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BUTON'S WIFE
She boiled the broth
boiled the birds for the pretty party
painted scarlet on her lips for an evenings permanent
smirk. Tore the gizzard tore the heart that cracked the
crystal with its clover cries.
She held the heart
in a cup as fine as the king's of a poor country,
swaddled it against her breast in silk and the inexplicable
pulse of wings.
She climbed a temple
four hundred steps on hundred
goddesses and a sun so
hot it tried to burn her
then gradually decorated her for November's Mardi Gras
and set her sails where the rivers gather in innocence-
a gesture's nakedness at her dining table
under the relaxed mango tree
with the delicate cow
and the other prided possessions.
She gathered us here
as unhurrying American guests
young bird remains
in our bowls
eyes slightly off, off-center.
THE WOMAN AT POL POT'S GRAVE
She's not in love
at all by busy,
plucking his last bone bits from the cremations site,
with reverence, red
mourning
string tied around her wrist, hand caress of all good
pieces. It's muddy, so no one can tell
what she's cradling, a phalange, stapes, or
thoracic vertebrae-
her earthwork, hoarding
what the others before her have left behind, and sometimes,
at dusk, dry cow dung. At the site
most mutter his name while she sells
gasoline and plants from her house, funny
almost-the kinship created between his spirit world
and the snake that slithers out from his ashes. Burned out
incense sticks, paltry picked-at tomb from where hundreds
of the frail and aging have prayed, one couple's loyalty or
the tragic genocidal memory wounding
the spirit, how frightening still that curiosity
at mountain overgrowth, a cicadas buzz,
to pray to that otherwise murderer,
how genuine this woman plucking bones, how normal.
ROADSIDE TEMPLE DISSONANCE
I want
to understand devotees
who pray at the roadside temple
not standing necessarily
still
because the chimes will not allow for stillness.
Their desire is to
be
silent to combine absolute wholeness
and the isolated cuts
they fear.
How to believe
in Buddha's meditative stance?
The reflections. The party
is only to pretend
now, the boiled prawns and grilled octopus.
Lizards continue to eye everyone from their positions
on the wall.
Enough?
How do the devotees refuse to feel
their country's split
belly. The suffocating incense.
The chimes carry discord
through the air, greedy,
disillusioned.
TUOL SLENG PRISON
Please say each skull
has a voice
and an appetite. When I press my ear
against their mouths, crab
shells and dried rice
drop out.
Then their smells come to me:
lemon grass, coriander,
mint leaves. Now how
empty
their sustenance.
How disquieted their once envied
salts and palm-sugar.
Please say
each skull has a voice. What can I do
with you my sound their tongues' undressing.
I mourn the wet season.
THE PAINTING
It Phnom Penh it is
2003, and the famous Khmer artist
has placed his palm on a murderer's upper back near the neck, has pushed
him toward the painting on the prison museum's wall. In it,
a soldier's glistening bayonet blade is in upright position
to catch the newborn
infant
as it gradually spins through the air.
If you pay attention you can hear the body's gasp intended
to be a first cry.
You can hear that
the whole evening
is crying louder
than the infant or Phnom Penh as the city's womb drips out her body.
The mother
who takes this moment
to gaze at her infant
or the soldier under the shade
of the infant's flying body
is mute on her knees outside the painting's
perimeter.
As the artist asks a murderer if this painting depicts the truth,
the bayonet slides through the infant's soft chest and the voice
of this tortured fine artist who cleans his brushes alone each day
in the consoling turpentine
and wipes his palette clean,
freezes in mid-syllable,
and hears the blade console the infant
and he leaves the canvass
blank-
Although he hears the crickets' trill in banyan trees
like flat static song
and the short vowel ? e ? tremble
from the mother who
passes through the perimeters,
he knows the painting as his settlement with humiliation,
the remainder of his life ungodly picturesque, without a blindfold.
When he smiles
at a murderer he knows
he, too, is the guilt worried and spit on
where the strokes are missing.
Someone looks at the painting, curious,
walks by it slowly
now, touches it carefully.
And though the shade shades the body this evening
in another world for lullaby and the mother rests
permanent at the edge-
Her fatigue is beautiful,
as if she does not remember why.
A WOMAN'S POSITION ALONG THE MEKONG
At sunrise my sister,
her Achilles' stretched, is squatting
at the river's edge close to my hotel room,
smiling and smiling some teeth.
What does she hear from its movement at 5 AM?
What does she hear from constancy and luck's flow?
Does she consider the fist, her birthright swimming by?
The survival of a woman in that instance
when the woman seems to accept her position as flow,
is silent, and not random.
What she sees pulses
and what she doesn't see is not meant to last.
I want to tell her
to stand up now.
I want to tell her
to straighten her memorized spine
curled into position for survival.
She sips from a communal tin cup,
the others waiting their turn. Her laughter
is like her spine slightly
dignified and blue.
But her smile penetrates
precisely through the poor morning.
What she sees forgives
and what she doesn't see cannot be touched.
I want to tell her
to stand up now.
PLACE SETTING
Evening. The table
is set with bone china
and sautéed miniature birds. We eat.
Our host's wife laughs often- lovely
that we are able to listen and respond-
In the kitchen
the help is squatting around a boiling pot.
The cook looks up from her bowl, smiles at us
as we pass the doorway- such a simple and
rural gesture
that I too would like to squat around the boiling pot
and sip.
No division. No place
setting. To be oddly
out-of-place in Cambodia.
Not to be "only you" but "you too."
Steaming broth, another point of view, easily seen,
that even our daughter responds, twisting her
silk button between her fingers
or squatting around that boiling pot close to the cook.
IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
I go to the fishing
shacks
at the boatyard to taste fresh fish,
and buy prawns
from the gulf. But when I arrive,
riel in hand, I hear a TV inside
the dimly lit walls.
I don't taste fish here.
I don't taste fish from anywhere.
Suddenly, in every shack,
the unperceived TV
where the fish
are supposed to be.
KHMER FARMER, THROUGH YOUR CAMERA'S LENS
He was not always
the farmer crossing
the Tonle Sap, his palms pressed against his cheeks,
against your camera's lens, his hands scarred
as though he had never lived anything
else, yet you know he is hiding, his face
pushed into his palms, and he is confused
that your lens includes him, you are confused, too,
your shutter snapping again, his eyes squeezing
out his nakedness onto your lens, wetting it
with sounds you can't understand, as if your
eardrum had been pierced,
on an unfamiliar ferry
in the mid-day sun, far from either shore
the silence wrapped around you, wrapped
around the photographs you saw in
the museum, the prisoners, shackled
in windowless cubicles, cubicles stinking
with human feces, feces
swarming with flies, becoming food
for the week, the prisoners saw you, bent
over at the waist to eat, their vision
impaired without glasses or sanity,
and when they cried, the guard watched perhaps
with understanding,
then felt nothing as he marched
them to their grave and fired the shots
too tired for faith, and he sees rice paddies
and his wife somewhere else, but he is not that farmer
anymore, his thin soul
bruised and fatigued, and when the Khmer Rouge
is overturned, his throat full with rice that sustained
him, his frail wonder beaten black through
the vast stillness of ashes, and though he tumbles
out, his hands hold a distant sorrow,
the rice paddies cupping his light body
ashamed. You look again through your lens
at the farmer's forsaken face and you
are unsure or afraid of this man, whom
you are not of but who wants you to know,
and if you refuse, will never let you go.
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