Handwriting Read Free Page B

teens, as I saw my son,
    your already philosophical air
    rubbing against the speed of the city.
    I no longer guess a future.
    And do not know how we end
    nor where.
    Though I know a story about maps, for you.
    iv
    After the death of his father,
    the prince leads his warriors
    into another country.
    Four men and three women.
    They disguise themselves and travel
    through farms, fields of turnip.
    They are private and shy
    in an unknown, uncaught way.
    In the hemp markets
    they court friends.
    They are dancers who tumble
    with lightness as they move,
    their long hair wild in the air.
    Their shyness slips away.
    They are charming with desire in them.
    It is the dancing they are known for.
    One night they leave their beds.
    Four men, three women.
    They cross open fields where nothing grows
    and swim across the cold rivers
    into the city.
    Silent, invisible among the guards,
    they enter the horizontal door
    face down so the blades of poison
    do not touch them. Then
    into the rain of the tunnels.
    It is an old story—that one of them
    remembers the path in.
    They enter the last room of faint light
    and douse the lamp. They move
    within the darkness like dancers
    at the centre of a maze
    seeing the enemy before them
    with the unlit habit of their journey.
    There is no way to behave after victory.
            *
    And what should occur now is unremembered.
    The seven stand there.
    One among them, who was that baby,
    cannot recall the rest of the story
    —the story his father knew, unfinished
    that night, his mother sleeping.
    We remember it as a tender story,
    though perhaps they perish.
    The father’s lean arm across
    the child’s shape, the taste
    of the wisp of hair in his mouth …
    The seven embrace in the destroyed room
    where they will die without
    the dream of exit.
    We do not know what happened.
    From the high windows the ropes
    are not long enough to reach the ground.
    They take up the knives of the enemy
    and cut their long hair and braid it
    onto one rope and they descend
    hoping it will be long enough
    into the darkness of the night.

House on a Red Cliff
    There is no mirror in Mirissa
    the sea is in the leaves
    the waves are in the palms
    old languages in the arms
    of the casuarina pine
    parampara
    parampara
, from
    generation to generation
    The flamboyant a grandfather planted
    having lived through fire
    lifts itself over the roof
    unframed
    the house an open net
    where the night concentrates
    on a breath
                   on a step
    a thing or gesture
    we cannot be attached to
    The long, the short, the difficult minutes
    of night
    where even in darkness
    there is no horizon without a tree
    just a boat’s light in the leaves
    Last footstep before formlessness

Step
    The ceremonial funeral structure for a monk
    made up of thambili palms, white cloth
    is only a vessel, disintegrates
    completely as his life.
    The ending disappears,
    replacing itself
    with something abstract
    as air, a view.
    All we’ll remember in the last hours
    is an afternoon—a lazy lunch
    then sleeping together.
    Then the disarray of grief.
            *
    On the morning of a full moon
    in a forest monastery
    thirty women in white
    meditate on the precepts of the day
    until darkness.
    They walk those abstract paths
    their complete heart
    their burning thought focused
    on this step, then
this
step.
    In the red brick dusk
    of the Sacred Quadrangle,
    among holy seven-storey ambitions
    where the four Buddhas
    of Polonnaruwa
    face out to each horizon,
    is a lotus pavilion.
    Taller than a man
    nine lotus stalks of stone
    stand solitary in the grass,
    pillars that once supported
    the floor of another level.
    (The sensuous stalk
    the sacred flower)
    How physical yearning
    became permanent.
    How desire became devotional
    so it held up your house,
    your lover’s house, the house of your god.
    And though it is no longer there,
    the pillars once let you step
    to a higher room
    where there was worship, lighter air.

Last Ink
    In certain