a man moves across the shoreline. Beyond break
his body pushes against the water surrounding him, facing
horizon. It feels like I am in on the ritual.
The crackling fire in the inn smelled like the central room
of a grandmother-in-law’s three-story home in Paro Town. Above
a bare ground floor covered in pine needles, where cattle slept.
Above the second-story feed and grain storage, up a steep
red-wooden ladder, we sit on a rug around a stove and drink
suja and puffed rice with the matriarch while a young boy learns english
from cartoons on television. The smoke is dressed in juniper,
rhododendron, clove, cardamom. We roll a soccer ball back and forth
and laugh. A half hour before this, a farmer cut my small perfect sea of rice
with a sharpened sickle. From where we sat on the dirt road,
rain fell in perfect rippling circles atop the flooded paddy. By now,
crunchy kernels soggy with sweet tea touch my lips
and tongue like a snow-coated pine mountainside
framed by wind-shredded prayer flags. By now, he has walked out of the
waves and is standing on shore.