I make it east of Madras, and in stories I tell
of that time, I take a boat journey along
the line of the Indian coast towards a jeweled
island of tea. There are servants in this lie,
white-toothed, black-haired, woven bamboo
fanning me in a teak room facing India. Unchanged
sheets. Drinks arrive warm, tiny chips of ice
clinking delicately. Dangerously.
Such portents of illnesses worry me more than
the bomb threats or the angry men with guns
who stand in groups along the muddy road from the capital.
In my retelling, the land is known by a modern name,
a speakable name without shame.
I leave out hopping on an iron bicycle and riding
to meet a boy along a banyan tree who sells me
a handkerchief full of marijuana. He kisses the bills
as I place them into his small dirty hand.
I put it in my pocket, sweet Mary Jane,
take it back along a sea-swept lane, and smoke in my room
as I listen to the unspoken words of the familiar sea.
I take such care with the deceptive details,
though these days little is done with care
and little is learned. So many unsayables
on this ground, breathing in ripened air,
in a gazebo owned by a man who wears robes
and tries to make energy by converting the power
of waves. "Some boys," he laments, "go off with gays
and do unspeakable things for money." He rubs
his hands together greedily. "Foreign gays.
Those with money," he says with regret.
Birds whistle at one another in rubber trees
and I get high on the floor with a French
Canadian woman. We stare at the ceiling,
smoke our ganja, and create new pasts
that scarcely matter in a place beyond
those twinkling lights we can't see anyway.
She tells me of all she'd do with money.
Buy land in her ashram. Divorce her husband.
Build a house on a hill and plant coffee. Take
a lover. She sells cloth by the road. Money will
never be part of her equation.
We all do the unspeakable and live
to keep it to ourselves.
For example: fly over oceans to get here.
Wage war. Keep others
like me hugging the western shores.
Hate. Plot. Manipulate.
In the future, I will forget few details.
I am a boy myself. I meet an Israeli sitting shirtless
in the wind facing east. He says nothing. I kiss him.
He buys me a sandwich, a cocktail, and recounts orgies
and cocaine parties in Cairo.
and record every sound, smell. The taste
of bad gin at the back of my throat.
The stale bread, the briny sea, the Israeli's tongue,
like some ancient rude goddess
breasts full of treasure,
fed to a hungry child
I, too, expose that natural side of myself.
And these unspeakables pay handsomely
in this oppressive heat!
State who the woman could be, kneeling.
Or standing, looking up, palm clutched
to her chest like a question mark, though
there's no question.
He is the man, touching palm against the
glazing of a view upon death and the plunder
he witnesses as she becomes desperate
on the ground, their palms uniting
his outward, hers inward, in the way they are,
speaking a painful, secret code she will
deciper later in a place she won't know
for many years.
Planes swoosh overhead in the now,
full of charred potential, would be, would be
beautiful, so lovely -- their shiny fishy bodies
reflecting sunlight and East River whiteheads --
if death would merely dissipate.
What will it take, this escape?
In her other life, before, she remembers
childish toys spread out on a poisonous lawn,
a tree sunk deep under the foundation
of that clapboard catastrophe inches towards
the base of concrete and wrought iron, rusted.
He's not there. He's far above in his own experience,
thinking of the gin he indulged in, the sleazy affairs,
the hateful words released. That's all.
Wife broken, wife healed, child invisible, child grown.
She will live in several pieces, a river flowing between,
she will hide in the closets of her past, small doors in
hallways with wooden ladders bumbling down,
reaching to where things are hidden away,
where memories are stored and experience
is wrapped in paper for some future faceless greed.
