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.