Moved four times in the last two
decades, kept from taking out
a mortgage until egged on
by others. Wouldn’t you know it—
these nesting dreams made recently
precarious by threat of tidal
swell and rising oceans, by news
of melting icecaps. When told
to leave you look around, not
knowing what to take, being
that it’s impossible. Water,
heat, fire; broad stones
under the fig tree in the yard.
Though everything you need
is already in your heart,
you’ll continue to eye
the coats on the line,
the good boots in the closet;
the army of beetles edging along
the length of the garden hose.
View in the crosshairs
We are blown grass, rocks
sheared into pieces by wind,
box houses tumbling into
the Balili river. We are
splints of fools’ gold,
seed libraries shaken
into upended gardens.
We’d crawled into the earth
with pick-axes in search
of luck and scrimshawed
bones. We come out thick
with mud, tails between
our legs, watching as one
by one omens come true:
horses flaring their nostrils
before they step over the edge,
the sun’s lazy eye clicking
into place, fixing us all.
In response to Via Negativa: Death angel.
Letter with only silence
“6:00 o’clock, morning, 30 December, 1896.
To my very beloved Mother, Dña. Teodora Alonso.”
~ Jose P. Rizal’s last letter to his mother before his execution
In his last hour, he writes a letter to his mother
consisting of the time and date only; a salutation,
followed by silence. For how could language gather
the enormity of what could be said; or even what can’t?
There are people who are so uncomfortable
with silence they have to fill it with something
immediately: click the radio dial on, the TV,
keep the babble going in the background
though they don’t feel the need to pay
any real attention. My doctor friend who lives
alone says he makes it a point to use the guest
bathroom regularly just to hear the sound of flushing
from another part of the house. But returning
to the hero’s silence, which archivists have described
as both cryptic and lyric or profound: someone sent
me a picture of my mother when she was brought
to the ER after falling or fainting on the street
corner. No broken bones, only surface bruising
on one shin. When the Barangay tanod brought
her home, she was appalled by the sight of unkempt
rooms— empty plastic bottles strewn in every
corner, piles of unwashed clothes; styrofoam
boxes crusted over with food remnants. Two
children left to watch over her and also
themselves. Hardly a trace of any responsible
adult: the orphans of her sister, who’ve lived
rent-free under her roof all their lives
and eaten at her table in ampler times, yet can’t
be bothered. The ones quick to say she has
a daughter in America, why should they be the ones
to care? River rats come and go as they please
through cracks in the floorboards. Bread disappears;
fruit, rind and pith. The faded drapes are streaked
with marks of their desperate foraging. Or perhaps
other mouths are at work here too. Someone turns off
the electricity to her rooms, while theirs are lit.
How does one even begin to address the enormity
of what else is hidden from view? Beloved, there is
no letter ample enough for my helplessness and that
kind of silence: door pummelled by wind day and night.
Twos
~ From poetry prompts given to 2nd graders at Buckingham Primary School, Buckingham, VA; 17 September 2018:
Write Two Animals
Write Two Machines
Write Two Things that Taste Good
Write Two Things that Hurt
1
A newspaper article on how to survive a monster storm tells people returning to check on damage in the aftermath. It also says, “In the Philippines there are some more unique risks. Beware of poisonous animals like snakes that may have entered your house….” We didn’t see any. Only a deer in the shadows, head bent and deadheading the hydrangeas.
2
When I am heartsick I press
my right hand to my chest
and listen for the whoosh of water.
When I court sleep I hold the levers
of my thumbs as I was taught.
3
Sugar.
Salt.
4
The body scored
by sugar
and salt.
Contiguous
Inside the periphery, the smell
of chlorine bleach and lemons.
The brown husk of a cockroach
beached in a corner of the room.
Who can say how limits are drawn
when water in fact isn’t separate
from earth, when the ground extends
as a series of linked platforms
under wells and lakes and fountains
arcing over granite slabs in the square?
You try to leave: like the navy sending
its fleet into the high seas, like lines
of birds moving in the shape of one
arm pulling itself away from a sleeve.
It’s no use: even in sleep you carry
the wind’s voice, its folded
handkerchief in your pocket.
The bony hounds, their bloated howling
through the night; the twitch in the hind
quarters, the way they’ve lapsed back
into habits of humid, casual coupling:
sa kalye, nagkakantutan— The dogs
going on with their doggy lives, by which
another botched encounter with the end
of days could be inferred. They’re lucky
to escape the fate they would’ve been dealt,
back in the barrio: steaming accompaniment
to Cerveza Negra, in bowls laced with fat,
lashings of vinegar, peppercorns. A dish
even the hardened could drown their most
hidden sorrows in. After the floods recede,
you’ll find your washed-up others in some
back alley: bellies distended with water,
muzzles stuffed with stones and reeds.
On Form
My child says in her next life she should like
to be a potato, if a potato could make someone
happy— in other words, tuber grown in loamy
soil, starchy carbohydrate that converts to sugar
as soon as it’s eaten. And its green runners
streaking across the ground, every eye pinned
on its jacket a bud or a node— I thought of
the famous Flower Sermon, in which the Buddha
holds up a single lotus pulled up from the mud;
and of his apprentice Mahakasyapa who smiles
in understanding. The blue-green leaves are first
to unfurl on the surface of water in summer;
then, the fragrant double blossoms of deep pink.
Inside the matchstick curtain of stamens,
a seedpod the color of burnished yellow: shape
that marvelously resembles an expensive shower
fixture you could get from a hardware store— So
much form, simmering in brown and formless mud.
In response to Via Negativa: Replete.
Overwash
Here by the mouth of the river
the water has teeth, or a tongue
mellow in summer and swelled
with the tides. You can still
see your reflection in it, a wash-
bowl filling steady with the sound
of a current whose source is out of
reach. We wade with our pant hems
rolled and our skirts hitched high:
we can count the shoes floating by
like boats; refrigerators, microwaves,
children in plastic laundry baskets.
The sky is a crater the color of wet
ash. The sky is a mouth, all mouth.
Sonnet for Grief
~ “Counting the Killings: 20,000 and Rising,” The Manila Times, 24 April 2018
The Enemy’s hands are many— reaching
through our doorways, aiming a finger
or the barrel of a gun and taking without
permission. It rides away from every murder
scene astride a motorcycle, as though it were
some god on a mission: masked coward dressed
in fatigues or flak jacket, assassin for cheap hire.
As though it weren’t enough to take away our jobs,
children, partners, The Enemy orchestrates elaborate
schemes to justify its insatiable hunger: it buys itself
more drugs, more guns, more goons, more profits. More
deaths = more reach, more power. The only arms that hold
and rock us now are those of Grief: Mother of all sorrows,
hands reaching to gather another close as she keens.
Breach
Not even the birds speak tonight. Nor the frogs,
the owls. This preternatural quiet can only mean
the animals have tuned in to those high
frequency radio signals that we can’t access:
for days they’ve rolled inland like waves,
ring upon ring of echoes from that gyre
levitating, terrible sufi at sea. I look around
at all the books that line the shelves of this house—
Should I have spent more time outdoors, collecting
specimens to pin to walls, learning to paddle
outward into the foam then climb up on a board,
cutting the water’s surface into points? Inside,
outside— sometimes I can’t tell the difference,
really, especially when holding my breath.