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.