Scooping water with his hands, a boy
splashes the barrel sides and wide back 
of a half-ton water buffalo belly-deep 
in a farm pond.  

The coarse rag for cleaning ears and eyes 
is on grass sloping the circle of muddy water.  
In Iowa this would be called animal husbandry.  
Here, it’s caring for the family tractor.  All this

in a fleck of looking as the highway
lifts me doing 100 km over a local canal, 
and drops down again—brief exhilaration 
before falling back to earth.   

The creature knows its caretaker.  Later,
the boy will sprawl on its back, 
napping in the sun as it browses 
rice stubble in the surrounding field.  

I’m on my way to Pattaya Beach 
to bake out a week of air conditioning 
to cycle between water and towel; 
on dimpled sand above high water.  

I’ve not brought my camera.  
Nothing photo-worthy 
in the seam of sea and sky, 
the sand, cloudless sun.
                        

When gratitude for monsoon tires, 
despite cool air and its relief; 
when drains pause in their course, 
the Chao Phraya invades the streets, 
and shops start to sandbag doorways 
against the water pushed across 
as sidewalk waves from passing buses, 

we look again at rumpled skies, 
the sagging clouds pouting gray 
like underside of upper bunks 
emerging again in early light.  
We look for signs of thinning, bits 
of sun stretching, reaching for us 
beneath the blue’s sloping ceiling 
over our green coverlet 
already smooth across the bed.  

In conversation with Khun Luang, 
retired captain of King’s Guards, 
we’re learning how monsoon shifts 
the city’s focus to upcountry, 
annually needed rice field floods.  

We watch the rain slanting through 
our neighborhood on heavy legs 
around our bargain-rental house:  
until it piles outside the kitchen, 
passes through the pantry wall, 
the dining room, then living room, 
the porch where it floats my shoes.

We notice how around us houses 
sit just like the rice farmer 
who lives above the annual flood: 
our neighbors live on higher ground.  

So, that’s why we got this bargain.