Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
THE CONSTRUCTION OF HIS TASTE
He is livid behind his mask yet it does not show in the photo.
Later, he wonders if that did him any good. The object of his anger
is laughing at something in her hand. Her joke
engaged to her definition of the day’s outcome. She reads
out a passage to him and he hears flotsam. He thinks mendicant,
because he just read that flotsam can be a vagrant.
He worries he is living through associations, that too many choices
are given to live out his life. She is his sister and does not know him.
She is laughing at the things she has not understood about him.
What is it about flesh and blood that makes me so foolish, he thinks?
Nothing in her makes sense yet he would kill for her happiness.
Blind children are painting in the yard behind him. They know the
boundaries of the paper and work with it. Perhaps that is all one needs
to know, he thinks. They paint without desire to see what is created
but can tell you what they have memorized. He writes in the inside
of his palm, taxonomy of my dislike: he can taste it.
Coffee ought to be only black.