"The Feast

A rivulet of pig's blood trickled underneath one of the enormous yams. Two rows of yams flanked the sides of a muddy road that led up to the feast house. Each yam was tied to a log and hung liked enormous, deformed Christmas stockings between two oil drums. These giant tubers, hairy with crazed roots and as long as a small child, hung in fat clusters beside the little road. Each cluster of yams weighed hundreds of pounds. A few had to be trucked in on flat-bed pick-ups and hoisted by six men... ten men... fourteen men. The size of the yam was rated by the amount of men it took to carry it on thick poles strung through the bark-roped top of the yam clusters. That's a fourteen-man yam... Each of these monstrous yams was dressed at the top with a garland of green vines. In spite of all the manly endeavor it took to grow, harvest, and carry the yams to the feast, the long row of yam clusters that flanked the road looked something like dressed-up, shy dancers at an awkward party.

The pig's blood flowed beneath the yams into a muddy crevice where barefoot children were playing. The riot of children were landing here, near the pig's blood, after they slid on their butts down a muddy streak in a grassy hill. The morning had brought the usual downpour, but now the weather was sunny, humid, and steaming as the warm pig's blood streaked across the haphazardly placed bits of cement that called itself a road on its way down the small hill in Pwudoi, Pohnpei, Micronesia, Pacific Ocean. The bloody path trickled towards the ocean, towards the open mouths of a tangle of eels, waiting in the dark maze of a mangrove swamp. The blood crossed the island's narrow circumferential road, went under the cement beams of the policeman's house and through his small sakau market where people were sitting on plastic coolers and drinking a gray, dirty mildly psychoactive liquid out of emptied-bottles of cheap Filipino rum. From the cement edge of the market, the blood dripped into the waiting maws of the eels."

In preparation for my wedding, I painted eight portraits of authors in oil on canvas.