In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

My mother took special care, ironing his barong between sheets of dressmaking paper. Feeling generous, he told my mother she could bring a friend, but she didn’t want to invite any of the women in her various clubs. So I invited Rhonda instead. We listened to the adults gossip through the six hour trip and drowsed or threw up in paper bags from motion sickness. There was a new and explosive biography about the First Lady, telling of her origins in the south. How she lived in the garage, illegitimate child of the man in whose household her mother served. A few surreptitious copies were making the rounds; the writer had gone into hiding.

Of course it was hot. Even a butterfly pod would shrivel in the shade, split a sleeve open before its time. But still, we fished out our swimsuits as soon as we got there, and went to bake in the sun by the pool, armed with cheap plastic sunglasses. To hell with heatstroke. We were too young for anything but pineapple juice on the rocks, but the waiters brought them with paper parasols. Rhonda tried to teach me how to affect what she called an air of worldly ennui, but I was working through a library copy of Anna Karenina. She gave up on me and flopped face-down, on her untanned belly.

The next day, the swearing in itself was a blur; but mostly because someone decided at the last minute that we (women) might not have the protocol clearances. The cousin-congressman and cousin-deputy went with him. As for us, we returned to the pool and ordered sandwiches and Coke. My mother cooled her bunioned feet in the water and filed her nails. After lunch, my father came back and said we had to hustle. Rumors, he said. Best to travel back north before nightfall. When I think about it now, I realize he was what his contemporaries might have thought a lightweight, not a big stakes player. Too conscientious for his own good, never took a bribe.

That evening, after we got back, more rumors. Then radio and TV blackouts, and sirens at six and at nine. Not the clarion of the Angelus, but signals for the first of many curfews and the squall ahead. Our sunburned skin peeled for weeks afterward, but nothing of that sort mattered anymore. At home, in the streets where people cast furtive glances at each other, we learned bits of new vocabulary: martial law, suspension, writ of habeas corpus; rally, molotov cocktail, salvage, subversive, detain.

In response to Morning Porch and small stone (150).

In response to Morning Porch and Via Negativa: Drinking Companion.

Is it the same that returns each day;
was it a man or a woman once,

a child, a snail, a blind ascetic
walking through the hills?

The sound it makes is dull percussion
on the side of a hollow bowl.

Is it the same, but now a winged soul
that troubles the wood

all through the year? A landmark:
pocked, scarred, familiar—

Safe in the relative way we
ourselves return,

to seek the ghosts of previous
hungers; then striking out

again for all that green, still
achingly out of reach.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Natsu âme: summer rain—

Buhos : downpour, Noah’s rain—

Bagyo : storm—

Ambon : drizzle—

Ulap : clouds that bring both mist and rain—

Agar-arbis : what we say up north—

Hil ulán, kaw uyán, uran : in Hiligaynon—

Some syllables are rain themselves—

*Drops are falling.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

guests in someone’s godfather’s house,
a few murky breaths from the bay;
neon poured through the windows

while the air conditioning unit blew
noisy drafts into the room. Along the sea
wall, peddlers hawked their wares.

Traffic coursed through choked streets
humid as the weather. Before first
light, in the morning, it was time

to leave for the airport. One of you
slept through it, was left behind.
A small mercy, I was told, to keep

you dreaming some hours more. I don’t
quite know now if that was the right
thing to do; or what you felt

when you awoke and no adequate sign
materialized for the apology I have been
making in the intervening years since then.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

crockery? Without peer, meaning not a copy,
original; baked terra cotta, crackled brown, bread-like

surface of imperfections. Around the courtyard, in the day’s
last glaze of heat, curling vines gather. Fronds of fern

spiral back toward themselves at their tips. I tuck the ends
of my worries like that sometimes: like hair behind my ears.

What I would give for such a sign, to tell me
of the genuine, or promise what will not change again—

But for now, only something in the name of the lilac
to suggest its scent; something in the aspect of the moon.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.