a hot croissant
fresh from the toaster oven
slightly greasy
with a smear of butter
and a blob of blueberry jam
small still life for a saturday morning
while seismic things
happened elsewhere
down the telephone wires
along synapses
through the soul’s sensors
to the true mind of the heart
our lives changed
in places we could not see
because we could not see
all that was visible was this croissant
that remained half-eaten on the plate
half a life, still

Greece was burning; we flamed our last words.
A dryness of tenderness gone wrong, skin taut
In an unremitting refusal.
Pain singes. A man and woman separated
By a sere hillside
Grasses vulnerable, no forces left to save us.

The next day the flames reached Olympia.
I sent him a last letter. Now we are stone.
There were tears for memories
Not of him, not yet
Tears for the Peloponnese
Memories of Zaharo
Where I once saw massive headlines
Announcing the fires at Chernobyl
Or Areopolis in the Mani
Where I stumbled drunk
into the heat of a long-ago marriage.
Or Kaiafa, safe by the water, beyond the flames
Where, pregnant, I first heard my child speak to me

A world is burning up. So it goes
With sentiments left to dry
On sere hillsides. I pray for Olympia,
For the safety and tenderness of memory
For the day soft stone will resist fire.

it does not rain in summer here
mere thickness of unspent cloud
cold
years of anticipation condemned to dissolve
hard thin drops against sequoia bark

memory falls soft and plump
yet fading distant
I want a summer rain, a lushness still
of suddenness, drops tender warm on petals
not this harshness so dry in its
thoughtless bending to the fog

Your silence cuts
the space I had made for you
now carved and emptied, scarred
whose hand? your own
touching elsewhere
or mine forced by memory
and treason hope
where is trust
too dull a blade
to protect against
imaginings resonant with
the sounds you would not give me

You cannot remember where you have never been.
But they are there
Those same trees, the cabin, the bed where you would make love
On an afternoon of honey-making
There is a corner
In a wine country village
Where street signs cross
Spelling your maiden name
You would go there together
And wonder about a person you once were
And who you might become
If this memory of a time you never spent
Honey-making
Were to become brittle fact.

But what you fear
Is lack of chance
The street signs are there
But what were the odds they would spell your name?

A novel like Darwin’s Wink is necessarily the result of a mixture of experience, research, and imagination. The seed of the novel was planted during my first trip to the island of Mauritius in 1995: I was there at the invitation of my older sister and her son, whose wife is from Mauritius. For weeks before the trip—which takes 24 hours by plane from San Francisco, as it is on the opposite side of the globe—I felt an immense excitement at the idea of visiting a real “exotic” “tropical” island; in fact while Mauritius is both of those things, it is also a country in its own right, with a multi-ethnic population of two million, a rich Hindu and colonial Franco-British legacy, and a thriving textile and tourist industry.
Among the regular guests at my nephew’s restaurant were two young British naturalists; they invited me to visit the small island where they were doing restoration and conservation work, Île aux Aigrettes. I instantly saw the romantic potential of the place: the old colonial warden’s house where they lived; the rich abundance of nature, with the added interest of the endangered bird species they were there to foster: kestrels, pink pigeons, echo parakeets. I took a few notes, on the off chance that the visit would yield a novel.
(more…)

Nov. 2005 Paperback Edition, Picador.

Nov. 2004. 288p. St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne, $23.95 (0-312-33199-1).

Direct link to the book and to the Reading Group Guide at St. Martin’s Press

The warden’s house is small, and Fran awakes, hearing the muffled sounds of Christian’s insomnia. The batteries of her flashlight are low so she lies in the dark listening to the whispers of night-living creatures. Her birds sleep, but she imagines she can hear a chorus of contented breathing, light as air, beaks tucked under wings. Or the scurry of small reptiles, or the ponderous scratching of the tortoises. Her tortoises. Her realm, her defenseless children. Those she cares for. Hard dusty shell or soft fragile feather, no space in between for the warmth of skin, no, that is gone, that was Satish and he is gone and there can be no thinking of him, that’s all done with. She turns her thoughts to the bird, to the urgency of its survival. It does not know that its barrenness is more than a mere lack of children, it does not know that all of its kind will become mere fossil memory, very soon, unless she, Fran, can save it. She fears she is working against terrible odds: even if she can overcome the obstacles Nature leaves in her way, how can she predict, or fight against those that man is deliberately and stealthily placing before her?

