This Kampuchea

We sit in a tuk-tuk with binoculars,

sipping Fantas, as a hot white wind

blows over water half a mile wide—

a heat that most of us can just abide.

Pale tourists, young voyeurs: we find

humidity a subject. Kids with scars

across their cheeks and narrow backs beg

candies, cigarettes. We give them coins

that mean so little we can hardly not afford

to give them up. Such charity! I pour

my Fanta in a cup and give a swig

to a small boy whose mother joins

us from behind a shack, an improvised

bamboo construction housing refugees.

She hasn’t said a word since she escaped,

the doctor tells us. Maybe she was raped

at knifepoint, maybe she had seen the trees

strung out with villagers Pol Pot despised

for simply being there. Then we all hear

they shot her husband in a ditch before her eyes;

her eyes seem blank now, darkly blank.

I notice that she never seems to blink

but watches like a bald-eyed moon, in fear,

as children utter their unlovely cries

for candy, cigarettes, for sips of Fanta

from my tinny cup. The bamboo clicks

in big-finned leaves across the river where

Cambodia has turned in its despair

to Kampuchea, where the golden bricks

of Angkor Wat sink like Atlantis

into jungle depths, the lost bright heart

of ancient quietude that’s since been drowned

in spit and blood. I wonder why we came

to this sad border and if we’re to blame

as much as anyone in that swart

jungle where the millions died as Death found

easy entrance on the world, engorged

itself, while faces turned another way.

Lon Nol, Pol Pot, the bloated Princes

whom the Rouge detested: none convinces

us that he’s to blame. We’ll never say

“this one” or “that” and feel relieved, purged

and guiltless, free to sail by 747

home to seasons in the hills of ease.

This Kampuchea has become a tomb

inside me, alien, but still a home

in some strange way—an altar where my knees

will fall at intervals, an odd chance given

to me as a gift, a place to bow

in obeisance to the darkest gods

who rule the heart whenever we ignore

our greatest charge: to watch and pray. The shore-

line glistens as a boy lets down a bamboo

rod, an old man settles by a tree and nods

off into dreams, a flame-bright bird

sails over water without any sense

of human borders. Children scurry to a jeep

beside us where the spoils are greater, as we keep

to schedule and drive away: untold expense

now memorized as what we saw and heard.