Improv: Pimone Triplett’s “Comings and Goings, Bangkok”

Once, in a house I will inherit in a land I can’t explain

I heard a viceless woman speak like whippoorwills
about her eternal home,
not the sagging, slanted thing around us—I was
trying to sell her storm windows and she’d have
none of that—but instead a home in heaven,
with a veranda and colonnade and lemonade
pouring from gilded spigots. Her eyes, red
from dust and loneliness, reminded me
of those few days I spent with a woman
by the Gulf of Mexico, and the ember of the sun
burning off over the sea there. The old woman
in the slanted house didn’t buy what I was selling,
at least at the time.