it was fourteen years ago

no wonder.  but a wonder still.  the little boy, now a young man.  i hadn't notice: only seeing him once in a while.  until right beside him, a young woman.  

how so suddenly old i feel.  body weighing heavier despite the mind.  it knows what the mind forgets:  little sister is not little anymore; and hasn't been for a long, long time.


















 

why an ocean cannot be crossed

the vikings knew it.  although some say
long before boats there were ice bridges

what resembled men had walked 
crossing continents and oceans.

what they found we will never know.
can only surmise 

such vastness
such minuteness.

Syracuse

City with the loveliest name, Syracuse;
don't let me forget the dim
antiquity of your side streets, the pouting balconies
that once caged Spanish ladies,
the way the sea breaks on Ortygia's walls.

Plato met defeat here, escaped with his life,
what can be said about  us, unreal tourists.
Your cathedral rose atop a Greek temple
and still grows, but very slowly,
like the heavy pleas of beggars and widows.

At midnight fishing boats radiate
sharp light, demanding prayers
for the perished, the lonely, for you,
city abandoned on a continent's rim,
and for us, imprisoned in our travels.






by Adam Zagajewski 

on relative "reality"

if one holds a cup here, now, long enough, one sees how the cup dissolves into something else, how the here, the now, turns into a something a somewhere else between spaces and places and things.  a kind of non sequitur.  how do we resolve the fluid contradition that is also known as real?  perhaps the surrealists have it right:  how we live separately and simultaneously in liquid dreams and reals; two or more mirrors facing each other creating more worlds; the strangeness of being one same person and different to different persons.  

such nuances; such fine, fine thread; such attempt--no matter how inevitably futile-- to climb the height of the ladder in attempt to see the worlds.
























    

this world as a fold

teach me how to fold origami, fold this paper
piece the way slender fingers do

they are graceful as a woman's,
as precise

as her heart the way it holds the brim of a world
into a cup of her hand.

flooding in another city

almost a week now national news tell nothing new:  flood and flooding somewhere:  the southwest monsoon; torrential rains; collapsed dykes and dams; overflowed rivers; and waves after waves of mudwaters having made their ways to the cities, mudwaters with the strength of twenty or more feet deep burying roads and cars and trucks and houses.  boats hovered by houses' roofs.  no Ark.  and crowding at the centers, the countless evacuees.

the local news tell a different story:  the collision of an oil tanker and a passenger boat.  more than two hundred missing.  a pregnant woman found floating at sea.  and that it has been more than seventy-two hours and so operations have changed from search-and-rescue to search-and-retrieval.  

government, as expected, is diligent on working on blame and accountability: they are out looking for a woman believed to have siphoned money.

the champion church is doing nothing.  while all the weather forecasters tell everyone to continue expecting rain.

but in this place, how the full moon shines quiet and bright.  i try.  the airline tickets lying in wait.














 

of motion

among other things, there is the constancy of motion.  the comfort of it.  like a kind of softness that urges one, gently, to move.  wake up, darling, the sunup.  the windows are the first to know.  and the curtains.  and she kisses you on the lips.  you wake up to find she is still asleep.  it is less than a minute before the alarm.  that your body has awakened you through dreams.  and the first day of the weekend has found you:  it is the temptation:  to be in abandon.  but some part of you is waiting for the daily paper, and an expected post that may or may not come.  and the knowing that the abandon is only an illusion:  soon she will wake up and rearrange her mind into a list of things to do.  most likely the laundry first.  the dog now licks your toes, it is time for a run.  the blanket still covers you, and her scent is beautiful.  you think: five minutes.  and if there are still eggs and milk in the kitchen to make her breakfast.

















 

Letter to Eve

Letter to Eve

Again it is Wednesday.  The weekday in the middle when

by policy the university stops.  All students leave the campus for somewhere else.

Secretaries ease themselves, certain the paperwork will be done on time

nothing new is coming; and the security guards down, empty hallways

at times can be comforting.  Like world under water.  The pace of things quiet. 

