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The Chankiri Tree*
‘The dreadful, inglorious dead, it was, making their
animal presence known across the land, still weeping
tears of disgust and shaking a tremorous finger of
warning.
- Frederic Prokosch, The Asiatics
it’s the rags & the fence made of bones
makes me think about life as a void filled
with canes heads of hoes knives & swords
to be stabbed into bodies of freedomists
mothers with no heads (in fact 66 in one pit &
one hundred beside) & the sky & the silence
of choeung ek be born like the thing hiding
inside & shiver when you see the way that
she moves over grasses & just like the
leaves out of eden the staircase with figs
& the branches so low that the earth has
withdrawn to be caught in a snapshot of
europe whose jawbone is here with the others
arranged & she stares at the river the sound
& the message like drums below deck &
a fountain a bowl of patella & joss sticks
encircled by teeth makes her heroic lush
*against which executioners beat children
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