The light was white bright on the street at noon.
Respectably dressed white people with white hair crossed
Between the bright white lines of the crosswalk
And entered the cool, dark theater, me among them.
The seats filled up. The lights went down.
The ambient sounds of Moby caressed us,
And the screen filled with a flying scene above Epupa Falls
In Kaokaland, then cut to a kraal and a small, ashy fire
Where a Himba elder no older than the theater audience
Murmured about witchcraft, drought and the death of Himba culture.
Just as I realized I could smell the elder, the strong sage odor,
The butter and dung-perfumed ochre, a disoriented memory--
The Himba woman hitchhiking, sitting tall in the back of my old rented truck
Seven years and more ago, her leather crown brushing the underside of the roof,
Her ochre rubbing into the gray fabric of the seat, calm, going to see her father
At the rural clinic twenty minutes dirt drive distant, that Kaokaland smell
The open grassland carried--I realized I had smelled nothing entering
The theater, despite, presumably, perfumes and hairsprays, nothing.
Nothing is like a memory.
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