levelheaded: South Africa

This poem’s enigmatic, interconnected, three-lined nature poems are essentially (if not technically) haiku.

Some of the stanzas are fairly simple. When the lioness “stretches her nails into the dirt / & the bowels of my fear,” the speaker presents an effective and understandable cause-and-effect relationship between a lion’s claws and pants-pooping (where are “bowels of fear” if not in actual bowels?).  Similarly, we’re shown how the futility of an “ornamented kingfisher,” even against a phrase a simple as “the green hills,” works as a metaphor for what the poem names “ego.” Here the poem gives us a relatively simple human-nature relationship. Nature acts upon a person. Nature represents some aspect of humanness.

But the poem also represents more complex, ambiguous human-nature relationships. In the first stanza, people hold a grudge against a river that’s “split the land” and presumably the people. The poem largely avoids making South Africa’s socio-politics a central idea, but we’re reminded that behind the safaris, behind the “electric fence,” there may be something threatening, unsatisfied, and distinctly human. It touches the same nerve when the speaker generalizes about “The ethos of this country” as “the hacked millimeters of a rhino horn.” Again, the speaker – an observer who renders quick aphorisms on the thin line between wild and tame – reminds us that a very human violence also takes place here.

To this speaker, South Africa is a source of awe even when it frightens or disgusts. This South Africa is viewed through the limited lens of someone on the safe side of the “electric fence,” someone cognizant of the “international breakfast” the lions could have if that fence fell away, and someone who is comfortable enough to make jokes about the danger. It’s a South Africa decontextualized by the speaker’s (and our) distance from the actual place. In effect, the speaker wagers its audience will participate in making South Africa exotic. What saves the poem from pure romance (and the poem is largely romantic in its approach to what must be a diverse, unquantifiable country), is its consciousness of its touristic quality. The poem doesn’t set out to give us all of South Africa. Instead, it sets out and succeeds in giving us what it feels like to have a thoughtful, successful visit.

To return to the poem’s haiku-like essence, the speaker’s consciousness of his observer status is carried forth in the special authority developed by the poem’s form. In their mystic imagism, the stanzas pull off an odd power.  They aren’t exactly parables. They aren’t exactly koans. But they adopt the same sage quality. Part of the pleasure of this poem arrives with the recognition that the poem’s sageness is curtain that can be pulled back to give us one more layer of complexity.

-The Editors