Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Fish Food

I returned from a 5-day jaunt through Malaysia and Cambodia this morning, and with many a happy tale to tell of it. I saw thousand-year-old ruins and the second-tallest towers in the world. I squeezed into a compact pick-up truck with eighteen Cambodians and was guest at the family birthday dinner of a dozen Kuala Lumpurians. I attended mass on a giant raft, and walked through the cabins of a Portuguese warship. I did and saw and met so many wonderful things and places and people...and at the end of it, what I think of the most was getting a fish foot massage.

What, you may ask, is a fish foot massage? The easiest way to understand is to walk around Pub Street in Siem Reap, Cambodia for five minutes, during which time you're guaranteed to pass by at least three fish parlors. The concept is straightforward. Big fish tanks, filled with schools of sardine-sized fish, are brought out in front of the parlor. A board extend across the top of the tank, for customers to sit upon. As you approach the tank, the fish start to swirl and mass toward you. "They know, they know!" says the man taking your money.

You take off your shoes and hop onto the board. Then comes the second-hardest part: you lower your bare feet into the school of fishes. As you do, you can see their little red mouths and dumb eyes gaping at your heels and toes. And then, when your feet hit the water, they go to work.

I said that lowering your feet into the fish was the second-hardest part. That's because the first-hardest part is keeping them there. At first, there's the tickle, which is hard enough to endure. Then, once the initial shock is over, the whole concept of the thing begins to prey upon your mind. The fish, you see, are eating you. With each little bump from their lips, they take away a tiny piece of your outer skin layer. They call this "exfoliation." I call it a half-click too far past creepy.

I didn't last long, probably only a quarter of my twenty minutes. Even so, when I pulled out my feet, I could tell that they were suppler and shinier than they'd been, probably since birth. As I left, I saw that another man--a friend of the man taking the money, it seemed--had come and was leaning over the side of the tank. His hand was trolling listfullly through the water, while the fish nibbled at the morsels around his knuckles.

Monday, November 1, 2010

Two Poems Called "All Saints' Day"

Seven years ago, I was inspired to write a poem on the Feast of All Saints, i.e., November 1st. Today I got the same urge. I thought I'd post both poems:


All Saints' Day (November 1, 2003)

This morning is cold and empty.
Last night’s decorations, the scarecrow on that porch,
the black cat cutout in this yard,
lay dead now—their ghoulish souls vanished ‘til
incantations at next summer’s campfires call them back to life.

Here the gory entrails of a pumpkin strew a gutter;
here yolk splatters a driveway;
here toilet paper clings like stale bandages to a skeletal tree.

As usual, the ghosts have gorged and titillated and made flight
before the frost descends
on the wrinkling pumpkin rot of unflickering cackles,
on the husks of bare vines in razed fields outside of town,
on the damp leaves clumped in the brown grass,

crystallizing time,
revealing what still moves in their absence.



All Saints' Day (November 1, 2010)

3 pm in Manila.

On Katipunan Street a man tries to sell me an umbrella the size of a golf course; half a block later, his tag-a-long grandchildren shout at me—brazenly, shyly—in Tagalog. Then they dash away, screaming giddy that such wickedness could come through them.

The banks are closed today. “Tomorrow, sir,” says the lonely guard, when I ask about exchanging Korean won. “You come back tomorrow.”

My sidecar ride back is fast, the streets being empty and the driver anxious to unloose his horsepower on the motorbike. My head nearly hits the roof.

“It’s raining,” says the gateman to me, a note of amusement in his voice, as he raises the crossbar for my gimpy, grocery-laden gait. And so it is. It’s raining. Not a fierce night-train typhoon like we’ve been having recently, but a soft rain, like a lamb’s fleece tossed into the air to unfurl, falling gently to rest upon the place beneath.

Across the street, under the carport, a dog perspires in his afternoon nap. He lays on his side on the cement, breathing slowly, regularly. He’s some kind of beagle or basset hound—probably the very dog that Socrates swore by in Athens. It’s enough to make a fellow wonder: O dog, where are you now? And what is your secret? All the people missing today, out at the cemeteries, are they going to notice you when they get back? The dog doesn’t answer; he just sleeps away to the patter of the rain on the roofs and cars and telecom poles and leaves and grass and the hardened patch of cement suffering Chinese water torture under the runoff spout, until he’ll wake up, shake himself off, and get about his business.