Category: Poems & poem-like things

one of us sends a link to this article.
 
And when next we meet for our regular
cocktails and conversation, we share

our amusement over bowls of mussels
steamed in wine and garlic, hunks

of fresh bread on the side. At last,
recognition that women who know what

they want aren't fanged or intimidating. 
One of us says casually, between bites— 

We don't really want to train anyone 
how to be emotionally mature, or have

to explain what we want, period. And so,
if they've finally learned what we know,

well and good. We want companionship, 
a voice responding in conversation not

in grunts but thoughtfully. Someone 
who doesn't assume we'll naturally 

remember birthdays, call plumbers, doctors 
or teachers, absorb every emergency like 

a sponge. Perhaps it's true that someone
younger might now be wise enough to know

they have their own growing up to do. 
Though some of us are close to retirement

and a few have actually crossed that line, 
we are not old-old, which is important.

We're not afraid of being fully ourselves.
Tired of following protocol for its sake, 

we've arrived at our certainties, 
embrace our desire, enjoy the view.  

We drove one day years ago 
to La Trinidad, where a near-toothless 
woman who could see the future lived, 
surrounded by farmyard— heads 
of cabbage and cauliflower, bean rows, 
creeping vines of sweet potato on one side 
of the house where tin washbasins leaning 
against the wall reflected the sun’s rays 
like the two giant radars on Mirador Hill, 
built in 1900 and used for weather 
observation and typhoon forecasting. 

The clairvoyant did not take 
money for payment, only accepting 
a bag of groceries or bottles of cerveza 
which we put into her leathered hands 
before being ushered into her kitchen. 
I don’t know what things my mother wanted 
to learn about the days or years ahead, but 
she was told barren women had gone to seek 
advice and months later, conceived a child. 

For other less pressing needs like fair 
weather, no rain for important occasions, 
it was the nuns we went to, in their Convent 
of Perpetual Adoration. We wrote our petitions 
on little slips of paper then slid them through 
a window with a grille, along with a carton of eggs. 
The eggs were no longer warm from the hen, but 
they were speckled and brown and each could fit 
and be carried in the palm of your hand, 
then broken carefully on the rim of a bowl 
so the good sisters could bake bread.  

What I learned was this: we trust 
in whoever is willing to listen. Everyone 
and everything prays for something— the soil 
for rain, fruit for sun, vines for something 
to cling to. My mother for the body's doors to open 
or close in certain ways. When we kneel and 
offer what we can, it means the future can 
still be placated, can still somehow be known 
though nothing about our days seems to change. 

You ask if this    hurt is permanent 
   if recurrence         is the only language
allowed us       in our passage   
    Like you    I think certain    days feel 
finished before they even        begin
    while      others unfold more slowly 
I wanted to say    even the fields
    that look raked and empty     hold on
to something         Roots    stones   a memory
   of water glimpsed as a drying    puddle   
The body remembers how      to keep going 
    Day shift    to night shift while
the mind finds the cruise    control settings
    I want to say          it won't always 
be like this   but we know the difference       
    between now      and tomorrow  the day
after and the day      after    How life    
    is a management of moments   even those
that bear  down as the eye     of a storm

A hill station is a colonial construct.

A hill station means rest and recreation, which are also colonial concepts.

The hill station could only come into existence when the notion of indigenous land ownership was rendered invalid.

A hill station is a vision of utopia breaking through the tropical heat and swarms of mosquitoes.

A hill is smaller than a mountain but larger than an ant hill.

Station has a kind of military ring; or it can mean signpost, which can also mean the place where someone is tied or whipped like an animal.

A hill station is a dream of living close to the clouds.

Clouds are formations of precipitate, meaning they have formed by accumulation and are only waiting for an inciting instance to release their weight.

In the hill station, landscape is mapped by functions not native to the land.

What a surprise to discover underneath the hill station, stores of silver and copper and gold.

   

is what they call artists who didn't go
to art school or take a single formal
art lesson in their lives. And yet
visions in their minds took shape
in clay or burst open with oils 
on canvas. Grandma Moses pieced 
her quilt-square landscapes, Van Gogh 
his bending wheat fields and vibrant 
yellow-green interiors. Fingers   
listened to every shape and shadow 
in the world. A tarnished teakettle 
on a windowsill is no accessory— only 
part of the equipment of daily life. 
Tea sets with missing cups. Mismatched
plates, silverware from yard sales;
armchairs covered with oily antimacassars
pressed to stiffness from the light 
of countless afternoons. Isn't this how 
you've always learned— figuring it out 
one trial at a time, as if from memory 
before it becomes memory? The lesson:
you prepare for joy the way you prepare 
for sorrow. How to stand without flinching
as orchids and velvet moths circle your head
and a black monkey coils a necklace of thorns 
around your neck, from which a dead hummingbird
with wings outspread now dangles like a pendant.   

~ after "Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and 
Hummingbird," Frida Kahlo (1940)