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42 Evie Shockley her table mountain Every poet has a table mountain tucked right beneath epidermis, waiting for the prick of evening wind for release. — p.g. they’d been to the same city, but you wouldn’t have known it. he came home blissing about jacaranda in bloom; on her visit, winter hid color behind the thick gray of clouds and rain, except for those pastel houses hiking up the steep slopes of the bo-kaap, a little squint-andsee -san-francisco quarter early muslims had raised like a garden in the town. he sang in liquid tones of how the atlantic reached down and crooked her blue finger round this lucky cape before giving the sea bed over to the indian ocean. she recognized that body, too, instinctively: there, the same wet cradle and grave it was where she knew it best—but there it was also jailer and jail, cruel cup in which rose the knuckle of land where mandela and sisulu couched their hopes across an ignorant count of years. his table mountain was a vast, gentle lover. i spent the clearest night of my life on its summit. all the universe was caught up in my throat. she recalled her ascent. the cable car, as it lugged itself from high to heights, twirled her once around in a slow, careful dance across the sky. even gray, the views were punctured with beauty: the steel blue bars of ocean rolling into the waterfront; buildings pushed unpredictably into parallels or angles with each other—like a jar of pearly rectangular buttons spilled, splayed, and then swept into a haphazard constellation— 43 Evie Shockley arrayed from water to mountain base and out onto the flats in an endless shimmering; the craggy stone of the mountain face foreboding an unforgiving terrain. she spent the coldest afternoon of her life on that summit, coatless in thirty-degree winds, her numb fingers cramped around her camera, ankles turning on the trail’s uneven rock. between billows of mist, she gazed down into a city that tried to cut out its own heart—it still bore the grassy scar where district six had thrummed—and she loved it, despite the miserable august weather, despite the history of peoples chained and chaining, killed and killing, that hung over it like the clouds over that prehistoric mountain. ...

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