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THE KHAN IN HIS PLEASURE HOUSE He steers his electric wheelchair between the statuary. Overhead, the glass roof has gone gray with snow. But the camelias are in bloom, and bare-breasted among the peonies and fuchsia Venus-of-the-Green-Heart meets his dull eyes. In the fine haze of the sprinklers— in one hand a peach, in the other the hook that maimed him—she wears a halo of yellow butterflies. Having traveled all night in one more strange country, I have invented this: the hurt magician in his house of glass. Let it be Muntsalvach, House of the Grail, this high-tech version of a Tartar yurt, pre-Raphaelite damsels— full lips and auburn hair—gently immersing the Great Khan Kubla in his Hot-Tub-of-Youth. But today, stuck all night without cash or passport at one more frontier, I see him wipe a window in the sweating wall of glass. He watches the snow drop into the black gloss of the river. On the farther bank children with chapped faces hurl snowballs into the flurrying sky. Behind us the cellos speak loud and clear. We watch snow fall. The laughter we cannot hear.
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