 Not that the class shard had any business with the soul of his foot. Nevertheless, it made itself familiar, and it was an unending story of how he teased and squeezed and how it refuted his negotiations. But finally, the shard, so smaller than the tiniest teardrop, was retrieved and he pain still examined it for a brief moment against the halogen lamp before flicking it to her like a comet out my window. On my bed he sat a teary-eyed Shiva, his wounded foot raised in the air, kicking, kicking. I should have swept carefully. This was no way to welcome a poet. I should have mopped, waxed something. Now I watch as he wiped the wound with the tissue paper and felt awkward like a caught voyeur. But then he looked up and smiled. Come here, he said. We had seduced each other over the phone and via emails a year before we actually met. An essay of mine had found its way to his part of the world, and he took the initiative of sending me an email full of compliments. I replied, thanking him for his kind words and discreetly enclosed my number. He called. We talked. Mostly of home, of our tropical Vietnamese childhood. He named for me seasons half-forgotten, our childhood fruit, fruits eaten in stealth and ecstasy. Remember the green mango, sweet and sour and crunchy, eaten with salt and red chili, pepper, or even fish sauce, hidden under the student desk while an old geezer of a teacher droned on? And the durian, loaves of yellow brains eaten with glee by the entire family after dinner, fingers digging through a split thorny shell like the size of a skull. Family brain surgery, that's what it was. A ceremony of share flesh. And what a smell. Rotten flesh fragrance, its punchin' aroma remaining for days in your air, your nostrils, your breath. And the milk, apple, green and purple outside, milky white inside to be eaten after siesta. It's cool and smooth texture sliding against your throat like sweet ice. Afterwards, washing the milky sap off your lips, scrubbing real hard and see how raw they look in the mirror as if from too much kissing. I, in turn, recounted for him the flame trees that blossom in the courtyard of my elementary school, red and green glowing to the point of blindness under an unforgiven sun. Its black fruits, hard shells that fit perfectly in a child's palm turn into swords for the boys to duel with. I recall the summer villa veiled in the cloud of red bouvengilla, bougainvillea, by the ocean in Nha Trang. The way I slept in the afternoon on the second floor soundly insulated in my parents' rhapsodic laughter, which echoed like shattered crystals from room to room. And how I loved the roaring sound of waves out the tall French windows that made me dream of tigers. My fairy childhood smells the sea of coasts with faint suggestion of kelps and dead fish ripe in rice field and dusk. My grandmother's eucalyptus ointment to wart against evil winds. The sweetness of sandalwood incense burned by my pious mother nightly. On the phone late one autumn evening, I whisper, read me a poem. Out on the bay, the fog hung well morphally. A poem, please. I don't know, he said. You were supposed to send me a photo, remember? I'm sorry, I'll send one tomorrow. I swear, a poem, please. Read, please. OK. Leaving, mother burns pages of album. Wedding day, first child, father's funeral, dead. Quick, she says, hurry, pack, prepare. We'll sail away down river to sea. Saigon in April, a season of smoke. His poetry went on to speak of a perilous journey, one full of wonders and griefs. So I took my chance. Will you come for a visit? To your city, he asked. Of course I said, by the sea. You can see sailboats every morning out my window. Here the cable cars go rumbling, clanging by. Feel the sea breeze on your skin, taste its salt. To fall in love is to have one sense of geography grafted onto another, no matter how tenuous so as to form a new country. I saw Houston in my mind, a city of strip malls, grand old homes in gleaming glass and steel skyscrapers that coexist chic by jowl. He, in turn, imagined San Francisco with its trans-America pyramid poking the blue sky. Windblown hills the color of ember at twilight, sailboats gliding on the bay like playful white butterflies. He imagined, and I could tell from this, from his voice, that there was freedom somewhere in the next valley. All right, he said, I'll come in December, the beginning of winter. Then he stepped on the shard and had trouble walking the next day. His new boots bought a week before unyielding. His dye stained socks kept sliding downward inside. He walked the city, my city, with the slightest of limb. We were otherwise chirpy as songbirds that first day. At lunch we held hands under the table and had cafe glad while I introduced him to friends. And afterward, walking home, we broke into an old folk song about rice harvesting. A song learned so long ago and so meaningless now that neither one of us know its lyrics entirely. Day two to Carmel. I drive my hand resting sporadically in his sessoria of aura cooing nostalgic ballads of love. Last night under a flapping red awning of a stucco apartment building somewhere on rushing