Blossoms of Phnom Pehn

(I can still remember the blossoms of Phnom Pehn.

 

I think about them now.

 

You cannot take this away. Stomachs may shrink, shackles may chafe, wife and children may and raped beaten and burned, but the single image of a blossom in bloom, a face cupped, the stem leaning, like a woman bent over the wash, is unassailable. Pretty little things. Pink and fresh, like the cheeks of girls not yet spoken for. Dropped from the pagan fingertips of the trees as the spring cocoons itself in the heat of another humid summer.

 

It is strange. I no longer think about the food. Food is a painful and distant memory. It is easier to think about the blossoms of Phnom Pehn or the feeling of your brother's breath or fishing poles on the shores of a village, standing out along the banks like accusatory fingers. It is easier to reinvent the world – the world before you existed. Before your soldiers. Before the exodus. Before the anthems and the freedom. It may agitate you to know that I have rejected you and your reality. You are nothing more than faded ghostdwellers. I walk among you, but you are a waterpainting. You are a reflection. I can see through you, skin transparent as lacewing. Strangers in the red dust.

 

You haunt me, nonetheless.

 

Tagalong, poltergeist. Earthly trouble. Earthly nonsense.

 

I no longer think about the pain.

 

The pain in the stomach, crowing, vast, emptying. The pain behind the eyes. The gray skin. The yellow gums and the teeth, black and aligned like railroadworkers. Eyes deep and old. We might blow away. Tumble away. Our bodies like kiteskins. Spread your arms and the lazy, browsing wind will scoop you up, collect you, ferry you.

 

But you have the wind, don't you?

 

You own it all.

 

You own my very heartbeat.

 

We do not need mirrors here. We are all the same person now. Tallman. Thinman. Newperson. Gray and dim-eyed in the mist, like dethroned noblemen. To have you is no benefit, you say. To destroy you is no loss. You have taxed us. You have embargoed the soul, the breath, the smile. Tariff on the touch of a loved one. Amendments on the poetry of a conversation.

 

It is only in the thoughts of a mother's skirts that there is any sanctuary. In the way the house smells after a home-cooked meal. In the way sugarcane break under my grip and in the way a betrothed smiles quietly at you through a folded photograph, tucked under your foot in your shoe. Her face like a blossom in spring, opening, divulging.

 

The bees, the bees. Come industrialize your tears, darling. Make something. Make something out of nothing. Out of sorrow. Out of sorrow and dust.

 

It is only in these thoughts. It is only in these thoughts that there is asylum. A nursery of sensation and remembrance. Quiet place, quiet shores. It is here that I smell the blossoms of Phnom Pehn. It is here that I live.)

 

 

*

 

 

They stand at the edge of the hole they dug themselves, like words on the tip of a tongue, all twenty-nine of them. The dirt is a fresh and heavy clay. It is in their fingernails. They can smell it in the air. A dozen Khmer Rouge – young men in uniforms that hang on them like foreign skins – sit around with guns and cigarettes and harsh words. They sit and laugh as a captain inspects the men lined up along the ridge, with his proud red sash and his face bruised with liverspots. It is unbearably hot. The heat speaks with a buzzing dialect. Flies at the edges of their eyes. Flies on their lips. Greedy, already, for their nutrionless insides. Attracted by the preamble of a dying man.

 

They stand in a field. A field of red dirt. The trees have been hacked down to thumbless stumps. The birds hang in the sky listless and homeless, silent and dark as clergymen. The men sweat. There are no women or children, because they were killed the day before. Their bodies hang from the trees on the outskirts of the field, gutless and naked. The birds roost on their limbs and squabble over their eyes. The Khmer Rouge joke around and wave the bloody dresses of the women in front of the men, like the capes of toreadors.

 

The captain stops at the end of the line. Twenty-nine men. They are silent and expressionless. They are holding the shovels they used to dig this pit, and they are asked to drop the tools. They are all yellow and their faces are too tight on their skulls.

 

The captain looks at the dozen Khmer Rouge. They stand up and fix their guns.

 

The trees on the outskirts wave, like the hands of favored pupils, ready with their answers.

 

Except, there are no answers.

 

There are only gunshots, and then men drop silently into the pit.

Reviews

[W.k.kortas]

Umm, there is a bit going on here, isn't there? Like the wise Emily, I went back to Masters--although in my case, it was Lucinda Matlock ('It takes life to love Life"), or perhaps Blake's observation that the mind is its own place, or perhaps still Andreyev's condemned anarchist who, in her prison cell, has something approximating epiphany and the transcendence of matters relating to the here and now. The first, parenthetical section runs the gamut--from the desire to embrace beauty and its memory, to musing on daily sustenance, from there to death and dust, and finally back to the blossoms. The second section deals with the brutal atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, who took revolutionary principles--ideas ostensibly for the betterment of everyman--to horrible and absurdly twisted ends. They, in the end, "have no answers." The piece is philsophically and artistically weighty, but the writing is light in touch--superbly detailed, with wonderful images, and pitch-perfect pacing. If there has been a better piece of fiction posted on this site, I've certainly missed it.

[Emily B]

As I read through this, I travelled through all the great literary figures of our time. Walt Whitman, William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams and so many others. Your voice is sublime. It just floated off the page so hauntingly I was entranced. And as I read there came other words. Like these of Stephen Crane from "War is Kind":

Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
Because your father tumbles in the yellow trenches,
Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
Do not weep.
War is kind.


And Edgar Lee Masters:

And the old soldier is struck with silence,
Or his mind flies away
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
It comes back jocosely
And he says, "A bear bit it off."
And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
Dumbly, feebly lives over
The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
The shrieks of the slain,
And himself lying on the ground,
And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
And the long days in bed.
But if he could describe it all
He would be an artist.
But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
Which he could not describe.


What a phenomenal write. One where words truly do meet metal.