Bedroom Anthropologist
An anthropologist found a tape recorder
inside a white tree in Jakarta:
hours upon hours of a lost people
whispering secrets to the heart
of this plant. Across the night, the news hit me
in my room, where I have nothing
to tell a faraway person.
The tape picked up a language
we thought long extinct, a rain-dialect
encoded in the bamboo leaves
ancient man had fashioned
in ways Sony could never dream of.
I stay stunned for a month—ask
my ceiling. Soon I will need
to decant my emptiness
into the nearest clay jug
or World War II radio.
Failing that, allow me to mail myself to you
O sad and future human.
| Tom McCauley |
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