend says). -
In the matchbox houses, on theír side of the Divide . . .
A town cut in half. Like me, midway through.
And instantly I picture the timeless setting: the dust boulevards,
packed stone walls, thorn-bush meadows, under primeval water.
On higher ground my grandfather timeless now,
and the San chief, conversing. Old buddies; interest: eternity.
Me and my friend too not a beard-prick older, catching
the first fish, with the chief's daughters, just like yesterday.
Lamb and lion stuff. Science, that meets the Bible.
Pure paradise. And I almost feel "pieced together",
swigging the last vineyard balm: "See you in the morning."
"Yes," my friend says, and gets up too, as if reading my thoughts:
"The fossil museum, a post-natal unit." We laugh . . .
A comforting thought, that everyone who'd lived
in the valley in times past, is still with us in the present.
I get into bed. The nights here've been good to me.
This could be what's called "integration of the psyche".
Except for those dreams I've been getting.
They can't possibly be my own.