Poems for Faraway Friends

For Siripan:

A green elephant pulls two leafs from a sketched tree
and a blue dog sniffs them, a bit of his blue reflects
in blotched shadowing across the elephant’s trunk.
The tree, dark and dying, the leaves, sepia and swirled

and the florescent shimmers across the coated finish
every time I move, blinding me to the image,
or just a streak of it,
remind me that I’m sorry, this card you sent

got bent in my bag and I
move around too much.  And where you are,

where leaves don’t change colors but elephants do,
I’m there too, in phrases of your language that sneak
from my mouth into a pool of monolingual misunderstanding
in streaks, blotched shadows
nobody notices.  I notice.

For Chirasak:

You gave me an assignment:
two hundred pages by the Buddhadasa
Bikkhu.  Bound by staples and masking tape,
lists of ways to look,
The Art of Living.  To read and learn
the core: not merit points
but perspective.

And you live by day:
another canceled trip to Bhutan, another project for
a new prime minister, another road pond, another bicycle.
I ask, you say, “so so. Because of”  me.
From way over there, you beg for photographs
of yellow leaves and red brick but when I take one
I hear you say my product is not beautiful:
mai suoi.  I don’t know why I hear you.

You gave me the book
in exchange for the core of Jesus. I meditated
and gave an answer and you said
you liked it, you believed it, you believed it all.
I try to give you autumn but I cut off a building,
trim a tree, catch the hand
of a passerby. I can’t fit what you fit into frames.

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