Jeff McCallum

 for Ronnachai Sivatanapisit and Victor

The words were not Thai

or English.

No one,

Thai or English

understood them.

Morphine or phentanol induced they came in bursts,

loud,

clear,

unintelligible.

Fits and bursts,

an occasional word in one language or the other

escaping from the mind,

mouth,

psyche of the dying man

sleeping wide awake and small within the arms of the recliner;

small, thin,

impossibly thin,

knees twice the size of emaciated thighs.

.

Soaring,

hang gliding through the universe,

speaking in tongues to god

or someone exactly like her,

unaware of me, the healer, she,

the wife,

him,

the older brother,

Victor,

the son pacing.

Me,

I could not touch this place although

I may have been there in some far off recent past,

visited a while, and ambled on.

She,

she is simply hoping he will say I love you or

I hunger,

thirst,

desire some thing obtainable in words she understands

as she sits and holds his hand.

Him, the man I do not know

sits and stands,

sees perhaps a shadow of the future, wishes resolution;

will leave and come to sit or stand until uncomfortable again.

Victor turns the stereo to full and sings

He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands

loudly,

alternating it with Kumbia again and again.

Chinese?

I ask,

His father was

and now he rides the dragon.

Great wings and fire rise, take him far,

so far he remembers what he never thought he knew,

chasing dreams and dragon’s breath beyond

the cords and corridors of self until

the face or form of god is seen.

The wheel becomes a turn of hands on clock,

the clock an abacus

counting, ever counting in a way that we,

she, he, I can not imagine

and only Victor’s seen.