What the Hand Knew
A poem on touch, recognition, and the body’s quiet fidelity.
We were not speaking.
The room had gone blue
with Saturday evening,
the film moving softly
through its borrowed weather.
You were beside me,
ordinary, beloved,
unaware of being
the centre of the world.
And my hand,
older than thought,
went quietly
to your leg.
Not hunger.
Not asking.
Only the body
recognising home.
Only the hand
finding the warm fact of you
before the mind
could come near it.
A palm rests.
A breath continues.
The light changes
on a wall.
And the whole life
leans there—
toward you,
as the sleeping earth
keeps faith
with the root.
—
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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.