The Blighted Star Fruit

To pass through astonishment and know much too late. And because habit makes us strange, I find myself Searching on a landscape that generates questions Beyond its ability to solve. That dark post Out there might be this poem standing as you would — Lead in the 4th grade play — under theater lights And your shadows that petal around you. And what Should be most memorable isn’t. So I recall Those prolonged moments of silence, incongruous And revealing as metaphor, most frequently. For instance: waiting at the bus stop in Pai in A midmorning the hue of the roadside guardrails That dot the cliff’s side like Morse code. Before leaving With trees (those felled, ones half-painted white, the burnt trunks ...    ) That passed by like the so many phenomena Of our days blurred together into a motion, At times, convincing as a nickelodeon’s, I waited under the thatched roof of the station With other travelers. With each in our common Solitude risen around like that Haydn piece In the tunnel I descended into on my Way out onto Broadway from the 1 train some months Ago, it seemed of Hopper. Star fruit on the ground Discolored, withering, blighted. Three of the town’s Strays hobbled by before midday’s heat stalled the town Like some lost Stephano, Trinculo, and their lamed, Dark sycophant — at least that’s what they were for me. It wasn’t comfort, never comfort, but something else. And when each moment with expectations for more Than it can hold leads to the next, and soon — as then — Expectation fills up the day as does your breath A balloon, the day floats with such care and strange hours. And both pleasure and pain are motions of the soul... Plato wrote — poetry’s banisher, beauty’s guard. 2 My hands grow differently used. While one hand thumbs Pages, the other hand steadies open the book. It’s the other hand that rests on the desk, forearm Paralleled to the table’s edge, all the fingers Except the thumb holding the blank field. One hand’s mole A gnat flattened between pinky and ring finger; The other hand’s palm-side, below the skin enough It’s likely a splinter left for years. Just one hand Fits my Discman, plugged in while watching those around (No news-as-white-noise here to occupy my sight): Kids who bus to school hours away toothpicking Slivers of chili-dappled mango slices in; A triple-sweatered lady palming back her hair In the thick Thai pre-dawn June; the one foreigner Other than us, earphone couched; and her shape, dozed slack, Coat-blanketed, neck against my side. One hand rests. Half a day ago, under a mosquito net, Flush with the desk fan sitting on the rattan floor, One hand kept on the steady act of beckoning Behind the tongue-swelled clit, uncreasing the ridged roof, Almost like the mouth’s roof as it slopes down toward teeth, Like rubbing the dampened cave wall, finger-darkened, As the guide turns his back to us. The other hand Traced its crook — that delta-creased pad set between thumb And fingers, hand’s most fleshy zone — on the torso. The other hand then stilled her hip, mosquito net, Weighted, walling out stitches of ants, from its hook A viscous drape like that through one hand’s two fingers. Oddly, only one hand drums along (the CD: Converge,Jane Doe) as the crowd would rupture outward Into a circle pit — a vortex in reverse — If this were a concert. The other hand just bides Its time. Milton’s clumsy other hand, God’s other Hand that Lessing chose, and that Spaniard’s other hand Riddled useless at Lepanto, a bullet lodged Into that scurvied poet’s chest, the other hand Remembers and betrays. The other hand cries out, Which was Keats’s living one? Neither hand scarred yet, Even after thumb-knuckle tempted a sander In shop class, impulse from imagining too much. One hand’s cushion bears the pencil (my friend whose tasks Are split between his hands — “I eat with my left hand, Punch with the other” — says we whack off with the hand We write). Each hand on different shaded denim thighs, The unclipped nails crude halos of sun-blocking hills. One hand lets forth words; the other hand holds it back. 3 Chased by a three-legged dog to the temple stairs, Past all the fallen star fruit (the veined tips the last To wither, the through-light flesh sun- and bug-eaten), We crossed paths with a one-legged man — wordless sounds, And that permanent wild gaze — crutching down the stairs (Four hundred!) as we stopped to catch a break mid-flight. Our breath would last us a run-through of the temple, And, in the first hallway — him?!, his phatic calls, tics, And unwilled smile facing the morning that just passed, The sun no longer in front of his propped body, But above it, the valley overabundant With the real light that stole our day. The fog too lifted Against my sight. We paused. Having just climbed the hill, We agreed to leave our shoes on despite sandals Stationed on the stoop, and then we turned towards that hall. “Let’s go,” he ends, befriended, prayer Phaedrus-empty. — The driver gases the bus off the parking brakes To idle back out the station; the attendants Scoop up the wood wedges and clatter the door shut; The passengers all shift. In the chapter among The deformed and footless, Zhuangzi ends, arguing For the greatest of men, a man void of feelings: “The Way gave him a face, Heaven gave him a form, Can’t you call him a man?” Yet there are things I love: The sun, you, travel. And back again, the thick fog Parts us from the obliterating Turner sun. Pretty soon, come day, the motorbikes The Rough Guide Says all tourists should try will buzz by those three dogs, All lethargic, the largest too tired to dry-hump, His red tip unsheathing (there’s no neutering here), The black one, bald in spots, wouldn’t even fight it off, The mottled one coiled back like the dog that badgers Bosch’s wayfarer, bandaged, poor bastard, with his gnarled stick, Not looking at us, but rather caught looking back, And above his head a doorway — no, the gallows? — The same one Brueghel’s final peasants romped beneath? My turn now to sleep. I can dab off from my jeans Your drool just reaching my thigh as you do, with care, From our sheets when — yet that stuff, all that stuff of ours Still spots our many beds with different aged salt-rings, Each gasp less a sound than a failure at silence. Before us another strange town, while for others School, home, maybe work, a field, someplace normal, there, Someplace beyond sight from its roadside stop. Abroad A month, toward a year in another country, Anne — Anacrusis: these days I’m lost in, reminded Of my presence as if catching a stranger’s wave To the yet-to-be-seen man behind you as yours. — traveled 2005 / written 2007–2008