top of his vision and left his pupils to sweep the floor.
With twilight, his feet brought his body and limbs over the field where he first saw the Kawani’s claws on the scroll. He stumbled in a dip in the ground and his jostled vision caught Keba’s shoulders alight with perigean moon dust. Her silence frightened yet invited him to sit beside her and stare into the long gone fire used to heat the noh for Zus. He sat.
‘Ravno….’ Keba let the silence complete her thought, but unexpectedly. As he said her name in his head, in an equally silent reply, Ravno’s insides surged with a sweet weakness. He realized he loved her still, despite what happened between them and his own discouraged heart. Keba. Keba Karan. Kebakaran. He almost smiled to himself but the dried salt of his sadness sat along his cheeks and stuck his expression flat and empty.
‘Where are you going?’ She still hadn’t looked at him.
‘I have no idea.’ He noticed he spoke from some base level in the container of his body; whatever she asked he would answer with no filter. He would be candid and honest to her questions. Would he voluntarily contribute unelicited comments or feelings in the raw? Wait and see. Wait and see.
‘I still can’t believe you did that.’
‘I wish it never happened. There are so many other things I could’ve done instead.’
‘It really scared me, Ravno.’
He forgot how long it was before he replied, ‘I wish you had responded to it differently, though. Like if you jumped on me and started kissing me so I could hardly breathe.’
He wasn’t sure if she smiled when he looked at her at the end of his comment. The moon’s ballad is difficult to interpret at times. But she did look at him and it was incredible to see her eyes in all their dark fragility. At that moment he wished he was turnip-white Chichi to see her clearly in the dusk.
‘I wasn’t expecting you to do that. And it was so rough, Ravno. You scared me. I hated it.’
He looked at her. ‘I know. I’m sorry.’
Somewhere a galaxy exploded in a silent frenzy of orangey pinks with hazy gases and red minerals unknown to species on earth. The beauty of it was overwhelming. That may have been the faint blink of light Ravno saw in the sky. Though, the explosion would not be seen on earth for a few hundred thousand years. By then Ravno would be long gone—but would his footsteps remain? It’s hard to judge using intergalactic timing; many things seem so relative and dizzying. In the same way, Keba’s hand on his arm felt like it happened both in the past and the future, which together create the present. Either way and whenever it happened, his hand responded with a somber eagerness and he turned to sit facing her. His first arm leaned across her lap on the night earth.
‘Where have you been?’ he asked her quietly, face-to-face, eyes downcast.
‘I’ve been avoiding you and waiting for you all at the same time.’
His second hand unclasped the asparagus-green capa that draped her shoulders. Moon dust spilled all over her chest. His fingers, as they moved the material, were like Vesta’s voice coaxing leaves of lavender and sage. Their bodies flattened the capas that lay beneath them. The capas flattened long, steam-moistened grasses and their legs moved round and round to write their own love-soaked stanzas. That galaxy, its colorful destruction subsiding into a hundred light-years’ expanse, ignored this lovers’ chemistry and minor explosion. The feeling was mutual, so lost were Keba and Ravno in each other. Their individual skins became one as they surrendered definition in the nightfall.
As their pulses became steady and slowed from a canter, Ravno listened to her breath and matched his rhythm to hers. In through the nose and down to the stomach, her body draped over his. Out from the chest and out from the nose, her head against his chest. And, be it abstruse in the benighted obscurity, the sudden deep, cold pinch at the top of his spine told him the shapes and treetop silhouettes were being viewed from her eyes—from her eyes! The salt-crusted boy face couldn’t hold back his pleasured grin. To feel her closeness, of body and of heart, in the delusted aftermath of lovemaking, shook the ground on which he lay. Yet a film of empty disappointment coated the inside of her chest. He sensed this along with filaments of subdued excitement. Her brow scrunched as thought slowly turned to icy command and Ravno’s eyes once again looked from his own eyes and raced around in their own sockets.
‘This field is miraculous,’ he said as they detached themselves. How quickly it all changes with a little making of love. They cleaned carefully with his cloth and he shook out the capas. ‘You’re timed with the full moon?’
‘Right now, more or less. Though last month I was done bleeding by mid-waxing. But I’ll be timed up now, until around bulanazpi.’
