Do things get clearer as you close distance and approach? An object in motion remains in constant motion. The line it draws is straight unless acted on by an unbalanced force. When cause skews the light or the viewfinder or the usual schedule? A boy struggles to disarm the stranger bent on doing harm. When you see the future it seems such an ordinary moment— a man hesitates at the loading platform, a child's face presses against glass. Doors whir close then open, as though they chose who should get on, who gets left behind.
The Loneliest Country in the World
This is not a country for the old or the young. Opportunity and abundance: poorly made promises that break before they come clattering off conveyor belts, that rot before they can be loaded into baskets. The young are names inside foil hearts tacked on a schoolroom wall, outlines on the floor where they crouched and bent their heads to the linoleum heart of this country. Don't say apple or flag or Thanks- giving. This country is becoming the loneliest country in the world. It is the smell of floors bleached after a rain of blood, the blind heat of hatred strung like lights in dance halls, incandescent as bullets boiled in a crucible of darkness. Just like in Stockton and Watsonville, the old washed the dirt of farms from their hands, put on their finest threads. If this was their only defiance, let it have been the moon they skated on, the pulse of a little joy that throbbed in their temples before the end.
Rooms Within Rooms Within Rooms
In a hutch with sliding glass doors, shelves displayed crystal we barely used— serving plates, footed bowls, a faceted soup tureen. But over the years, it became a holdall: a portmanteau of assorted souvenirs and kitsch, their faded sentiments crammed cheek-to-cheek with vials of prescription drugs; a wide- mouthed jar stuffed with receipts. Of other rooms in that house, I remember very little now— only how crowded they were with plaster saints, furniture that had seen better days but that they couldn't bear to throw away. Sometimes, when I look up from these rooms in which I write, I think about light from thinly curtained windows, a view of hills; the horns of jeepneys flying past, their headlights crosshatching the bedroom walls. The yard where we slept in the days and nights following the earthquake, where we fed a makeshift stove with old newspapers and listened to rescue helicopters probing the dark.
In which I wonder why
a curse is believed to pass from one generation to another: a grandmother one never even knew but for a black and white photograph, where she is the unsmiling mouth clamped over yellowed teeth; a grandfather who had a first name but no surname because he disappeared while a crowd gathered in church, and a cake teetered under the weight of sugar paste flowers in the rectory. When does it become a gift, this thing that at first was the most unasked-for? Take a curse and say: the hole made by a moth in a sweater may be repaired, the dust collected from house corners and thrown out of doors is only dust.
Ova
~ for Beth Vincelette In a world heading toward predicted ruin, remember how there are still things that begin— Green shoots pushing through the paper tent of a garlic bulb; tubers that thrive after the final frosts of January, eyes open in the sustaining dark. And every day, an egg from the hen house: grey or speckled brown, white haloed with blue, ivory streaked with olive as it passes through the oviduct . Whether your life is the size of a humming- bird egg or the Madagascan elephant bird egg, its sphere cradles its own kind of depth. Don't we who have mothered know what it feels to die a thousand deaths and return from the brink? Praise, then, the roundness of every new beginning. Praise what holds a tiny world in, a sky not yet cracked on the edge of a pan or fallen.
Quicken
The days grow short again, and we turn from winter stores of broth and marrow. I have a craving for pickled green papaya and mango, moringa leaves, mung bean. In the neighborhood, someone has lit a fire in their yard: here is the smell of things turning into ash, mingled with the yeasty trace of uncollected garbage. The wind peels back strips of old paint from the gutter's edge. Under the faded deck, paw prints in softened soil—animals that must have eased under the fence, hunting their own small hungers.
Umami
Since the '80s, the discovery of this fifth basic taste has gained more popularity. It comes from naturally occurring glutamates in fish, kombu, mushrooms, dashi, soybean paste. Scientists say it's no wonder our taste buds snap awake: they're connected to our earliest memories of pleasure. It's in cheese, fermented foods, and in breast milk which is high in amino acids. Think of babies, faces cupped against their mothers' breasts, heads tipped back after they've had their fill. Then, there's texture: the pleasing melange of sensations spreading through the roof and the back of the tongue, a fuzzy warmth down the throat. Mostly, I prefer savory over sweet, salty over sour and bitter— One perfect oyster globe, the reward of buttery yellow uni gonads lifted to the mouth with chopsticks after tapping carefully around the spiny shell.
Poem with lines from Kobayashi Issa
Even with insects— some can sing, some can’t. Is that like saying some of us can be great writers or artists, and the rest of us merely hold beauty like a promise; a wick dipped in tallow, used for incremental burn?
Repetition Pantoum
Repetition lays grooves in the tracks of her speech— each pass makes the same sounds, tells the same stories. The common room is her kingdom, the bedroom her cell. Trembling, she calls for rescue from unseen persecutors. Each pass produces the same sounds, the same stories. Sometimes she cries for her sister or her lover, both long dead. Trembling, she calls for help—who's coming for her? Like a leaf, she slides under the covers. She cries out for her sister or her lover, both long dead. She doesn't believe that they couldn't hear her. She is thin as a leaf slipping under the covers. Are the sheets cool as satin, is it her wedding night? She doesn't believe that the dead can't hear her. Don't they live in the air, in dappled shadow, in water? Who lay with her on satin sheets, who wed her? Fish in the shallows, moths in the net of a lamp. Don't the dead live in the air, in dappled shadow, in water? The common room is her kingdom, the bedroom a holding cell. Fish in the shallows, moths that line the net of a lamp— Tracks that repeat in the mind and the groves of her speech.
Polaris
Easy to find the brightest star in the evening sky— at the end of the Little Dipper's handle, or pointing in a straight line from the two stars on one side of the Big Dipper. Early navigators knew this: at the ship's prow, their bodies straining forward and upward, trying to push the compass needle north. There are various star- gazing apps in our time, and so much more light, we call it pollution: these modern predicaments of excess which give us a sense of certainty —sometimes. At his preschool, my grandson says the teacher led the class in a guided meditation and he learned that light gives love. He sat on the carpet by the window, the geometry of dust-speckled rays falling on his face and shoulders. I wasn't there, but I know his mother's heart sped quick as a line toward this brightness, the way starry bodies circle around the celestial pole. Particle or wave, diffracting or expanding —could we patch a coat with it, unroll it like a map or billowing sail; gather it in a crystal sphere? What we see of light depends on what we ask of it, and in what ways.