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When my friend abandons Norway for south Thailand his voice
comes lighter through the screen telling me to visit while a half
nude woman lingers in the background. I know a kathoey who says
she’ll help. There’s no better place for surgery. Then our silence fits
the distance of his life from mine until his girlfriend perches on
the armchair with such perfect balance staring at my face: I think
you could be very pretty.But there’s no money and no money
and my wife returns to bed so bright one morning, her softness
waking me, the piss test positive. And just as well. By then
my friend has moved, his girlfriend gone, violence increasing
throughout his province: Last week they fished a girl like you
out of the canal, such a waste. And more to say before bird cries
become screeches through his open window as rain comes on fast
filling our screens with static, our connection lost to stillness
in this single room, my small apartment between bar alleys, all those
cut-throughs pitted and uneven and too often spotted in the night
with women going out alone or drunk and coming loudly home or
women shoved and coming up against one stone wall or another. 
Epithalamion
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