| After the
Honeymoon Casualty of
the lorry in front,
the head end of a python smeared to the tarmac
the other half untouched. It's stopped twitching,
but its patterned skin still shimmers like jewels
glowing saffron and apricot, edged with indigo
and ultramarine, on a chiaroscuro ground
of buff and bistre. Such vivid camouflage -
tessellation of leaf and lozenge shape,
inlay of sunlight laced by inky shadow
spilled dappled on a still coil: but not this still.
We get out of the car to look closer.
These
are rubber plantations. Their scarred trunks swing
round me in sickening avenues of perspective.
Under the glaucous leaves they sweat heat and sap.
Down an aisle the flash of a turquoise wing
sharp as a kris-blade. The air is full
of whirrings and hummings, bubblings of bulbuls,
chatter of hidden monkeys, green parrot screechings.
It's hot, heavy, spiced in my nostrils, noisy
as a kitchen I've no business in but can't get out of.
Forty minutes cross-legged with a blunt
fruit-knife
and you're through tough scales, between the joints
of a spine like a cod's. You wonder about cooking it,
say you've always wanted to eat snake.
I let you lift it. We reach the Chinese quarter,
half a dead python in the boot, already a bit high.
Its brightness is dimming fast. You negotiate for
skinning
and making up as a bag; and I plead - Isn't there some
way
to preserve those colours? - Sorry mem.
But I can dye it for you. Nice red, mem?
Contemplation
Mitsuko keeps a cockroach in a cage
of bamboo slivers. She says it knows her.
In the evenings
she sits and gazes at its primitive
impassivity. Millions of years
have not changed cockroaches,
and Mitsuko finds this calming. Stress
is not a worry for cockroaches.
Overcrowding does not concern them.
They have no jobs to go to,
no husbands to please.
The cockroach gazes at Mitsuko.
She does not know what it thinks, but it seems
not to be asking anything of her.
She finds this restful.
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