Parable of a Brief Ceasefire, and: Windfall

Parable of a Brief Ceasefire

A man is a man inside a banyan climbing on temple roofs.

I feel large banyans climb the walls; whole jungles flee themselves.

There are men inside the banyans, men who breathe and brown in the sun and shimmer their limbs with the wind.

A banyan is a man that climbs the temple walls. I am called Left-Behind.

               I am called Left-Behind, a starfish with a child's head and two limbs that point down.

The banyans are my family. The banyans are orphans like me.

Ta Prohm:     Banyans walk around with their tentacles at night.

The tremors of their fleeing: mosquitos scared the banyans who sit with their roots hanging.

The men are my brothers; the men and I are orphans and mosquitos, too, orphans.

The men knock from night. They knock but do not want to come in.

Windfall

The fishermen, desperate, poisoned them with a cloudy gasolineso they dropped like apples on the ground one might find below a tree.

Except these were birds out of water, their long legs still wet.Sarus cranes especially, the conservationist said, were sold for $200 each

at the border market, where Thais bought them and turned around.After the war, that was how the local villagers needed to make money.

The cranes, near extinction, migrated to waters near a Khmer Rouge holding,where no one dared go, not that a mandate said keep out, no sign written

in blood. They rationed their food, knowing the pendulum of warcould swing anytime, and they'd need something to eat before evacuating.

They were sure it wasn't over. Invisible the egrets and ibises, invisiblethe forests of the eastern border to the one they shared with Laos.

This is why the wind blows a drought hard across the land, tonnage of lifedestroyed in the invisible, invisible land.