In open palm the old man cradles his chiseled characters, names them - Arjuna, Hanuman, Sita. We choose among the faces carved to dance in villages holding out their human hands. In two languages we bargain circled by children gawking, giggling at our skins. If we reach out they shrill from our touch equal measures of mock and real fear at the peril of our fairness, a shade for ghosts. The carver's white-haired wife stops me, clasps my pallid hands in hers, dark as the paddy earth she's tilled, and speaks, not in her language but the old colonial tongue, mistaking the disguise of my paleness into her past. I hear warmth, the urgency of sounds her mouth has not formed for thirty years. Her voice flutters in the vibrato of age. I search behind the masquerade of language. Perhaps this is a thirty-year housecleaning of the heart pouring from its chambers all that's not been said so death may enter. She stops, strokes my cheek with one finger. I leave with her naked countenance. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...A LOVE SONG by PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR THE WIDOW AT WINDSOR by RUDYARD KIPLING THE HOUSE-TOP; A NIGHT PIECE by HERMAN MELVILLE THE LEGEND OF ARA-COELI by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH RECOMPENSE by DOROTHY MOORE ALFORD MORTAL JEALOUSY by PHILIP AYRES OBSERVATIONS IN THE ART OF ENGLISH POESY: 22. ELEGIAC VERSE: THE FIFTH EPIGRAM by THOMAS CAMPION |