'He’s Not the Only One'

My newly graduated youngest son is visiting Thailand with friends from his alma mater, Rice University. Most of the photos he has sent document meals eaten and temples visited, but among them is this, my favorite image: 

The smiling head of the Buddha sunk among the tangled roots of a banyan tree. The place is Wat Mahathat in Ayutthaya, former capital of Siam and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991. Founded in 1350, the city was destroyed by the Burmese in 1767 and today is known as Thailand’s Angkor Wat. It was abandoned until the 1950s.

 

I had seen the banyan/Buddha image once before, in black and white, accompanying a series of poems by the late Kenneth Fields, collectively titled “One Love,” a sort of travelogue documenting a visit to Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. Fields was a student of Yvor Winters at Stanford University, and co-edited with him a poetry collection, Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969). Fields doesn’t mention the Buddha head explicitly:

 

“Sacred figures draped in yellow

Bas-reliefs crumbling away

Wat overgrown returning to earth”

 

Fields’ memories rhyme with my own:

 

“Rolling through these jungles

News footage in my head

I don’t have to spell it out”

 

And this:

 

“I feared seeing it as a boy

Then thought I never would

Mekong

The wake of empires

Spreading out”

 

Fields reanimates the Imagist impulse:

 

“Magnificent ruins,

Forest and culture

In symbiotic rush”

 

Fields visited Cambodia in 2009, during the trial of former Khmer Rouge prison camp commander Kang Kek Iew, known as “Comrade Duch”:

 

“Duch is on trial today.

Head of Tuol Sleng, S-21. Old

Party pols are trembling

He’s not the only one”

 

From the beautiful landscape and temples, Fields moves on to recent history and genocide:

 

“Decimated

An entire country

Many times over

Some for wearing glasses”

 

Fields concludes the poem:

 

“The world is dark

With us. Even

Electricity darkens.

Only a few—

Honored in crumbling ruins

Built by darkeners darkened

In their turn—

Only a wild heedlessness

A spare carefulness for those we love

Suffice”