Kalden's Story

Drepung, Tibet, 1958 So won a name in this place, handing off lath strips to a hammer's measure, seeing the passing girls' slits in roils of timber grain. Mountains, barley, scaffold, dirt. I was sixteen. And hourly from the hoods of faraway bells monks emerging like hairless animals. I was sixteen. What did I know of sovereignty, or the new soldiers by the gate, chinning their shotguns like violins? Nights, a tin roof wind cracked flat; my sister, flushed with child, hushing a child.