The Mouth You Gave Me
Before I speak to you,
breath crowds the dark
behind my teeth.
My tongue lifts,
finds its place,
waits.
I thought I could shape it
cleanly—
give air an edge,
weight it with my tongue,
send it to you
as something mine.
But the mouth closes
around what it means.
The tongue turns once,
as if listening.
Even these teeth
close on an edge
they never cut.
The word stops,
held at the root.
I try again.
Breath enters
without asking,
and the tongue falls
into a shape already worn.
The mouth opens.
What it has gathered
leaves on its own breath,
the word moving
toward you.
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The Debt of Being Here · Series introduction · From the Workroom
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A concise and impartial dictionary of absence, promises, quarrels, ordinary objects, and the troublesome instability of words.
The City of Service
The temple we inherit is a building from which almost all necessity has been removed. Nothing must be brought for it to continue being what we call a temple. The sanctuary asks nothing of us. Stone is good at this kind of independence.
A living temple was otherwise.
Water had to come in. So did grain, cloth, oil, aromatic substances, fuel. The things required for worship arrived because someone carried them across a threshold.
Houses of Wood, Light, and Smoke
Some of Angkor’s most intimate ruins do not rise above the ground at all. They are postholes, low mounds, hearths and ponds: durable traces of a domestic city built largely from things that decay. To restore that city is to see Angkor not only as stone, but as wood, smoke, water, repair, and people living within calling distance.