Burmese Days

I
The alleys are blind,
the streets are worn.
Everyone has left,
but tea is offered.
Bone china cup,
we’re together in a room
with high ceilings,
huge windows, polished floors.
Overhead,
a whirring fan.
Outside, a city bares its soul
through broken shutters
and peeling walls.
Lacquered silence.
A river’s black onyx
silts pure melancholy.
Life here has the air
of a dying art.
II
Nothing is whole:
a boy slices into his bone
sawing a jade green stone;
a girl spins silver thread
stolen from the moon.
There, one story ends
and another begins,
two characters
in search of a future.
III
Tamarind,
turmeric,
betel nut.
A monk billowed
in sunset orange.
A novice draped
in shadowy dawn.
Everything is stained,
dyed or shorn.
A cage loses its author,
a tree begets a shrine,
a wilted traveler drinks water
from an incidental clay pot.
The heat is trapped,
but prayers are born.
An old woman peers
out of her window.
A pigeon alights
on a blackened ledge.
A gray hair drifts
into the pale light.
A gray light drifts
onto her pale hair.
An anguished voice,
its colossus grief,
a lost emperor’s grave,
his scripted sleep.
We are all exiles here,
but for a moment
we abandon our fear,
call that which is torn.