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boundary 2 28.1 (2001) 113-115



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Markets

Tina Barr

The café in Chengdu was filled with men
who turned their dark heads towards us;
all in Mao-blue, they sipped tea
from egg cups. Dozens
of bamboo bird cages twisted above.
Finches shook and fluffed,
nibbled their necks, dipped
their beaks into tiny china water cups.
They rattled their light cages.
From the sleeves of blue cloth jackets,
hands shifted, lifted cigarettes.
And the smoke drifted inside the cages.
Along the street were storefronts
like the open backs of dollhouses
filled with birds in cages. Further

down, fish nosed and swung their tails
inside metal buckets, whiskered, [End Page 113]
orange-finned. Silver amulets,
dropped into pails by the dozens,
turned and spun, minnows
smeared with the residue from rainbow.
Three women sat under the hoods
of hairdryers, in yellow vinyl chairs,
two feet from the street. A man
in a white coat, wearing a stethoscope
bent over a desk. Black meridians
coursed through the outline
of a man like a target on the wall behind.

A dog, dead and gutted, was strapped
to the back of a bike, its yellow skin
like a supermarket chicken’s.
Someone had set bowls filled with water
on crates and tables. Inside each bowl
a few stones: flat disks that fit in the palm,
bone, brick, black and green.
Jades, perhaps, some green as new leaves.
Rain spun down and pocked
the surface of the water.
We could smell the ozone and smoke,
meat seared over coals.
Wet ran down the back of my neck.
When I put my fingers in the bowl
the stones were cold.

In Lhasa, I got up from butter beans,
greens and barley bread,
in the dining room of the Holiday Inn,
crossed over to a seated monk.
One of his eyes—they’d taken,
skin puckered shut over the socket.
I’d cut the Dalai Lama
from the page of a book. He slid
the picture into the folds
of his yellow and dried-red robe.

Outside the Jokhang temple,
prayer flags snapped from phone poles; [End Page 114]
burning juniper threaded and spun.
They’d spread swatches of it,
rolled its paste into straws that dried.
Pilgrims in yak-skin skirts,
their braided hair beaded with turquoise,
bowed and slipped forward on the square;
in prostrating waves they rose and fell
like soldiers. A mile down the road they butchered
yaks, dried their skins outside round tents.
When our eyes met theirs we looked
through so far in
as into another’s room
before the mind drops its curtain.

Inside the Jokhang, we climbed a ladder
to the second floor and as we progressed
through each small chamber filled
with figures of brass and painted wood,
yak butter lamps burned before
Buddha after Buddha,
some with their eyes shut,
keeping their tiny faces lit.

Tina Barr is assistant professor of English at Rhodes College in Memphis, where she directs the creative writing program. Her poems have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Brilliant Corners, Chelsea, Harvard Review, Louisiana Literature, Southern Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in June 1999 and 2000, where she worked on a series of poems about Cairo.



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