skin laid like an embroidered
table runner across the abdomen

and the tattoo of the comet dust, black on black: such extraordinary images.

AN UNSUNG SONG

On some mountain terraces I had whiled sunsets
away when young, gleaners stretch their brown
backs at the end of their day’s toil and burst into song:

I must gather them while green, must gather them.
I must gather them while ripening, must ripen them.
I must gather them on my back before sundown

shadows grow tall on the red rocks on my trek home
to join the roister of the hunt, to boil camotes in vats
and cauldrons of goatmeat for the day’s harvest feast.

That night I asked Mag-siya to be mother of my sons,
a long streak of light roamed the skies like a cowlick
on a boy’s forehead, and the night stars swallowed it.

Hayley’s comet was the augur for the war that ripped
through the huts and burnt stilted houses on the terraces
and dashed the dense dreams of delivering baskets

of fruit and rootcrop to my woman on the river washing
stains of the blanket that wrapped our newborn son,
he with the cowlick on his forehead and the howl

of a hunter whose eye for the coypu rushing through
the terrace falls would have been unrivalled in the valley,
would have been the mark of all that was alive and loved.

O, how these shadows torture me now at sundown
when I hold on to trees, leaves, flowers, or roots to trace
that cowlick that burns bright still on my gnarled palms

and echoes still like a hunter’s hallo for the wild boars
culled for the harvest feasts. The shadows are long
in the valley. I have only my unsung songs of that mark.

—Albert B. Casuga
05-10-11