Songkhla

Songkhla

Songkhla

                Prasit’s



1.
On land your mother owned
you’ve built your home. Inside,
where the white walls are cool,
we are drinking tea with your cousin,
the monk, who has come to talk
about the new temple being planned.
He would like, he says, to see
Australia. His eyes are restless,
but he’s been a monk for twenty years.
“It’s a good life,” he says,
“But lonely.” Up and down the drive
that holds the hot traffic back
your dogs, Diamond and Ruby, play,
with jasmine and purple of bougainvillea
looking for their chance to share the fun.


2.
The night before the festival
the women make the offerings they’ll give
tomorrow to the monks: sticky rice wrapped
in parcels made of palm leaf, ideal for travelers.
The housekeeper shows them how
to fold, turn and tie, as their mothers used to do.

Sometimes they get it wrong – these are not beautiful enough,
everyone will know what house they came from. Beauty, here,
shows respect, so they unwrap the leaf and start again,
letting me know how old this custom is and how good
because it brings people together. Songkhla, they add,
is a peaceful place and they are happy here.

Then one of them asks, “Are you happy here?”
“Yes, “ I say: because for the moment I am,
a traveller grateful for what has been offered,
a guest whose duty is to recognise the beauty here,
to know whose house it comes from.


3.
Out the back your housekeeper builds
an open fire where, late as it is,
she’ll boil the offerings, cooking rice
until it feels the flavour of the leaf.

She’s tough. Before this she worked
construction sites, hard among the men,
with three small sons she wouldn’t give away.
Yours was the last house she helped to build.

You call her Gop (in English “frog”).
Now her sons are standing next to her.
One of them has put his hand up
to stop the smoke getting to his eyes.


4.
The dark is different here, close
as the sea that is drawing over me
a memory of warm and salty skin.

Somewhere just outside the window
an unknown bird is making prayers
I repeat beneath my deepening breath.

So I sleep undisturbed, although I know
there is a gecko clinging to the bedroom wall,
ready to crack the knuckle of the night,

although I know that out on the unceasing road
there are, there always are, the motorbikes.
Their smoke no longer makes its way into dream.

If I wake at all it will be to hear your dog,
Diamond, barking, guarding you with a sound
that rings the house, resounding like a temple bell.


5.
I will abandon myself to the rhythm of a day
that starts with drums, drums drawing buddhas
down the country roads, through the city streets,
buddhas carried on the back of old and battered utes,
buddhas lifted high on trucks made up to look like boats,
boats beautiful as pieces broken off and drifting down
from a brightly papered heaven.

I will abandon myself to the rhythm of a day
displaying everywhere on yellow flags the wheel,
the wheel of dharma being set in motion, a day
remembering Lord Buddha coming down, after the rain,
coming down to earth, coming down a stairway
made for him by the King of Heaven, coming down
into the circle his disciples made warm with waiting.

I will abandon myself to the rhythm of a day, Lak Phra,
that comes, as always, after the rain and its prayers,
drawing monks with buddhas into town, monks who seem
to me correct, pious, sleek, satisfied, disciplined and wise,
until I find the one I’m looking for, the one who’s learned
how not to care, the one who’s laughing as he scrubs
my hot head with a blessing made of sticks and water.


6.
When I’m taken (as everybody is)
to see the mermaid’s statue on the beach,
the story I’m told starts to sound familiar.

One night she came up out of the sea
(the waves are gentle here) and sat upon this rock.
All she wanted to do was wash her hair, but
a sailor – he would have been
young and handsome – saw her and fell
at once and of course hopelessly in love,
so in love he tried to catch her, to hold her,
and had he done so would probably have said,
“You are mine.” And then he would have kept her
safe from harm. But she had never seen
a thing with speech and legs, and so was frightened off,
scurrying back into the surf. Never seen again.

The sailor, silly bugger, couldn’t let her go.
He spent the rest of his life combing the seas
in case he got another chance to have her hair
run between his fingers. He never stopped
to think she might be happy where she was;
as far as he could see where she had gone
was dark; she’d only have the sharks for company.

I have my photo taken sitting just in front of her.


7.
After the house was built,
before you could come to live in it,
you had, for seven nights, to stay somewhere else.

You chose the temple where, as a boy,
you were taught that nothing lasts. Nothing does:
time is a worried cloth that hangs over the place

and cannot hold itself together.
When, in the night, there is a storm,
it can’t be kept outside:

the rain comes to make you wet, the wind
to make you cold, to make you think
of poverty until to show the heavens more just

you decide to build another temple here.
That night your dreams are bound
upon a wheel of noise.

Yet the monks in the morning say
there was no storm; what you heard
was the spirits saying they were pleased.