‘Tam’ini miwa tekina.’ You’re incredible, he said.
Ravno’s thoughts clung to the switch he just had with her. There it was! he delighted. There was Keba and the switch and the plane that he crossed like a hemp sheet on leaves. The plane wasn’t physically there but it was integrally there. The plane spread wide and tucked beneath and it held their dear bodies. And, though the field was knee-pocked with sadness, Ravno walked lightly across it with Keba firmly beside him. Good night, moon ballad. Good night, sacred heart.
6/ penemua kembali
You don’t know about what you can’t see
Early early, before the terns left their beachfront sticks to fish and before the broad-faced moon drew cinereal fingers back beneath dawn’s arousal, Ravno quietly flattened his papyrus switch-list on the earth. In the quiet pack, his calloused hands that rubbed against the dry paper in raw morning silence were like squelches and screams of caspian terns all a balking. But Keba lay still on the leaves in his pack, breath slow and asleep. The kurumi ink list of letters and words formed meaning in time through the newborn light, as he strained his eyes: Cokha lehen, capa kokkino capa morea, and bigar, boto di saya ini dan Mister.
No, that’s wrong, he knew. Lehen, koko plaj timur motsu botorang. First, the Botorang on the east beach. He scratched bold kurumi lines through the numbers to start with the actual beginning. He recalled the vision four months ago when he saw himself and Keba on the sand from the boto with Tetora and Shisen. Well it must’ve been them, anyway, he decided.
Keba awoke and they ate together. His switch list wanted so badly to poke its frayed head out from where he kept it hidden. After breakfast they went west, retracing Keba’s retreat back from the para zona—but in reverse. After the swim across the Duat canal, during which they held their clothing above the water, Ravno pointed the way through the first few strides of bush. As he paused to tighten the hemp line that held up his cloth she took the lead and raced through the thicket. He enjoyed the tree shoots that whipped his face as he shadowed her. Vorra’s needle peeked through breaks in the foliage to their second and the density of steam increased after they crossed the Sunberry. They walked beside one another and came upon a tall arbutus, its red arms reaching out to preserve its own clearing.
As he looked up at the arbutus, Ravno asked, ‘K, you want to climb this one and watch the zona from up there?’ He had to look away as she scrambled above him, showering him with bits of scaled bark. He left his clothes beside hers on the papery ground and shimmied up the polished branches to join her near the crown. There they perched on facing branches, and looked west over the halcyon canopy at the para zona’s rising steam, lit amber in mid-morning sun. To the north sat Vorra, its distinct marker in the blue, and in the southeast Notou Mound, which hid the grounds of Pelajaran. The low crest of Sekitsui Island was barely visible in the jumbled horizon soup to the south.
Keba gazed slightly past Ravno.
‘Oh, there’s a nest,’ she said. He looked over his shoulder to a tung tree that flowered clusters of white petals with purple throats in array. Hidden from all ground animals was the nest of a grey crow, tucked in the crotch, where the trunk met a higher offshoot.
‘Couldn’t see that from where we were before, could we?’ he said. ‘Had no idea it was even there….’
Keba sensed the overly wistful notes in his voice and her eyes asked for more explanation.
‘Well, you don’t really know about what you can’t see,’ he said. ‘I mean, you can imagine and guess and sometimes you’re right but you don’t truly know unless you see it.’
‘And by see you mean touch, feel, smell—’
‘Sure K, the wind’s in your hair. But, I guess,’ he realized he had again been speaking in parables, ‘what I’m saying is I’ve begun to see…,’ and he trailed off, as he knew it wasn’t much more than that; and to say it, to honestly and outright say it, would be the most honest thing to do. The nest of the grey sat, twiggy and round, weathered like Keba’s hair.
‘Thing is I can see through other people’s eyes.’ Without waiting for a reaction and perhaps to avoid any recusant response, he added, ‘So turn around and hold up some fingers and I’ll tell you how many.’ She swiveled on her branch and held a two on her fingers close to her boyish breast. She waited.
‘K, I can’t see anything with your eyes closed.’
She laughed a short spurt of excited disbelief and opened her eyes. It’s possible at that moment the first sliver of joy, back from its sea dance in the air, quivered in the top of her lip. They reenacted his time with Temperance and the flowers, but now
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