EXPERIMENT IN RUSTICITY

 
 
The afternoon numbers

ate their way into my skull,

and the ceiling fans had long since

hummed themselves to sleep.

The heat would kill me if the numbers didn’t.

 

The day before it had been nouns.

They hounded my dry half-sleep

of dusty dreams that night,

until all I had left of words I knew

were sounds, crackling in the yawn

of my stick- on smile, ready to pounce.

 

My pounding temples screaming protests;

this not that, this not that, NOT THAT!

I was ready to leave the village on foot,

risk taking directions

in a language I only half understood

I am no teacher.

We were preaching cleanliness

to smiles belonging to faces

washed in a river kilometers away.

More fool us.

My age, these girls were my age!

The days melted into each other

like our new aches and pains.

City slickers!

 

Mornings, they bathed in the river.

Evenings, we washed that same river

out of our hair and skin,

snapping a bunch of noisy photographs first.

And in that same way

we would later shower clean

of their embraces and their shy-eyed smiles.

 

And so we watched the swirling rush of the river

with the same eyes that would one day follow

our memories of chunni-chewing faces

disappear into the foam,

down our pristine bathroom drains.