You were most beautiful after you were
gone, so often the case with love when your
father took your mother for granted or
she would rather have been an artist than
a wife. But there you are. What I recall
was not the rhino lifting his head by
the water but instead the photograph
of a man standing on top of him with
a gun. At dawn, while I was sending an
email, Buddhist monks knocked down a Muslim’s
door and told him to leave the town. Like the
police in my neighborhood, the monks had
gone to the wrong house. The prayer meetings
are five doors down at the place with the gas
street light. Toward the end of the hour, I turned
off the stories of leopards, gorillas,
and gazelles because I knew the ending.
