grandfather

Loak Tha sits in the garden
staring at the fleeting shadows as they traverse the walls around our house
or, at the flashing christmas lights in the palm tree
as he does each night

maybe he is listening
to the drifting sounds of clinking glasses and the irregular music of the gamalon
for it is wedding season
or the frogs,
or the hundreds of voices echoing among houses without doors and windows.
perhaps he is waiting

Our conversations are simple, limited by swinging doors of language
and the magnitude of his experiences in a scale with my twenty-two years
adding weight to each word

I was only going to get something from my car:

Tou Nah?
Where are you going?
aut dtung dtey
don’t know,
I don’t know.