Poem Eleven

“CROCODILES CAN JUMP!”

Sunk in the palm frond south’s
lost contentment of discarded
plastic water bottle-wading cows,

the Krakow Buddhist couple playing
backpackers with pirated guidebooks before
next month’s Dharmasala meeting

with the seventeenth Karmapa
aren’t speaking. Again. He’s back
sleeping off last night’s

argument-sparking high at the guesthouse; she’s
with their American travel companion,
a crocodile farm outside Mamallapuram.

In spite of appearances, blanched-
to-gray green logs baking
thicker their stillness in reputation’s steel,

the American’s frayed-staticky
educational television notions of
cold-bloodedness

sees them in constant flux, degrees
shifting between air
and knotty vein in dispassionate exchange.

A Green Tara pendant glints
low on her neck, represents
transformed jealousy.

As a pile manacled by tooth and scale
snaps enlivened at a caretaker-flung
pink chunk of chicken,

she confides she’s considering leaving her man.
“People who get attached to objects
are stupid. People who get attached to

other people well,
it’s sad but understandable.”
Another possibility,

a Tibetan ceremony to have them play
some major role in each other’s
next thousand lives. “Sometimes lovers,

not necessarily, sometimes best friends
or mother and son.” That morning,
before the crocodiles,

visiting a two room orphanage,
drugged-seeming children, each
with an entry in a stained

three-ring binder, most of them
abandoned by parents who could no longer feed them,
or rescued from parents with alcohol problems,

not technically orphans,
he remembered the train station in Madurai, buying
idli for breakfast while the Poles, still holding hands,

bowed secret smiles, saying, “Trust us,”
purchased his ticket, this
town he’d never heard of, now

all bricked up around him: This heat.
On a mouse-chewed jute mat a little girl
sucks her thumb beyond the thumb’s

ability to help. Do not sit on walls!
Keep hands out! Crocodiles--

“What if,” he asks, “one does jump?
And what if it just keeps going up?

Why don’t you two
just make up?”