hill, we kissed and I impulsively beckoned him to move in with me. He stared out to the dark water and contemplated the offer. Then before I could speak, he kissed me again and shut me up. He contemplated the sea now, a gliding sheet of silver lame that stretches back to the past. It must be strange for him to see the Pacific once more, so long hidden from him in Texas. The ocean, a reminder of that terrible flight on that crowded boat full of refugees from Saigon. He relives it all at once more. He sees the small of his mother's back as she huddles her children in the corner of a dark and crowded and stinking hole. He wanted to take her place so that she could rise to the upper deck and smell the fresh air, even if only just once. But she never did. The journey she kept her lioness vigilance over a sickly brood. It was him who begged for water, who gathered bad news. His siblings are grown now. His mother well past middle age and half crazed. And he, like a benevolent spirit, still needs to watch over her, over them lest he would somehow loses all purposes and meanings, though how he yearns for freedom, God only knows, a nightly defeat. He turns to me then, the wind in his hair, the sea of blur in the corner of his eyes. I want to, I really do. Day three, something has changed. A shadow has flown across my windows, a movement in the stars. The initial delight of recognition shifts to the fact of too many details. We fall into a routine. He sleeps on my favorite side of the bed. My left shoulder hurts from the weight of his handsome head. The way he throws a scarf over his shoulder vaguely bothers me, and I can't say why. Sometimes he has that sad look, a poet's melancholy. And I suppose it's unreachable. He wears it too often, though like a geisha, his powder. I look at him now insulated in sadness and wonder how his books could possibly fit in my apartment when my shelves have no more space for a VS night post collected works. Day four, he discovers an unfinished poem on my desk and owed to his beauty. He says nothing, but I can tell he doesn't really like it. It's not jealousy. It's the fact that I have moved into his territory, even if to woo him. Something in his side I recognize too well is claustrophobia. Day five, or rather night, rain. A chorus of remembrances, 15 years, and he is too late as he was then. A moist-eyed boy standing in the refugee camp, watching his mother hugging her sickly son, her youngest pup, dying of pneumonia before her eyes. He is drunk, but not from the alcohol, but from trusting and grief. He stares out the window and speaks of leaving, of wanting to leave, leaving his mother, which is impossible, leaving his siblings, who have already left him, leaving Texas, which he didn't care for, leaving everything, his memory, his sadness, what owns him. We bury a little bin in Guam, he said. Around the grave, we stood and sang his favorite song that left his plastic dog on the mound until the rain watched it away. My sister went back to look for the grave last year, but she couldn't find it. Some morning, my mother stares out the window and cries as if it had just happened last night. Listening to him, I suddenly am overwhelmed by the particular memory. It was in the summer of 1973, a year after the Arvin and the Americans recaptured the city of Cointre near the DMZ. I had visited with my father via helicopter, a rather strange excursion. The city was destroyed in the recapturing, reduced to piles of rubble by B-52 bombs that left deep holes that, in afternoon after the monsoon, turned into swimming pools for the children who survived. I walked about behind a broken window of a house sat an old woman. She sat as she must have always sat with an ease of years, but she stared out to nothing now. The old neighborhood gone and the wall that held her window was the only thing left standing of the old house. I remember waving to her. She did not wave back. Day six, I want to tell him the angel sleeping on my shoulder that is strange how love between two exiles can be tormented by the hunger of memories, that Vietnam remains in many ways an unfinished country between us, even now body to body, lips to lips. Day seven, she needs me, he says, you're lucky, you're free. And therefore, I thought utterly alone. On the way back from the airport, it suddenly occurs to me how the tiny shard came to be there on my floor. A thin crystal vase that held a dozen white tulips toppled over one windy evening last spring. I remember holding the flowers upside down drunk and out of breath, a lake of sharp crystals laughing at my feet, water dripping from the grieving bulbs like melted snow. A month and still no news. His phone is disconnected. This morning, I found a wrinkled tissue dotted with dry blood under my bed, my own shroud of torrent. He is so far away now, hidden across time zones, cocoon in requimms. I walk barefoot in my apartment, hoping another shard would pierce me too. But I'm not made for such a thing, alas, and must resort to keeping under my cool satin blue pillow the bloodstained tissue, remnant of an easy dream of communion whose yearning is long. Thank you.