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ROOTS
Batang, Western Sumatra, Indonesia
The roots of the two banyan trees poured themselves
like rivulets into the Batang River—
one from the eastern bank, one from the west—
competing for the endless torrents gods grant Sumatra.
The village elders who met at the full moon
beneath each tree loved their own banyan so much
they needed to destroy its rival and so sent
machete warriors across the rapids
where, matched and met, blood whirled
downstream for decades.
Even children swung on the roots
like mad monkeys to attack the other shore.
Entangling limbs in knots, they hung
like ripened fruit
before they fell on the reddened rocks.
Left to themselves, the roots of the trees
wound around and within themselves
until there was no end among them
and later innocents called the bridge of roots
a natural wonder and crossed from side
to side.
A CUSTOM:
TO THE NIGHT
after Frost, after Conrad
in Way Kanan, Lampung, Sumatra, Indonesia
The gloom of the city broods,
breeds darkness like mold,
like cancer, its impenetrable
selfishness absorbing me
who must escape to the jungle river,
right to the heart and soul
of my brooding gloom, to branches
silhouetted against the full moon’s sky.
There the snake head crane curls atop
its crag; here a pair of hornbills
swoop and glow at sunset. An infant
kingfisher dares to pitch and roll.
Jungle night awakens with a roar
of the tiger, and so the sudden silence
of the black monkeys; the frozen mouse
deer; melting horizon of life and death.
I wade the river, struck
by moonlight, cut and rippled
into a thousand incandescent
moments. There is no darkness here.
At dawn one siamang monkey whoops
oomboo and soon the forest is a chorus
swirling ‘round me howling and singing,
whooshing and whirring. Leaping.
OUR LADY OF THE ISLAND
Lombok, Indonesia
Our Lombok island lady
big as the pile of bricks
over which she climbs
doffs her headful of rattan trays
piled with the day’s groceries—
squeezed, weighed, and haggled—
into the hands of the conductor
as she oozes herself
into the last space inside the mini-bus.
Reconstituted upright on the bench,
trays in lap, she crosses
her eyes catercorner
at the skinny biddy spitting strongly
enough to threaten our lady’s sarong.
The ample grinding of teeth
and the rising of a machete
in our lady’s right hand dries the spittle
on the skinny one’s lips so our lady
turns to her tray of garlic. With
the grace of a dowager needlepointing
her Mercedes way
in Manhattan traffic, our lady
separates and peels each clove
meticulously with whips
of the machete blade. Not a flavor
nor a moment wasted
this day.
MOMA, DAD, ME, AND MATISSE
"Matisse Picasso," which has come to the Museum of Modern Art's temporary home, in Queens,
after triumphant
appearances in Paris and London, is a marvelous exhibition
with a frail hook.
- --Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker
certain ballet dancers were fags,
setting was a plot by literary show-offs to ruin a good story,
poets were fags,
Republicans were good for business,
Liberace and Rock Hudson were fags,
killing deer was sporting, and
painting was what we did to the house even under
the mirrors, stuffed heads, and velvet landscapes that didn't know a white
from an off-white.
He'd moved up America's ladder
welding battleships in the forties,
trucking potatoes in the fifties,
extruding aluminum patio furniture in the sixties,
and purchasing the raw materials for Swingline staples in the seventies.
I visited his office once in the plant
on an eponymous Skillman Avenue
in Long Island City.
(I had to persuade him that his wife wasn't a whiner
but in need of a shrink.)
A bow toe accompanying his Haband knit
struck me as sadly genteel,
but we had other things to discuss.
As we always did. I had a tour of how staples were made
and boxed by tough machines and tougher men.
We lunched at an Astoria pizzeria where he'd once let his target pistol appear
beneath the knit to scrounge a better deal.
We shared a seventies pizza at fifties prices.
No toppings; mushrooms were for fags.
My father went out of business 'round
the same time as Swingline.
Now I read how the plant is a museum
with Matisse and Picasso hanging out where
my father did.
What wears the wall nearest my father's desk,
I wonder: harlequins or whores, nudes or bulls?
I hope it's "The Piano Lesson"--that lonely little boy in
a world of sharps and curlicues,
sex in the corner, time on the move,
a faceless matron forlorn in the background,
no father in sight
but the boy keeps an eye
on the music.
Patriot's Act
I never felt
my top before,
witnessed my crown, my
heights
overlooked
by those who tower above me
(or think they do)
who have taken my measure
as rulers might
so aware of their eyes upon my head
I combed and gelled
and conked and bonded
and sheared my waves
but curls will have their way
and now around the vacant lots I see
ba-boing ba-boing a thick kink
that will not concede to the brush.
James Penha, a native New Yorker, has lived for the past fifteen years in Indonesia and teaches at the Jakarta International School, Jakarta. No Bones to Carry is a volume of Penha's poetry recently published by New Sins Press (see Lunarosity's Homepage listing of "Lunar Authors Books and Chapbooks"). Among his many published works are an article in NCTE's ClassroomNotes Plus, fiction in Columbia, East of the Web, and Ignavia, and poems in Heliotrope, Thema, and in the anthologies Queer Collection and Silver Boomers. A volume of his "Greatest Hits" is also available from Pudding House as part of its series celebrating the work of small-press poets. Penha also edits the current-events poetry forum, New Verse News (www.newversenews.com). See Lunarosity's homepage listing of recommended online publications). (April-05, April 08)
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