The second stanza of the first bones
of what this poem is becoming turns with a call from your father.
You have been paddling between the murkiness
of your memories and Google for an answer
on how to thaw pipes frozen with water.
You are desperate to transform this image into something meaningful:
the taps outside your childhood home
as open and silent as Edvard Munch’s Scream
on mornings when Winter bloated the pipes with ice like distended veins.
You cannot recall how your father coaxed the freezing back to flow.

When he returns your text with a call,
you will laugh at first –
his is the only voice you know that sounds like the rolling of sleeves
up to the elbow.
His first question will be a spanner loosening the conversation for context:
you both know it is the beginning of a Cape Town Summer,
and pipes never freeze at the foot of Hoerikwaggo.
No, dad, I am writing, you will tell him.
I am mining memory for metaphor, and
Google’s recollections are void of poetry.

To your father, memory is a passage for instruction.
He will plumb the frozen pipes out of your family history
into the present tense.
Thaw them slowly with lukewarm water, but not too hot,
or wait for the sun to bend the will of ice, he will say.
He will speak as if packing padkos for your journey to
some hypothetical city where winters paralyse water in plastic veins.

This reminiscence will be a bowl of porridge spooned between the two of you.
You have both stopped the day to savour it over the phone.
But, your mind, extravagant in its appetite,
will garnish the moment with other recollections:
frozen-toed mornings spent skating with school shoes
on a frosted school lawn
then thawing your regret in front of a paraffin heater or coal stove.

The bones of a poem will have crowded together into skeleton
in your mind, without your knowing.
As your goodbyes crystallise into memory,
you will stitch a new body on the page around this thought:
your father’s own memories have solidified in him, and
you are still learning which questions defrost them as Winter sun,
and which are scalding water.
You have never been willing to crack the copper of his silences,
not even for art. DM

Lessons from My Father is a series of interviews and stories collected and written by Steve Anderson. Anderson has been a high school teacher for 34 years, 26 of them at two schools in East London and the past eight at a school in Cape Town where he heads up the Wellness and Development Department and teaches English and Life Orientation. About the series, he says: “[It] is not about holding up those who are featured as being ‘The Perfect Father’. It is simply a collection of stories, each told by a son or daughter whose life was, or whose life has been in some way, positively impacted by their father… And it doesn’t take away the significant part played by mothering figures in the shaping of their children. Theirs are the stories of another series!”

In case you missed it, also read: My dad was from a different world, but was close to me in ways that cannot be expressed