The broken eggs shells, the injured birds, the disappearances.

But she refuses to be worn down or discouraged; that is what they want, after all. Her role is to affirm life.

My bird, thinks Fran, drifting towards sleep. Both noble and flamboyant, gorgeous plumage of deep blue, verging on teal, with a rich crimson crown and breast. It has long tailfeathers, flecked with white. A bird prized by kings, once called l’oiseau Isle de France when it was a regular exhibit of the menagerie at Versailles, where it languished and died of mal du pays.

The Mauritians say that it is good luck to see the bird, because rarity gives it added grace, and magical powers. Fran does not credit superstitions; if anything, she resents them. The local name of the bird is oiseau-languit because of its long, yearning, homesick cry; in English, the mourner-bird.

Often in the pink softness of early morning, before heat, before work, Fran goes to listen to the waking call of the mourner-birds. There is a particular tree where they gather, an old, tall bois de fer. She takes a worn cushion with her, and places it on the hard coral ground beneath the tree, then sits Indian style, her head bent, her eyes dreaming.

Sometimes it is the male who begins, sometimes the female; usually it is the pair she calls Mimi and Rodolfo. In such a small, isolated place, you reduce the grandeur of your opera to scale, but for Fran art and nature are not comparable. She accepts that nature has taken the place of art in her life, and does not think that is a bad thing.

She waits, then the call comes. Mimi. Soft at first, a gentle, repeated clucking, then more urgent, an open-throated call, full of avian longing. Mournful, lonely, not unlike the cry of a seagull on a bleak coast; somehow out of keeping with the warmth and softness of this island.

Then Rodolfo’s answer, neither reassuring nor scolding, not an alluring mating call but some other ritual reply to an obscure atavistic necessity: a series of short croaking sounds, as if to say, yes I am here, and then a soaring response which echoes the same mournfulness, with brief inflections Fran has found peculiar to the male, just a few notes, a poignant trill before the call soars again, impossibly forlorn. Visitors to the island have remarked upon this unusual melancholy; Fran smiles and shrugs, does not tell them that even with time the sadness does not diminish for the listener; one never grows used to it.

But for all that Fran loves to hear the call, the island music which is her reward. We are here, the birds are saying. As if in thanks, though birds have no such notions. Fran is the one who is thankful.

She closes her eyes, leans her head back against the trunk of the bois de fer. It is warm; there is a gentle breeze. The song will be repeated perhaps three, four times, no more. Then again at dusk. During daylight hours the birds cluck, chatter, tweet, but do not sing. Their song brackets the darkness, in honor of the sun’s passage. The world most beautiful, close to night.

That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free.

- Ivo Andric, Bridge on the Drina

Borders: what they are, what they represent. Not the same to all people, depending on your nationality. And then there are internal borders, the ones that no visa can get you across. For the traveller, borders are an integral and often inconvenient part of the journey, but they offer a kind of magic, too, a sense of transcendence, of going beyond what is familiar, of testing oneself against the barriers of the exotic.

Europe’s borders are dwindling. Scandinavia lost its border charm long ago: the only way you knew you had left Norway behind and entered Sweden was the sudden cluster of sex shops, and a flag. Now in the European Union you can enter the Schengen territory and travel through much of Western Europe without showing a passport.

And there was the Iron Curtain: the border between Greece and Bulgaria, for example, where in 1986 surly officials emptied the entire contents of my car onto surgical trolleys; or the Danube, that same year, between Bulgarian and Romania where, after waiting for an hour in an unmoving line, I was dissuaded by the East Germans’ gruesome tales of travel through Romania (”They’ll take the veels from your car!”) and gave up, left the line, turned around and drove back to Sofia: to my everlasting regret.