It would be nice to make my way to the beach today.  This apartment, too,

the view of Iglesia spires pointing to the blue, empty; no matter the sun

is even on the walls and the cactus on the coffee table grew a flower.

My mother had said nothing when finally told

grasping why I’d rather be spending my days out walking alone with a dog.

Of course she knows.  But you are too far away.  Less real, I must say,

if not for these blind pockets within days I put my hand in

not really surprised you are there.  If I move

put away this paper, take keys instead and close the door

go down stairs to the park to pedal on a bike the kilometers to the shore,

it wouldn’t have mattered.  The surf would be constant, the kelp, the birds.

The distance.  And something else would inevitably remind me 

the anchored boat denied from the tide; the flotsam bottle at my feet. 

by Charmaine Carreon

 

copenhagen

Copenhagen is not a real city, he says, reviewing the number of murders and theft, the number of people that is less 

than the population of stricken children in the humid city where we were 
eating eggs benedict in a place that smelled of vanilla.  A waiter named Denmark 

came to pour water.  The name on the tag on the crisp white shirt.  Only in this country, he adds, noticing the name.  I only thought what a happenstance--having known 

such penchant for first names:  a Xhemei, an Angus, a Lucy Pearl, a Lefer, a Lady Goddess,  
a Lady Macbeth, a Sir Lord, a Phil.Mighty, a Douglas McArthur, an Avril Lavigne.

Copenhagen is not a real city, he says again, pointing at more cities and stopping, perhaps
not without a touch, the cities in his Italy.  The man missing his home.

to make sense of the world,

some resort to words and the trouble (and pains) of definitions: this is
what is, and therefore, that is not.  in other words, this is

the drawing of lines.  the making of differences,  the pointing
of marked territories, otherwise known as concepts.  

or boundaries.  whichever is deemed closest  to or farthest from
the perceived real ("real", of course, being a construct

which no one says, unless...)  Simone says
"One is not born---

but becomes one" which sums the efforts of many who trouble 
(and pain) with definitions:  what we think we know

we may not really know.






*the full text by Simone de Beauvoir is "One is not born a woman, but becomes one."


















 
  

traveling short distances

1. it is thursday.  after having made a few arrangements, there is a four-hour breath before another plunge.  this is it, now, and i take it, even though i am unable to stop glancing at the clock, not knowing exactly whether it is out of apprehension or anticipation. 

2. after yet another meeting last night which thankfully did not extend 'til past eight, had a brief exchange with Greg who is not of this city and who is always a pleasure to talk with, mainly because the exchange, in another language and of ontological topics, is reminiscent of things.  last night, the brief conversation included the subject of philosophy being categorized in the social sciences vis a vie being categorized in the letters; also the idea of line as an illusion to which he answered phenomenology.  i do not know if it is his former monastic life and the considerable theology studies i've had, or the circles of people in the country of another time, space, place, and language that we both happen to know, or both of these somehow meet.   we do not talk about details of previous or current lives; these are irrelevant.

3. she looked extra pretty last night when i arrived and told her so.  you don't look exhausted at all at work, i joked and she laughed.  she had arrived earlier and had time to make dinner. i did the dishes and walked with the dogs.  stayed up 'til almost midnight doing paperwork.

4. read a poem before bed.  even in poetry, the sad, difficult world is always of beauty.

a bloodshot eye

so the clock reads past ten pm.  after shower i happen at the mirror and see one eye red.  the veins exhausted, bloodshot.  i make it to the bed where a book patiently waits on the side table.  the lampshade a warm glow.  tomorrow is a government-declared non-working holiday.  but also.  tomorrow is a lunch meeting.  tomorrow is a venue ocular inspection.  tomorrow is another appointment after the lunch meeting; an appointment squeezed into an hour in between the lunch meeting and another meeting.  in the meantime, the Committee waits for the Memorandum of Agreement.  in the meantime, the Wednesday meeting at 9 am makes itself remembered.  in the meantime, the paper stack waiting inside a green folder makes themselves known.  little sister tells me the news:  she is pregnant again; hopefully not twins; times are hard.  my eyelids are dropping on their own.  beside me, she is asleep with the sleep of the child.  tomorrow is...