Poem-a-Day

I had tasted the pork pickle he had transported trussed 
up in layers of plastic and newspaper pages. My mother stripped 
layer after layer, prying away pieces of words that stuck 
to the jar as though closing around an open wound. 
We knew his wife was a woman with hands of a deity. 
My mother had saved the pickle for us.  You cannot buy this 
with money,  she said. We blessed the hands that made it, 
the unknown wife of the man I did not know then. 
When I did finally ask him for his name, twenty-five years later, 
he described the villages his parents were born in. He paused 
to correct himself, adjusting his memory, in a follow-up message
on WhatsApp. His name: the name of all those who came before 
him in the villages across Dege, Nangchen, Zurmang. 
There are many Chemes  he said, even among us. I know 
what he means by “us.” It’s not the same as the “us” he describes
in an interview a week later with a historian. The intimacies of us. 
What’s lost, what’s recovered, what we cross daily to sing. I recall,
in return my mother sent scented soap for his wife. The fragrance 
of distant gardens; red rose, gardenia. She turned the world 
in her palm.  International. Classic. Red rose.