News of Pol Pot’s Capture

By Eugene Gloria
That night the moon over New Hampshire
wore a face I knew in high school
of a pudgy boy whose mother was a singer
and whose sister was once trapped
in a burning building. When she was a girl,
my sister and 17 of her classmates
could not leave school
because the janitor ran amok.
 
The moonlight on the lake glides
like Persian slippers wingtipping
on the surface of the water.
And the road with its arms
around the lake is silent and American.
In Thai, Sasithon stands for full moon,
a name for a woman who once saw a pair of hands
on the dashboard of my car.
Not hers, but of another who died a violent death.
 
In the whir of static
between Top Forty and twang, I listened
to the news report of Pol Pot’s capture.
And like a man whose bowl of soup
has grown too cold to eat,
I realized that I had overdriven—
missed the road I was supposed to turn into.
In a false memory, I look back
at the burning building
that claimed my classmate’s sister.
I see her moonface veiled in blue—
blue as a flame of a lit match
telling me the road I missed on the map.
I could pull over and rest my eyes.
 
I could sleep like an entire race
of bones underneath the tall grasses
where a man hacks and hacks
at something in the heat.
Once in a while he might stop
to examine the pattern of a tattered fabric
suspended on the tip of his machete,
and try to remember his wife.

Copyright Credit: Eugene Gloria, "News of Pol Pot’s Capture" from Drivers at the Short-Time Motel. Copyright © 2000 by Eugene Gloria.   Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: Drivers at the Short-Time Motel (Penguin Random House, 2000)