donderdag 12 september 2013

DANCE OF THE MONKEYS





I

Twilight. We became expected guests.
Kite strings full of ground glass entangled
high above the palms. Torches burned.
In all the din you said I was deceiving you.

For an instant there was silence, more perhaps
the absence of something else than sound, a listening
lasting longer than the booming moment
that the priest blessed us with holy water.

Then, in a primeval shriek, the foreplay began
which I repeatedly evoke: your father
with his lovely, red camp-eyes, my mother
in a loincloth of coercion. Children of our era.





II

Routine disappeared in the ritual, as did you
first in your head and afterwards in the mental home.
Bodies of predecessors and followers
billowed in a circle without jaws, without tail.

At the centre Hanuman the white monkey squirmed
with lust, peered through the chinks of his mask,
only at us, and barked out obscenities
in Sanskrit, only for you. Mama

never let go, waltzed in our kitchen until she could
no more, called me just as you her one and only.
I stuck the knife in the husk, where the eyes should be,
and knew again what I saw here, now must do.





III
In ever shrinking coils the snake of bodies
tightened round the old intrigues
that are also mine, your quibbling that is
always on target, our fate known too soon.

Forefathers wormed themselves into
our lives, penetrated all my programs.
I scanned the virus, you underwent the test:
‘Bhinneka tunggal ika!’ I had to, no,

wanted to be all those men, love all their
women in you. The screen remained blue.
You stiffened, you stared at my body,
never ready for the ovulation.










Publisher: In de Knipscheer, December 2003.
Book: € 15,00, cd (music by Dirk Stromberg): € 18,00. Set book + cd: € 29,50.
Postbox 6107, 2011 HC Haarlem, The Netherlands.


www.alberthagenaars.nl
www.indeknipscheer.nl