On Hearing the News of Your Death

On the Bahau River, East Kalimantan…

In the month of the
wagtail’s arriving,
in the time of the night blue
starry sky,
the longhouse was empty,
silent old brown rafters
spun out into visions
of laughing lucent skulls hung in baskets.

The moon had died.

In time
I hope to have
this sorted out:

Your name from the fire.
Your shadow from the cosmic crackle.
The half finished letter halted in mid-sentence.
The trail without your footprints.
The unfilled shirt.

Not everything needs
to be seen, heard, and felt
for it to be of substance:

A likelihood of
intuitions,
actions and reactions,
the weightless
unfractured nothingness
that fell between us,
that awaited the absolute
thought-defying crisis
of meaning full-blown:

The loss.
The begging.
The promises.
The sobs.
The repetitions
of holy names.
I went there
behind the crude
but serious belief
that you had to be able
to look
at anything.
That you were not only
responsible for what you did
but also for what you saw.

I can remember
those feelings now
but can’t have them:

your stories like filament
through a piece of time
washed into the rapids
of the Bahau River and gone.

And now the dead tell their stories
out of remote and inaccessible space
where there are no ideas,
no emotions,
in uninhabited passages of dead language.

There is nothing to pull
from the sleeve,
no other shaman’s magic to perform
only to conjure
the past:

the damp roots breathing,
and fruit sweating,
the heartbeat of tiny animals.

On the Bahau River
the gongs sounded:

There were surprise entrances
and sudden exits,
quickly through
the swinging door
of the future,
from pure spirit
to the land of the dead.

The ashes of the longhouse fires
are cold and bitter
in this season of
the fullest rice harvest:

and I am told
not to forget the dead
and yet
not to think of them
too much.

I hope to have
this sorted out
in time…
The hornbill,
glimpsed
in rainforest
shadow,

from the hornbill dance…

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