The Sleeping Wall

The Sleeping Wall
Mai makes him tea in her celadon teapot. Gibbous moon. She feeds him almonds. A plate
of oranges. Waning crescent moon. She is obsessed with hummingbirds.
One night a syzygy. Moon, earth, sun clumsily aligned.
2
James’s desire for Mai stuns him. Her clipped, precise English, handwriting careful as a
schoolgirl’s. Caught in window sun, she seems a chrysalis encased in light. When she
walked into his classroom he hadn’t known an instant could transform him so completely.
Again and again, he goes to her as if in a dream where he is without will. Her room holds
such stillness—a boat adrift in the middle of a lake. Air tinged with the closed-up scent of
secondhand books that line her walls. Her soft hands clutch the sheet. Before he leaves,
she tiptoes to press her lips against his eyelids.
3
Mai’s world lost piece by piece. There is a rhythm to the losing. The way purple herons lift and
lower their heads, their spindle legs vanishing in tall grass.
Saigon, city of bones, rises in smoke. The sky bends down to meet it. The stripping away until
things reveal themselves as without weight. Without roots.
The Mekong is a molten river, bridges fingers of flame. She watches her mother bury the polished
Buddha under bamboo leaves. She feels a sudden pain, her heart fighting against its own death.
The darkness is a ruin. Her mother’s hand, twigs of bone in hers. More refugees, tense links in a
chain of bobbing lights. Footprints dissolve as if in sand.
Boatmen lean against lampposts smoking. Those who would try to break her open. Rough and
careless, not like she imagined her father in his French army uniform. She pieced him together
from a torn image in black and white. He visits her dreams offering oval pebbles piled in a rice
bowl. He left her his name, left her his language ma fille, mon amour.
Boats, ribbed cradles anchored in red morning. She stares at the lapping water, vessels battered
by the sea. Her teenage body. She lifts her chin, straightens her spine and faces the eastern glare.
• 27 •