From Bali Journals

When the monsoon quits the cremations begin. The banyans are wrapped, the body is wrapped. The food, the offerings, the altars, the stone griffins are bright with gold cloth. Dewi Sri's ricefield shrine is decked with filigreed banana leaves and plaited palms. Parades flood through narrow alleys draped with flowers, vibrating with gongs. Elaborate bamboo towers, festive with colored foil, lift the dead to the clouds. I watch a young girl's body burn, blacken into parchment, rise to the sun from a flaming bull. Her toes flare like candles as the body folds in half, arms stiff--raised like clock hands. The pyre explodes into a fountain of sparks. The wheels of her wagon, the eyes of her stuffed doll, melt. Her ashes pinwheel through sprays of bamboo and swaying coconuts, then rock from the sky, as if in her mother's arms. Through smoky sunbeams they land in the sweat on the nape of my lover's neck.

This child, dead from typhus at age twelve, becomes ancestor now. She is of the land, incorporated into its meaning. Her golden sarong whips in the flame- fanned wind, a diaphanous mast ready to snap from a burning ship. Here, where rivers cross and auspicious monoliths guard the ravine, this girl returns to earth. Vanilla perfumes the air, rainy orchids catch her remains. The breeze wafts each atom of her smile into porous stone. Through wooden spillways she feeds the rice. She is what we eat, the breath of these poems, the eager rattle of bones as the mouth begins to speak. She is water pouring from a fall, cobble piled into walls, trumpet vines light headed in the breeze. Because of her, I am not myself today. I belong to the world. The eye of a frog between pink lotus follows our feet across the plank bridge as we cross into an emerald sea of rice. A dragonfly naps on the wooden gate latch. We walk around, step through the plumerias, catch the last light on the volcano. Home, now--

Naked, smoke-wrapped
how we arrive is the way
we'll finally go.