You are a childhood memory and so not a real place; as foreign to me in remembrance as you were that first day– where others have the fragrance of their mother's breast I instead have red dust and the way an acacia thorn feels rolled between your fingers; the quiet of a savannah's promise and the lock of a python's jaws upon the fox's disappearing face– and I choose not to hold instead the setting of a deadpan sun, but rather the temerity of an English rose transplanted in the shadow of a towering aloe to lick at the lapping of a chlorine wave and the misunderstandings between a live-in maid and her Canadian employer best translated by their eldest daughter; you let her know she puts too much sugar in the chocolate chip cookies, but ruin my English suede half-chaps in the washing machine from lack of familiarity with the subtleties of Western fabrics and expense not spared on riding tack. I learn to iron my own uniform in the morning and defend your right to take the second board to your one small room; we seem to agree on what it doesn't mean to steal, whereas this woman tries to communicate through buying smaller bags of corn meal for your pay. Children in this house have grown accustomed to what you treat as new and I envy your expression of resentment the way you might my comparative status; this doesn't keep me from teasing your own little girl, leaving her stranded on the kitchen counter like a discarded notion of peace between our families and I still wish I could say sorry. The people you learn about when they crawl into your truck cab to steal cookies and a pair of binoculars present themselves a bit more frankly– Primates have not abandoned here the cradle of what we call civiliz(ed)ation; Baboons are much more frightening in their entitlement than all of Rome or Mongol's armies; Hippos cannot pretend to care whether you think it's a good day to go swimming, while elephants have families sewn with a different coloured thread than mine and hold each other's tails crossing the river. I'd like to be where things are strange and impermeable to the passing of Human collisions with the ideas we spoke as if tailored to bodies still reeling from the way the water fled the sea even as it fell to travel underground until it reached a place where everyone would die if it had not appeared to flood the city of slow-gathered souls in faith of an Okavango promise– that dirt we've wrung out from the Ground as if our backs could break us is faintly breathing, still– the Air has not here left the body, rather heaves and in soft stumbling steps reveals Momentum left untouched– I romanticize what was my first hint that everything proclaimed by pain of Death presumed by fear might not yet be believed; could still become the way I'm growing and intuit as just possible by the purple clouds bloomed malevolent; electric pink on horizons days before the storm we knew would come and fill our swimming pools with mud and filth and overrun our hearts with the beauty of lightning struck just once, perhaps even twice per year; the vision of green on these bare hills topped only by the violent blush of violets found in just an hour's grace of springtime.
