toss your compost out the window here
and wake to find a garden of impassables.
the rainy season, barely holding on, nurses
refuse; i think the earth cant help itself.

of course i arrived on an airplane of garbage
along with other harbingers of the end
of the island. i remember motorbike rides
across the sawah during the pandemic,

when it was sinking in how forever i was
here; the tropical scene windswept and quiet,
the people returning to their villages
to farm; it felt as if everyone was home.

back then, we couldnt mampir yet
and i didnt know that if you let a chili grow
it can live for years; it can become a little caterpillar-
munched tree, studded with flaming-hot fruit.

our neighbors treat me like Princess Di.
it doesnt help that i am shy; when we try
to take a walk, we end up seated, with coffee,
small-talk and gossip peppered with serious

conversation; which is my husbands work.
he cultivates connection, setting down
our roots, as i behold, just stupefied
by the spongey texture of community.

and then, i watch out of the corner of
my eye; i fall asleep amidst rotations of rice
and peanuts, tomatoes blushing on the vine
with fields of corn and sugarcane, rows

of marigolds and magenta gomphrena,
patches of green mustard and frilly cabbage,
near densely-shaded thickets of coffee and cacao.
i would absorb the pace of those in steady

negotiation with the sky, and what it gives
the terraced land, absorbing what it can,
for what it gives us — and by my daily plate,
it gives me very, very much.

and too, i read an article about a strong El Niño,
and one about the AMOC shutting down,
and news of friends in Denpasar, their flooded
houses and kos kosans; and always stuck

in traffic, in service to dollars, rubles, yuan,
the concrete surface spreading ever closer.
the village priest asks to send his daughter
to me, so she can practice her English.

of course, i say, let her come, frozen inside
with something like a knot that i cant name.
so im old enough (for here) to be a grandmother
but all the children say i look like Elsa.

so i let them see me picking up plastic,
and in the dirt, on my hands and knees, digging
up peanuts. it used to be my daily task
to ask the young, what is justice?

these days i find my figure lined and lit
inquiring at the city of necessity, ex-
perimenting with my best friends hair — ngaji.
so how shall i explain this, and to whom?


//

Phaedrus: (as Lysias, cont.)

yet if it is necessary (chre)
to gratify (charizesthai) most
the ones most lacking (deomenoi)

it is also fitting (prosekein) for the others

to make well (eu poieein)
not the best ones (beltistos)
but the ones most at an impasse (a-porotatoi)

// 233δ

ἔτι δὲ εἰ χρὴ τοῖς δεομένοις μάλιστα χαρίζεσθαι

προσήκει καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις

μὴ τοὺς βελτίστους ἀλλὰ τοὺς ἀπορωτάτους εὖ ποιεῖν