LatinosUSA

Image: A poem by Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm

Immediately she left the sea for the mountains. Where the swamps were muddy and dark, she clandestinely slips in like a snake slips through the thickets. She licked her wrists as soon as she caught her breath. Her wrists turned into a baby, her daughter. Now both of them walk under the canopy of the durian trees she had planted amongst the coffee plants.

I met her and her daughter in the durian grove around the beginning of June. her daughter was running between the rows of coffee plants, the white coffee flowers and the blue sky falling were as keen as the durian fruit. She was silk, she was a flower but she was burning like wildfire. It was the beginning of my new life in the wild. Fallen cracked and moist pieces durian left behind on the ground in the dark, like her, as though she has just stepped out of the heat in the middle of summer. I heard her scream, but I didn’t know what to do, even when my hardened fingers were already digging into the sombreness of the night.

The secrets no one sees, like the roots of the trees and the water ambling each time she waters the garden. Each time, time became so painful, like the way autumn appeared just around a corner, the cold to her became unbearable. Each morning I would stare at her footprints. When she had just left the field after the crops were sprayed, she was as damp as the leaves.

I thought about how summer comes with its bounty of ripe durian, flowers fruiting, leaves turning into thorns. Perhaps people make love when it’s cold. She carries secrets, like the ferocious passion she reserved for the nozzles of the insecticide bottles she gently uses to take care of her crop, perhaps it is her dream. A dream with a blue flying fish, on its return to the sea. She said: the blue sharks are rolling and flying in the air.

In the cold, she was savage. She cuts down one durian tree at a time, an uncountable number of white flowers have been grounded into the red earth under her feet.

When death turned up, she used what cash she had left in her purse to buy my body, before snapping it shut. My curiosity pushed me through the door as I asked myself: what will happen, my dear, in the wooden house in the dark forest?

When it all came to pass, I said I was a bride on my wedding night, and a groom that was able to embrace the whole world. She gives me permission to visit this world, inside her garden, amongst the durians.

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Lê Vĩnh Tài, the poet and translator born in 1966 in Buon Ma Thuot, Daklak, Vietnam. The retired doctor is still a resident of the Western Highlands and a businessman in Buon Ma Thuot.

Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm, the blogger, poet, and translator, was born in 1971 in Phu Nhuan, Saigon, Vietnam. The pharmacist currently lives and works in Western Sydney, Australia.