Tin Can Plane post Laos
By Elise Rockart

Gathering shades of green over ropy muscles of land,
mountains, great scars and spines of the earth stand cloaked
in morning steam. They cradle clay houses,
cradle rivers, streams, roads
like children, like the tiny brown hand
of a little Lao boy. He leans over the stone wall, confident in his 16 month old
immortality, cackling with covetous love
at the blue boats floating below his little solipsism. I know now
that I could wander this country all my life
and never stop to breathe. Don’t breathe. Don’t close
your wondering eyes to the breeze, this land
will leave you. It will slip away under the scratched shell
of an Indochine airplane as veins,
sandy in their contrasting nakedness, knot
across the unclaimed earth, a bowl, a spine, a great sleeping beast
covered in the earth’s tender blanket of trees. In the distance,
cities loom and spill out into the ancient silence
of a land so old it knows
its own mortality.