A Moveable Garden

Part of my Feb 2024 Dream Poems project.

A Small Undoing


It seems unlikely, but I spent last night in Thailand,
in charmingly simple apartment rooms unlike others,
a long rustic table holding space, its surface
crowded with colour, pieces of things, the clutter of living,

and our genial host is asking genial questions of us
and you’re answering wildly, unaccountably. I bend forward
to hide my dismay, falsely study a piece of flowery cotton,
feel the passing rescue of the palpable and ordinary,
and when he queries me and I look up,
he’s looking back at me, quite unfooled, quite amused.

Outside, or rather both inside and outside, as it often
is here, birds flit, shift air in what’s almost but not quite
a cage, the faint intimation of what was never
a cage, some of them red like tanagers,
exotic only to us, and I’m photographing them or us
or the irreplaceable bird-shifted air in this damp alcove.

Now I’m in the rooms again,
peering about, taking photos, always photos:
what’s real is softened,
also enhanced, by the numinous gap,
the pause between now and later,
the dangling pause disentangling
what’s real, what was never real.

Now,
later,
another now,
as it always is here,
I’m walking the town alone, dismayed to discover I’ve
forgotten something, left it elsewhere, as one does here.

It’s not important what; it’s only the forgetting, the discovery,
the dismay, over and over, and now the seeking help,
panic rising but quelled. In a shop as I explain,
we both notice, but he notices first,

that my shirt is completely unbuttoned. Shall I describe it?
It’s a lovely fabric, at home in Thailand, a loose cream-coloured linen,
and light, draping like the stirring air, a distant trace, birdsong.
Embarrassed (need I add “as often occurs here”?),
I rebutton it, and now —

from now until then,
until the end — I’m checking and fiddling,
conscious of the risk,
another small undoing
that can’t be undone.

©M Wms 2024