Under clammy loam       past the roots

of Bodhi trees, in a place the ancestors

named Colombo

                 lie the bones from which

we came, you and I.      Think of the mariner gone

two centuries, stowed in the damp of someone else’s

gouged earth, landlocked for eternity,

the owners of the place where he disembarked

                                                           hurling dirt

on the change he’d brought, gathered like dark pillars

                                                           on the fringe

of a Christian burial for a tragic Billy Budd,

our great, great, great, etcetera, all bravado

and natural curiosity, a genealogist’s conundrum;

his legend mocks documentation, his archaic sextant

condemned to a musty life      in the sea-bitten tea chest

that adorns your mantlepiece, a salt-damaged relic of

expired wanderlust. Think of his marrow, small red specks

dotting the verdant fringe of Negombo,            the nucleotides

that grew our generations. Imagine our long-expired grandmothers

who landed swan-necked, vulnerable as seabirds on the docks,

to marry, to cobble nests among the jam fruit trees, to dodge

cobras; the scrape of coral reef on merchant hulls, their rite

of passage.	Unmoored now, we roll like egret eggs,

you and              I, in different directions,

                                                   far from the sea;

the art of navigation sunk within, dormant, unfathomable,

the distance between us, vast.