In these poems there is the same openness and honesty he brings to his writing classes.
Haarhoff's work, prose and verse, is always in his own very personal voice. And it is very much a male voice: that of husband, father, brother, son, and lover.
The ease with which Haarhoff brings the reader to feel the distinct emotions of his biographical pieces is disarming. The rhythms of Haarhoff's verse are not just happy accidents, but crafted to appear so.
From the Introduction to Tortoise Voices
by Jack Lambert
Windhoek 2001
Bronzed Shoe
for Allan (1921-1968)
your shoe stood on
the mantle-piece
above the fire place
where your father lived
with his second wife
and us, your siblings.
it rested alone,
its left-foot friend, long lost.
I often balanced it,
cool in my palm.
studied its leather tread
glazed in a bronze age.
hand stitched, double thread.
the shoemaker's elves
could have shaped it.
tongue, eye, sole and instep
sang in unison.
the nails tacked
a horseshoe heel
for the luck of the road.
your body trod to
a kind of manhood.
you wrote gentle letters
each birthday, in pencil,
from the Home, with poems
copied letter by letter.
for you never stepped
to cursive script
with run-on lines racing
to the edge of the page.
your mind had long gone wandering
still shod in its childhood shoe.
Workshop Kampala
they drew on sheets of
newsprint how they ended
on the streets.
stick figures, fists, banana skins
and cops hustling them along.
the teenagers nodded off
after their rambling nights.
so, after chicken and rice,
we built in a siesta.
I found a teen
under a tree
beneath the African sun
in open abandon
using his story sketch
as a sleeping mat.
Witch Wife
(for Jack and Regina)
hitched to a witch, he is.
not the crooked-finger kind
with a monkey wrench
for lower jaw,
who zooms, gripping her broom
hanging onto a conical hat.
not she who bubbles
a brew on the hob
and drapes a slinky cat
for a fox fur,
who dons habit and stocking
dull as schoolgirl uniform,
who frog-hops you
with a finger twitch,
who hangs three kitsch
wands on a sweet wall,
who cackles on her Sabbath
raising hell at All Hallows.
but he's wifed to one who floats
rich at full moon,
in subtle body
like a nun's ghost,
whose knitted ribs predict
thunder crash and calm,
whose limbic brain
switches synapses
to his solar plexus.
who, thighs astride,
powers a Yamaha
with a side car familiar,
who third-eyes you
through her navel
exercising sans stitch,
whose breath is a garden
with herbs sweet and bitter,
who pitches her love
in rhyming hexameter.
