Read an Excerpt
Sestina
There’s a sister who works so hard she never talks.
A sister who screams when she hears dogs bark.
A sister whose breasts have grown dry. A sister who always hides.
There’s a time comrades come to the hut.
They can’t tell who’s who—How many are you?
Where’s the other one hiding? That sister stays close,
somewhere in a hole, closed off with dirt.
Sometimes she sits with the sister whose baby lacked milk.
In her place of hiding, she cries, thinks of comforting words
but her mouth goes dry. In a far village,
where works the sister who never talks: the sunset.
Finally, it’s her chance. Time to run back,
but this time an owl screeches. She closes her eyes.
She disappears, pretends she’s the one who can fly.
That sister so quiet. How does that sister stay quiet?
Biting her lips she goes into hiding: between her teeth,
the skin of a snake, hiding like a chasm in a field, a hole
in the door to spy on the time, dark knot
high up in a greasy tree, little dry well in a forgotten yard
where sounds of smoke and fighting drive close.
One sister soils her sarong. To wash it, the sisters search for water
but find full of air, a balloon which swollen in the river
makes the youngest scream and cry, she who holds hands
walking around the open eyes, her own face hiding.
Then the sister who never speaks, begins to speak.
I want to go home, she says. But home is not close at all.
No salty plum juice, no rice, or fish dried.
That dream is dry. And tracing with a stick,
a sister who closes a circle around them in the dirt,
hiding them safely inside—This is a circle,
a time warp around us sisters, so we can go back
to when we girls were not hiding, when fear didn’t dry us up,
and we could be whoever we were, dear sisters.
The Weaver
for Bun Em
She threaded the loom
with one strand of her long silver hair,
which might have kept growing until she was done,
which might have fallen out
but I would come in and
sit beside her on the cushion, without her noticing,
and she would continue.
Every day I saw this old woman
weaving at her loom, rivers and lakes
underneath her hair.
The bottom full of silt.
I could see it if I reached with a comb
and that was when she'd look at me.
Under her hair,
she kept her oldest son,
who was out for a morning swim
with swallows swooping down to touch
the water. It made her happy
as she worked on silk dresses
and her hair never ran out.
Sometimes, when she was tired,
she'd tie it up,
and let all the tired animals around her house
drink from her head.
The Woman Who Was Small, Not Because the World Expanded
The elephants came
out from the fields
each carrying me by their trunks
to the back of the parade,
heading toward Chambok,
toward a village doused in fires,
that in the pond
fish had fried,
and looking at that dead water
was a woman
I had seen running home
each evening with a bucket
in her hand.
Always her speed was the hair
that flew in my face.
Always her feet sounding of tanks
which made dogs bark and flee,
footprints deep as trenches
in the grass.
This is the woman
who had shrunk
so small
when the planes came,
nobody could ever find her.
And since more planes,
her size stayed small
as a spoon,
and the world seemed to enlarge
though nothing had changed,
and when she saw me
she hid, threw pebbles at my ankles
and another, until I bowed down
and easily picked her up
folding her inside a banana leaf.
She slept. She slept well—
she who is my mother
sleeping off the world again,
whose person
I hold in my hand
when she wants to be held.
