You taught me spirits don’t move
but horizontally, in order to be safe,
all you’ll need is a trivial hurdle
between the sofa and the bedroom, oriented
the way the feng-shui suggests. A Benjarong teapot,
the one from your mother, a carved door
reflecting the multiple aspects the Naga can exist.
We went down to the chalk-stupa temple
the motionless stupas, that allow no livable cavity
on top of Buddha’s relic – a trace of hair, the ultimate nail.
We stared at ourselves as if the lake carps were
about to swallow us, shred our terrestrial meats
apart, to reincarnate in a lower circle,
a rat, a dragonfly, a monitor lizard.
Garuda’s wooden profiles were crutches for the oxygen
of the world, I would have leaned your silk
dress to invert the reproductive process, teach the butterfly
how to come back to the status of a silk worm, that giving your life away
was just not worth it, that no pashmina embroidery
deserves the final act, the one nobody
will narrate – just the latest of the countless ignored miracles.
The image of your neck overwhelmed all
this, the recess between your shoulder blade
and your atlas where your skin twists and stumbles and changes
its color, where I’d pour loads of tiger
balm, the fire of red tiger balm would
burn up to lathe your outline, to soothe
your domestic grieves, with a major blaze.
Considering giving your life away, to be a string
benefitting of your human warmth.