We call these balikbayan boxes— and we
fill them to the brim (they’re packed and taped,
not weighed, by volume) with every imaginable
first world desire: chocolate, clothes and shoes

bought at various sales throughout the holidays,
books for nieces and nephews; coffee, processed
ham, brined and pressed into teardrop-shaped tins;
liter bottles of shampoo, purse-size samples

of scents and lotions and oils; candy, pain-
killers, cans of tuna and corned beef and Spam.
Strips of masking tape and markers help
to designate which items will go to which

relatives and friends back home. I know
that what I really want to send can’t fit
inside this cardboard box— And so from time
to time I’ll stop to lean against the kitchen door,

survey the goods strewn across the table:
despite the labels, unsure of their destination
as I am uncertain of what real purchase
I have over the things in this world.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Incubate an egg with the heat of your palms. Brood.

Nurse your sorrows with the sour milk of jealousy, or failing that, Nestle’s infant formula.

Dissect a seed.

Relive a pleasant memory by reenacting it in excruciating detail.

Do math problems in your head—for example, prove Goldbach’s Conjecture.

Collect rain in jars, tightly sealed and organized by month and day.

Get ready! Sharpen all your knives.

Grind them until they’re thin as piano wires.

Hug yourself tightly and rock back and forth on your haunches.

If you must watch the clock, unplug it first.

If you must play solitaire, dispense with the cards.

Light cigarettes and watch from a safe distance as they turn into columns of ash.

Pace, but let your fingers do the walking.

Novels are best read backwards, one page at a time.

Stop kidding yourself about what comes next.

Go about your business.

Coil into a spring so your mind won’t have anywhere to wander.

past Assandas, Bombay, and Bheroomull’s
department stores; then Dainty Restaurant
where the chess-players were by then deep

in their cups, and the air was fragrant
with the smells of coffee, soy sauce,
and sesame oil. In the alley, a rabble

of crows occasionally swooped down
among the garbage for scraps, driving
the cats behind the upstairs apartment

windows crazy. Farther, past Pines
Studio and Cid Educational Supply,
the entrance to Magnolia ice cream

parlor and Sky View Mezzanine.
There, he gestured to the maitre d’
named Lito, who soon escorted us

to the basement where father’s best
friend, Don Alfredo Blanco, held office
in a room musty with the cinnamon

and clove smells from the humidor, mingled
with a whiff of English Leather. I don’t
know or can’t remember what they talked

about for hours, it seemed; only
that they let me sink into the leather
armchair underneath a lamp and a poster

of a toreador in Spain, and I was free
to take out books from the low shelf:
The Count of Monte Cristo, The Great

Gatsby, and I turned the yellowed
pages and read or drowsed, until a hand
shook me awake and it was time to go.

Sky View is gone; I hear it’s now
a pizza parlor. And both men have
likewise passed away. Sometimes

I catch a glimpse in photographs
someone has posted on Facebook—
the old buildings, the wide sweep

of streets not yet choked by cars
and pedestrian traffic: the Chinese

couple who kept a shop called The Old
Pagoda, dipped brushes into ink to make
calligraphy; fingers of fog on the sleeves

of trees, their reluctance to let go too soon.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Just as the tail bone is a vestigial tail, the ears are vestigial cabbages.

Wear a hat to ward off ear worms, which if unchecked can turn into ear butterflies.

Listen with the heart. It’s not really designed for that, but it gets bored just pumping blood all the time.

Listen with your skin: each body hair is an antenna.

Turn on, tune in, drop into a really comfortable couch.

That “still, small voice” is neither God nor conscience but a long-deceased great aunt with a few things still on her mind.

Take notes.

All sound can be heard as music, but not all music can be heard as music.

Your life did, in fact, come with a soundtrack—what have you done with it?

The listener, too, must improvise.

One chord is enough for most purposes—don’t be greedy!

Silence can take four basic forms: pregnant, shocked, utter, and radio.

Pregnant silence is the most tragic, since she always dies giving birth.

Compose in her memory a sonata for the ear trumpet.

after his death: despite his long
career in law, how scrupulous, how
fraught with superstition the lengths

he went to avoid the writing of a will,
or such grave considerations of the end:
a bank account his widow had no real

knowledge of, with one last retirement
deposit; the neat and mostly unused
stack of blank checks (he favored cash)

tucked in a corner of the sock drawer.
Somehow I can’t remember more
than the questions that now come

out of that time. They crowd upon
the present, which today seems
cloudless and untrammelled, clear

blue shot through with loose coins
of sunshine though winter’s breath
suspends its shadow from every branch.

If you can’t take it with you, what is
this lifetime of working and making do,
of putting others’ needs before your own;

and nights of sleepless worry, counting
the days from one paycheck to the next?
The clock in the hallway whirrs

and hidden levers scroll the hands
across its ivory face. Its music
is also a counting-out, a measuring

of the remaining distances between
the ache of all that wants so much
to be fulfilled, to be disbursed.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Walking is a form of climbing—one extremity should keep hold of the floor or ground at all times to prevent a fall.

(Feet are better for this than hands.)

You can try delegating it to others, but you have to hope they won’t do the same.

Someone must walk or the earth will forget about us and have other bad dreams instead.

Find a tree to coach you—trees spend their whole lives plotting their next step.

Be careful not to take root.

Every corner of terra firma requires a different walk, as well as every hour of the day.

A morning walk should never take the place of an evening or postprandial walk.

Saunter. Shuffle. Swagger. Stride. Plod.

Feet are like oxen bound in harness: they’re paired, but they’re not a couple.

However much they’re fetishized, their first and only mate is the ground.

Muscles are like batteries—simply walk backwards to recharge!

Try not to think about the ten little piggies with their discordant agendas.

Try not to think about those other two-legged animals, the birds.

At birth, you are allotted just so many steps. Choose them carefully.

Keep your eyes on the sidewalk—there are no dropped coins in the sky.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Cultivate an appetite through rigorous exercise of the organs of speech.

Grow root vegetables and, if possible, talons.

Salivation is important, but in most cases it will not be necessary to consume the saliva of other creatures, e.g. in the form of Aerodramus swiftlet nests.

Go to the ocean—primal eater—and watch how it wags its tongue.

Make sure the bread and the soup are singing in the same key.

Beware of the sea cucumber, which turns itself inside-out to avoid becoming a meal.

The best food is the most obvious: a fan never runs out of air to chew.

If the meat is rotten, eat the maggots.

Forks to the left, spoons to the right and a steak knife’s macron over the dish’s O.

Oxidation is too unpredictable. Use gastric acid and fermentation.

Set an extra place at your table for the anthropologist with the most delectable buttocks.

This is the first page of the missing manual, designed to be understood only by those who have no need of it.

Waking up isn’t for everyone.

Dreaming is an anodyne to our nearly inescapable grief.

But if you must awaken, make your bed inside a kettle drum and pray for rain.

When it starts to thunder, climb onto the roof and cling to the lightning rod.

Waking up isn’t for those who are already dead.

You have to start from a position of strength: go fetal.

Every zipper yearns for closure, but it can’t be rushed.

The mountain isn’t going anywhere—stop trying so hard!

Early birds are known only from the fossil record, having met their end in the jaws of nocturnal beasts.

Leave a window open for cat burglars and cats, either of whom might teach you how to travel light.

Waking up isn’t for sleepers.

Eternity can be bribed, though, if you’re subtle about it.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.