Cambodia
There is nowhere to begin but in metaphor:
the temples are as ancient as the fields of heaven,
the dead will be as numerous as the cobra’s coils
Thus may we understand our journey through Cambodia,
which is a dream, a luminosity, a message
buried beneath a heap of bones
In the market, there is a Frenchwoman buying a songbird
and we must remember that she is not at fault: she represents
only a sojourn in a distant latitude—only a woman in sandals
and a summer dress. Walking through the heat of August,
along a flowery road she sees pythons at her feet and dragons
in the sky. But she can tell us nothing, she is not the colonizer
though her presence on the road is, itself, a metaphor:
the blossoms are the pathway, the pathway is the Mekong,
and the Mekong is the infinite, which she is walking towards
Then there is the tiger and the lake, the lake,
the mountain and the stone. They represent mythology
and the power of mythology to redeem the natural world
which is, itself, the message, and the message is a metaphor
for tigers prowling in the darkness, for sacred lakes and
sacred mountains, for a stone that has been lodged
at the center of the universe, a stone that can be moved
Which is nature of Cambodia: to be the instrument of
incremental movement, the churn, the mill, the mind that
turns the sky’s machinery. Which is, itself, a metaphor.
that represents a woman in a market who buys a songbird,
who feeds it seeds and honey to restore to us our privilege
to live the days of jade, to cross the bridge of milky stars,
to turn our backs against the thin ghosts who will flee
the suffering country, to survive the coming war
Eleanor Lerman
