Laksmi Pamuntijak has been chosen to represent Indonesia at Poetry Parnassus as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. She is one of eight Asia Literary Review poets among the 205 who will perform at the South Bank Centre in the last week of June 2012. Click here for links to all the poets and their poems.
Two Women
Sitting at a Window Table in a Café
First I must
tell you, it is not the first for the
woman in
black. For the record, let’s call her
the First
Woman.
Just look at
her coffee: a
tamped single
shot on a clean base. Tight,
dark stains
only halfway up, forgetting,
not
forgetting.
As for the
bundle of nerves in Lady Grey rose –
which out of
politeness we shall call
the Second
Woman instead of the Other Woman –
come! Surely
you recognise a novice:
crema in
light brown stain swirling around milk,
getting, not
getting. Nothing but foam
at the bottom
of a demitasse cup.
And now it is
getting on noon and tassels
of drapes
like eyeliners are fraying.
Cranberry and
peach crush, smudged on the rims of
the umpteenth
cup.
Who says each
case is going to be different:
each
beginning, each ending?
Is this how it happened? says the First Woman,
Over a cup of coffee?
Did he watch you stir your cream in,
longing to kiss the sweetness the froth was brought into?
Did he ask you, politely – oh, for he is polite –
whether he could?
The thought
of cream, of sugar,
of anything
cloying and cowardly,
how it fazes
the Second Woman terribly.
She says
nothing, and so are
the both of
them thinned out,
by the
silence
that sells
the other out.
And then
comes the tightening,
the touchless
greeting,
everything
having to come out of breathing.
The Second
Woman’s reply, finally,
(and
inevitable now that they’ve come this far):
It’s over.
But is it? Of
course,
they both
know that nothing is ever over,
not if it has
to be uttered by women
like her to
women like her.
It’s over. Is it?
Yet what a
tall order, to forgive:
all that
power game and putting in place,
so much
knottier than “I am sorry,”
the girl
scout’s easy way out.
For a moment
the First Woman was lost in thought.
For wasn’t
there a time, a long time ago,
by the
hibiscus in the garden of her old home,
his face long
with the sun pale behind him:
This is not about you, he said. I ask you not to forgive me.
How many
years now? Neither of them
knowing what
her silence meant.
Meanwhile,
the Second Woman kept to
her own
silence: they took so little space.
Can there
ever be, she thought, enough coffee in a lifetime:
that
home-breaker, the stuff of satire?
Difficult to
tell, with all that crimsoning,
between a
mature but broken fruit
and
everything else.
But have I
told you: the two women would never meet again.
Box
Supposing –
That having opened the box,
we find in it sun-dried pineapples,
parched lotus roots,
pinnate seeds bleeding into puce.
Voodoo dolls,
lacquered masks,
and a barbecue shrimp mix
we know is anything but.
Supposing –
that having looked at the box,
we can’t decide what it is:
a witch’s vasculum, Louisiana tourism ministry’s
free-gift box, or site-specific art.
Supposing –
that red is not what makes purple,
is not the colour of blood or wine,
and henceforth is neither
sin nor Satan.
Supposing –
that the venule is like any other
vein, as plebeian as any,
a delusional vessel of life; and
that its hopes are not even as grand as
the turdy smell produced by air which is
wedded to a certain strain of
jasmine: that feral smell, that mortal sign,
that most unheralded of death knells.
Supposing –
that acetone and ambergris do not
settle their differences in bed;
taking them, instead, to the halls
of the divorce court.
Supposing –
that a furious absinthe
hands a pint of wormwood
to Aniseed the Timid, and folk
start dying from a sudden plague
of the diabolical pastis, having
repeatedly ignored the razor
glints in the cloudy water.
Supposing –
that love is the mind’s doing, not the eyes’,
and on which note even the twenty-by-twenty
black box downtown has the opalescence
of the silkiest sable, depending on
what you choose to remember.
Supposing –
that a box contains.
Extolling only
what it seeks
to cloud.
