Her customer is a tired man from the city.
Under the shade of the green twisted trees
she presses him into the soft sand.

She stands on his back. Her feet are worn
by years on the beach, her face is old in the sun,
ripened like midday fruit.

I sit at a table and I cannot read my book.
The eyes of Thi and all they've seen
are watching me.

Under the green canopy of her tree
I sit on her shady, sand strewn mat
and she tells me we must fight for our life.

And in the sea of night we meet outside the 7/11.
I am holding donuts and we talk under the strip lights.
She invites me back to her house -

would I like to see it? Her boyfriend is away,
the one she told me about on the beach,
the middle aged man who beats her and calls her a stupid bitch.

We will grow drunk in each other's eyes.
Later age won't mean a thing,
and she will ask, softly, 'what?'

I will know all my history
in the lingering touch of her unsure kiss.
And later I will ask,

after I have lain with her in a hostel bed
and known her body, aged by childbirth,
belly like an old scarred sack,

ravaged with too much violent love,
with love, I will ask
'Do I love her?'

And Thi is the face of God
under the stars,
her eyes glint like soft jewels cushioned in the night,

tropical with the silhouettes of palm trees
against the dark blue
beneath an egg moon.

-

I went with another girl home to her room,
took her from a neon bar and the yellow warm night.
We showered in a concrete cubicle off the muggy hall

where she hosed me down. She hardly spoke a word
of English and pretended to be scandalised by my erection.
I couldn’t come and woke in the middle of the night

with the fluorescent light on over the bed still
flushing its sickness over us.
She was holding my cock like a child’s hand.

-

I am a child and my means are poor.
I can do nothing for her.
I will soon leave

her shady sand strewn mat
under the boughs, her green kingdom of leaves.
Soon I will realise that I have fallen in love

and I will be a stranger in every street back home.
I have known her wounded heart,
the lovers who have died and gone apart.

-

It ended with a polaroid and a wooden box,
to hold letters never to be sent,
and five or six slow phone calls

ringing from the travel agent
across the street from the beach,
where she is running towards my tinny voice

never quite able to reach me again.