And the man lies there thinking, Not Bidong, not Klong Toey, not in any of those places had he let himself down like this. His mouth is full of the brittle, rusty taste of blood, and the sky looks like the sea that first morning on the Dong Khoi. And he leans his head as he had over the side of the boat, longingly, and Bo and Ma are finally running out of a doorway, running toward him, and the road between them is like water, and they both grab him as they should have and his mouth splits open and all the water spills out.
This is long after Carla drank that espresso and rode home. She put on some music when she got there, and she sat by the window, looking out on the street and the coming evening, at the young man who sold houses, the woman who worked in the abortion clinic, the girl who talked to her dogs as if they were human. The lottery man was heading from the Mars. Downstairs the storekeeper had drawn the awning in. She would wait up until Tuyen came home. Listen to music, drink some wine. Tomorrow she would miss work and have everybody over. She longed to hear Tuyen chipping and chiselling away next door.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALONG THE LENGTH OF TIME I spent writing this book, I was accompanied by five most searing critics, Louise Dennys, Leleti Tamu, Leslie Sanders, Claire Harris, and Constance Rooke. When I came to the end of the writing, I found myself rereading Pablo Neruda’s “The Book of Questions” and discovered the question I had asked each of them—“Tell me, is the rose naked / or is that her only dress?” To which they all replied patiently and repeatedly, as I’ve now realised in Neruda, “From what does the hummingbird hang / its dazzling symmetry?” I humbly thank them for their generous collaboration. Many thanks to Bernice Eisenstein, Angelika Glover, Deirdre Molina and Sue Sumeraj.
DIONNE BRAND won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Trillium Award in 1997 for Land to Light On. In 2003 she won the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry for her book thirsty. Her novels In Another Place, Not Here and At the Full and Change of the Moon have been published in the US and the UK to great acclaim. Dionne Brand lives in Toronto.
