“the making of an ocean”

Writing “20/20” was akin riding this kind of a wave, in the raw, and for the first time.

None of water’s softness was to lead me down the sheer cliff I faced. The very nature of my childhood and youth with its accosting memory-scape, left me feeling over exposed and totally un-preprared.

Looking down the haze of memory is one thing, baring oneself to the elemental emotional interior in a way that offered no escape, but for going the distance through it, meant I had to strip away all the layers that carrying pain becomes of one, over the years, as it seeps into and shapes one sense of self. With no idea if this monumental ride would leave me drowning under the weight, crushed against inner rugged rock formation I had no clue might be there, or shattered like Humpty Dumpty, never to be glued back together again, I understood at least, this was beyond anything any kind of writing I’d ever considered to undertake. A ‘different’ voice took over as soon as the decision to write it was taken.

Mario Susko had begun with poems about his grandmother,

LIFE in which he poignantly depicts an old old tradition of the familial viewing room.

…

I tried to remember every song my grandmother sang /to me in Italian, about her homeland, lost love, / and that morning I awoke in the frigid room, alone,/ with a shameful erection. I propped myself up, / looking at her waxed face, and saw her wink at me.

… and his mother in

GROWING UP WITH SIN

…

for mother everything we didn’t have, or / she had no confident answer to was a sin: / why my father got her pregnant while she / was in high school, thus making me a product / of sin, one frail moment, as she’d later put / it, we have to atone for as long as we live.

whenever I thought of my friend’s sister, / my mind picturing her in the kitchen / cupboard, behind the misted glass, wrapped / in a towel though naked underneath, / dropping it painfully slowly, my pupils / became narrow slits, those of a cat, fixed, / unlike camera lens in American movies / on her budding cherry nipples, mother / would read me and say, You are not / having one of those sinful thoughts are you, and I would blink, pretending I / didn’t get what she meant, and ask for a glass / of milk, for her the only sign of purity,/ for me nothing more than a lumpy mix / of water and chalk-tasting powder.

…

I began with a trilogy about my mother in her different selves shaped by a time I lived with my grandmother as a toddler.

THE AVIARY ;

1. Ghostrunner

. . .

Ma was being a disappointment / half a world away. No mute elegance./ No African Queen, that tall ebony enigma./ Wedding gifts vanished by which Ma was too ordinarily white. Ma / and her New-man readymade for domesticity and adoption.

Little She was renamed. Reborn. Stamped./ I’m told.To what, — from what? How was I / to hold all that invisible ‘in-between’ of / Little She, quietly snuck out the back of me / from the room of draughty lessons / into all that electric rain?

To find my feet binding earth of her / mouth with cold words in the economy / of giving up: / How to be the ghostrunner in the forgiveness/ of all those sins you shed / in my direction?

…

11. Temerarious Fields

In your quiet turn of old, reincarnated / stars I sat idle among lost senses. I waited / for petals to fall from your serrated hazard:

Waited to be fed the thud of your demise / by thickset relatives eager for such young / Blood kissed so cold

Your aviary filled with plumage, trimmed / for loud ornamentation. Only, your birds / were freer than you ever let me be.

…

111. Lithium.

. . .

P.S.

All human clues to you peel thinly; / a nutshell crumbed to the touch. Your body / scene littered with No way to read them / but bite marks of memory:

The wigs, the pills, your birds / and your garden. / Your open house. Chemo./ childhood tales / Days of endless sleep, / nights outside whispering / to the stars; the silences. / Talk of reincarnation . . .

So much life yet so little living.

I glimpsed your real glamour between / Valium ‘n Coffee: / Just once.

Had you lived, would we be friends?

. . .

From the battlements of childhood to the sombre shape of war, Mario Susko’s dispassionate depiction of its cold, barren ruthlessness is superbly crafted in CONVERSION which I offer here in full as it cannot be properly appreciated in extracts.

I came upon a man in black who sat on a tank,/ tending his sheep that grazed impassively / around the craters and among dead bodies.

I am looking for my son, I said squinting./ The bullets in his cartridge belt slung / over his shoulder shone in the sun like teeth.

He smiled, chewing a cigarette to the other / corner of his mouth, and motioned with his hand / to the field. Plenty to choose from he said.

The sheep were moving away toward the shade / of a big oak tree, the bodies following on all fours. I strained my ears to hear the bell

I knew. he slid down and stared at me. / Is that your stomach growling , he asked. I am just trying to find my son, I whispered.

You want me to shoot one? He spat out his butt / and stomped it with his boot that was like my son’s./ We are talking about some good meat, he grinned.

The shirt looked familiar, but I couldn’t tell. / My sheep started to fan out and I suddenly heard /a dog yelp behind me. He whistled, the sound

thin and piercing, making the bodies stop. / I felt the sweat run down my buttocks and legs / as if someone was punching holes in my ribs.

Have you seen my son, I uttered, not knowing / whether any sound left my mouth. You never had / a son, he yelled and cocked his submachine gun.

The boots were the same, and so was the shirt./ And the Mickey Mouse watch on his wrist was the same. /Tell you what, he said and laughed. I’ll be your son.

…………………………………

The Bosnian war is a recent memory and while we don’t have a constant CNN feed on the tirade of warfare currently ripping Syria apart, we are facing the stream of refugees. And somehow it feels much closer to home and even so, the daily life in such a war remains inconceivable, until you read poems like this.

Mario Susko’s work forced me to re-examine how I write and in the context of this kind of violence I retraced one of my own, that occurred in broad in the centre of Johnannesburg on a ‘normal’ day. I try to explain what happens to me, on the inside, after experiencing a running gun battle and walking away.

THE ORANGE BOY

Your first new politics of cruelty:/its precision. An insolent itch/explodes between tongue/and complexion to send body parts flying. You forget in that deadening

chaos, it’s not about the colour of blood/or the mixed race of spleen /liver or mangled rib cage, but about/ a hair and its breadth.

You mime the walk of normal / bones walking ignoring the /shocking breathless shiver aching / to reek havoc. Light outside folds; / your brain freezes, constricts ready

to implode, your body suddenly /coming loose at all ends. You /acclimatise to days, normal green / library lawn days, until one line /of Jacaranda trees stir.

There is no time to ask his name, / no moment to smile and watch any/ of his young pride stride off into /a future undressed of fear so uncertain

of itself, it sprayed bullets through/ the sunlit square. The orange boy /didn’t stand a hope in hell.

Even now your body lunges up /and forward, you cower close to /the edge of stairs and the scramble of / feet. The pop that cracked your / backbone, bled out his sanguine

young life beneath your dress. A /shrill scream and you catch the /sound of his name then; “Tshepo” /and see his mother drop like a ragdoll, in a ubiquitous tense from /your corner of an average day.

In the soft blue of savage air your /eyes warp at the real congeal of / blood spilling, lives gashed. Life /doubling-up rams the stomach so

tight you convulse all speechless / candour back out your mouth,/ a mouth that forgets how to make / a sound but for its gutteral wretch.

Limpet or bullets: Nothing escapable /exists. you try and think beyond it, only to find perforation.

All the capacious matter of life / compressed into the complexity of /death’s arbitrary anatomy. Then it / lets you walk away, bruised but the / house of you scarred beyond the eased / repair of bandages and fragile / as its unfurling to infection.

……………………………..

The creating of my portion of the combined ocean that is this very personal collection, took me on the deepest interior dive. I emerged a better person, a tougher poet and with a deeper understanding of what it means to write.

20 / 20 is not a pretty or cosy collection. It is bitter sweet. It stands for memory in an age of forgetting. It speaks, we hope, to the necessity of the soul.