One of the rooms is haunted the Resident Poet tells me, handing
the key. From my studio, the Gihon is green and barely a creek. Yet
this town with one bar and no coffee shop summons up
my birth village: the two-storied stone house, the water mill,
the suspension bridge, the Mikli-Phoom that spat out Jyojyo
still breathing … (I never went back after we moved to Kathmandu:
what was I so afraid of finding, of not finding?) And why am I,
who have always been afraid of the dark, disappointed