So over the years as the borders of countries have been changing or vanishing, some of my borders have moved within—passages of time, transitions in life, the invisible lines to cross which require no visas but a certain faith, or curiosity, or, some have told me, courage. (more…)

Scribner, New York, 1996

Island. Let me think of you, in me.

I lie here on the sand at Desolation Cove. Noddies and petrels circle; I wonder at my madness. To have left the island—or to choose, this time, to stay. Some deeply buried prejudice from my upbringing, from my childhood, tells me I must attempt to return to society, even if it means my death; the island whispers to me of a life beyond death, and of the eternal beauty of the present. We have no words in our language for this knowledge of a life outside time.

I am afraid that if I returned to that other world I would lose the beauty and the meaning of this life. How could I explain to anyone what it means, if I have no words?

Who would listen to an old woman?

But by staying here, there is no old woman. There are no wrinkles, no lines, no sad wasting of the flesh. No judgment, no pity, no indifference.

I see only a sentient being in a body touched with the grace of belonging.

The sun beats on my skin and the heat is terrible, but the wind lays a cool hand upon me, the caress of a lover. If it rains, I am soaked through and cold; then the sun returns, to warm me this time like a welcome fire, and the cycle is complete.

The elements are my lover. I press my body into the sand.

Sometimes I touch myself as lovers touched me. It is a gift in my body to know pleasure, but a sadness to know it alone. Sometimes the pleasure comes to me in sleep and then I awake with a sweet well-being: my body has sung on its own, without the stern choirmaster of the mind’s desire.

The mind has not always been so easily contented. There were long hours, days, of boredom when we first came to the island. I had to play games, with Fred: tick-tack-toe in the sand, chess with primitive hand-made figurines. Later, I had to make up my own solitary games. To pass the time.

One day I understood, after Kuma had gone and I lay watching the passing of clouds, that to “pass” the time is wrong; a terrible ailment once afflicted me, still afflicts, perhaps, those among whom I once lived. I wanted to skip over time until something took me away from myself (a radio broadcast from the President, a play at the theater, a night in company). That was wrong because I deprived myself of the present, when I should have been watching the clouds, or thinking about the watching of clouds.

There is no word for my state of grace on the island: we invented the word for time, and in so doing, invented time itself and lost that state of grace.

Animals sit quietly in the sun, under the large sky. They watch, they feel, in their way they think, with their other sense of which we know so little. They are better adapted to the present; one wonders if they know of past or future.

I learn to sit like an animal, my pores open to the necessity of life. The earth smells ripe and rich of existence.

I have my memories, too. I lie in the sand or on my pallet and they come to me, changing cumulus on the sky of the past.

In dreams memories are transformed and become reality. If I cannot touch those visions with my meddling thoughts, if my sleeping mind and body perceive them as reality, then surely that makes them so. Thus I am still able to fly. And to crash-land upon awakening.

At times the pain of wakefulness is great, with the sharpness of memories, sleeping lions, disturbed. Then I must fight for forgetfulness and serenity in the beauty of the present. I go into the lagoon and release my pain to the cerulean hues of its depths; I lie undisturbed on the glass-smooth water. Even the sharks fear the sharpness of my pain.

The ocean brings me its gifts. Not just the shells, the driftwood, the fine-ground colored pieces of glass; it also brings me the detritus of civilization. I wonder that man has produced so much, that his castoffs can travel to me, almost daily, on my remote island, and he cannot.

Bottles, cans, containers printed with Japanese characters, drawers with handles (whose hands?); huge salt-ravaged lengths of timber; jagged, rusty sides of metal; shiny bags made of a strange stretchy material. Tokens of a world I do not know.

Once I found a huge conch shell, big and pink as a melon. I listened: in it I heard, not the sea, but the drone of propellers.