Handwriting Read Free

even knowledge of her grave.
    Who abandoned who, I wonder now.
    iii
    In the sunless forest
    of Ritigala
    heat in the stone
    heat in the airless black shadows
    nine soldiers on leave
    strip uniforms off
    and dig a well
    to give thanks
    for surviving this war
    A puja in an unnamed grove
    the way someone you know
    might lean forward
    and mark the place
    where your soul is
    —always, they say,
    near to a wound.
    In the sunless forest
    crouched by a forest well
    pulling what was lost
    out of the depth.

The Siyabaslakara
    In the 10th century, the young princess
    entered a rock pool like the moon
    within a blue cloud
    Her sisters
    who dove, lit by flares,
    were lightning
    Water and erotics
    The path from the king to rainmaking
    —his dark shoulders a platform
    against the youngest instep
    waving her head above him
    this way
    this way
    Later the art of aqueducts,
    the banning of monks
    from water events
    so they would not be caught
    within the melodious sounds
    or in the noon heat
    under the rain of her hair

Driving with Dominic
in the Southern Province
We See Hints of the Circus
    The tattered Hungarian tent
    A man washing a trumpet
    at a roadside tap
    Children in the trees,
    one falling
    into the grip of another

Death at Kataragama
    For half the day blackouts stroke this house into stillness so there is no longer a whirring fan or the hum of light. You hear sounds of a pencil being felt for in a drawer in the dark and then see its thick shadow in candlelight, writing the remaining words. Paragraphs reduced to one word. A punctuation mark. Then another word, complete as a thought. The way someone’s name holds terraces of character, contains all of our adventures together. I walk the corridors which might perhaps, I’m not sure, be cooler than the rest of the house. Heat at noon. Heat in the darkness of night.
    There is a woodpecker I am enamoured of I saw this morning through my binoculars. A red thatch roof to his head more modest than crimson, deeper than blood. Distance is always clearer. I no longer see words in focus. As if my soul is a blunt tooth. I bend too close to the page to get nearer to what is being understood. What I write will drift away. I will be able to understand the world only at arm’s length.
    Can my soul step into the body of that woodpecker? He may be too hot in sunlight, it could be a limited life. But if this had been offered to me today, at 9 a.m., I would have gone with him, traded this body for his.
    A constant fall of leaf around me in this time of no rain like the continual habit of death. Someone soon will say of me, “his body was lying in Kataragama like a pauper.” Vanityeven when we are a corpse. For a blue hand that contains no touch or desire in it for another.
    There is something else. Not just the woodpecker. Ten water buffalo when I stopped the car. They were being veered from side to side under the sun. The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressing and removing their wings. My head and almost held breath out there for an hour so that later I felt as if I contained that full noon light.
    It was water in an earlier life I could not take into my mouth when I was dying. I was soothed then the way a plant would be, brushed with a wet cloth, as I reduced all thought into requests. Take care of this flower. Less light. Curtain. As I lay there prone during the long vigil of my friends. The ache of ribs from too much sleep or fever—bones that protect the heart and breath in battle, during love beside another. Saliva, breath, fluids, the soul. The place bodies meet is the place of escape.
    But this time brutal aloneness. The straight stern legs of the woodpecker braced against the jak fruit as he delves for a meal. Will he feel the change in his nature as my soul enters? Will it go darker? Or will I enter as I always do another’s nest,