Pimone Triplett

1 This one’s on Route 80 south of Water’s End, Arizona, speeding anywhere else when I’m tired of reading the yellow dash-and-dash, highway’s old adage. Sunglasses coaxed yellows to reds, though there are none where I look into the camera. Behind me, a blur of roadside cactus called “succulents,” for the moisture they save for years. The sky cut from indigo to blue to white until I wished for the sunset’s truncations to stay there, thinking, too, that the verge of its curve could flirt me into the absolute. 2 Moving on, in Bangkok, I’m always crouching in these, wanting to keep my head lower than his to show I know he’s Mother’s father. Asked, on going in, not to say anything if he brought up the distant old dealings, metallic shrillings of long-dead women, asked to ignore what they’d do for him, offerings he could almost eat a meal on. And this from the aunt who was asked to leave the family when she was young, “for the sake of the children,” drawing the bad lot. No one told me why. That’s my foot in the foreground. That was the daylight’s assignment of unwavering white, the background. These are only the circumstances. As for an end to the glare getting the last word in, there was none. 3 He’d set the machine on the tripod himself, return to read the newspaper, wait for the click, and want to keep it, the stop-time, that is, the pretending to read the newspaper. Held half in the shadow fans of the palm tree, half in a browbeat of sun. So that the machine had to catch him quickly, the clarity, the shot of his legs as suddenly: brown leather sheaves holding bone. 4 Say the moment arrives at the frame, and she who is about to enter the picture approaches. At the end of the road trip, she turns back in the hopes of memorizing what’s been passed, the colors that changed, the mirror-winks, the real moisture, invisible, along side mirage. His face was a once-darker shade of dust in his country. Some days he’d set the aperture, the opening, as wide as he could, to ruin the picture, to let all the light in.

For Grandfather, in Bangkok I can tell you, sweeping the several jigsaw lizards away from your casket, away from their expert invasions, kneeling by the order of our births alongside the mother-of-pearl mosaics, the family at your death keeps to form, having to act out that love of endings. I can say the little I know of how you lived is your patient gaze in old photographs, surrounded by three generations, most of the spindling offspring back from the States or Australia or wherever they’d been taken, children barely known but abided on holidays. Today I’m told we have to place pennies in the dead man’s mouth to remind us of the portions left behind. You pay the debt, someone says,you give your something solid back, push your currency up against the open, up against the father tongue. It’s the formal silence we love, the hush that’s planned, the good answer, monks, boyish and newly shorn, who know to whip your burial cloth exactly three times over the altar flame to purify countless threads. Who know when to kneel, when to back away from the casket. The casket itself carved patiently, inlaid with the images, portions left behind of silver shrunken disciples, each framed to each then framed again by squares of alabaster scrollwork whittled into black wood: the whole teak surface worried, Grandfather, with carpenter’s gold, splintered, then resplintered, puzzled with lapis. The eastern window’s been slivered open, to make the sun stab the craftmen’s metallic fretwork. The mourners too, suddenly embossed, become dozens shifting to kneel. When a few clouds eclipse the sun, wiping away the borders, the frame and scrimshaw, so that we stand briefly in the room’s darkened largeness, next to me someone whispers, how your vessel is rented, a work to be given back.

Bangkok Caught in a slip of particulars, say, between the dirt road and the brand-new Seven-Eleven, a bucket of lotus, three shades of red in the mudbank giving way to workers, faces hidden behind kerchiefs, binding the copper tines of another half-constructed building, this fretwork, that rooftop’s progress up and up, the eye riding a motor’s rev, coming to a woman who leans over the seventh story’s edge for the pulley rope’s basket of rice or rubber mallets, then a sweep down into cattle now, their beige skin over bones, the look of loose tents, or taking in a bronze Buddha, hands folded over the First National Melting Company, the red gate, black gate, red, retina arriving at a man throwing straw clumps to earth so the seeds don’t wash away, and the light behind him washing away, and this desire, a gaze shot along the border which is shaped like a question mark, cramped with hotels, pink neon grammars blinking Alpha, Alpha, Alpha Is The Bank For You And Your Needs, another quick catch, the glance stippled with disappearances, a girl who lifts her skirt to bathe near the bus stop, a fire burning/burnt/burning in the field of bulldozers, an eye trying to fix itself as the vehicle turns, the mind from nascent to nation, drifting in instances, a grit in wind worrying the surface, the facts, out to finger the invisible gap we would inhabit, pulsing always in between.