from
Elemental Portraits: Nocturnes for Two Pianos
composed
by Kirk Whipple
—Kosal
Long: 1975 to June 7, 1989
1.
The end of a classic American dream
confronts
the runner coming over the rise
of
blond hills & dark trees mirroring the lake.
The
drowned laughter of classmates
horsing
around on a summer outing—
Their
blind eyes, and the sun cresting each ripple,
the
silent “O” of empty inner tubes,
punctuated
the end of the sentence.
At
the bottom of the lake a fisherman’s net
casts
a game of cat’s cradle for things lost
and
the sleek young diver—
The
boy who, with his 14-year-old eyes
sought
the true identity of light
on
this side of the world:
the
names Refugee &
Cambodia
whispering homeward
in his ears.
2.
The runner’s legs measure
each
step, each breath, bearing witness
as
if life depended on it: systole, diastole.
The
indifferent ground answers, Decrescendo.
No
overtones to clear the ear’s palette.
The
boy left the killing fields for El Verano.
We
survived the war, saw death and hunger every day.
Now,
the youngest and sweetest taken from us.
I
dream of walking that lake bed clad in citrine light.
A
constellation of bubbles escapes, takes flight.
A
velvet foot upon the blue throat of the California sky,
the
lotus flowering in the mind,
a
journey taking us home.
Home, could he whisper it?
The
long slender vowels of the soul,
no
distant jungles to flee from—
Refugee
camp, the bodycount and the hunger
of
foreign syllables.
The harmony shifted
in the final depths:
an empty raft in deep summer.
2/1994
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