shawl

She could mean a half hundred things with it.  Leaving the shawl
on the passenger seat while I parked the car at the side street.
I wouldn't have noticed, until she came back and said "I left something."
And pointing at the red shawl beside me, she smiled that smile
beautiful and warm in the December night.

the mermaid gardens

The mermaid wakes 
to a garden chilled by rain.
She remembers
the last morning by the sea
on a photo.  She was sitting 
crosslegged, red blanket on sand
surrounded by blue 
sails in the background.
The last time her lover
mouthed her name.
This morning, the dragon 
wing begonia flowers 
brim with seeds.
She fingers them
with eyes.


                                            photo by and poem for ricci

"imagine"

And because my wife is here, I would like to say I'm sorry for the times when I wasn't what I supposed to be, said Ray in words that in one way or another must have been like it.  He then took his saxophone and, beside two guitarists and a pianist, began.  No words, just music.  And the entire Solidarity affair held in abeyance.  I found myself finding the words:



Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace

You, you may say 
I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world

You, you may say 
I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will live as one

catching stars

One of my better memories was on a rooftop, on reclining summer chairs nights in the middle of October, November, December.  Those were a long time ago.  Up the flights of stairs, we brought cheap wine, a couple of glasses, a tea light.  And she talked about many things, growing up and childhood.  I listened to her voice, looking at silhouettes of rain tree canopies moving with the breeze.    

waiting for our turn

How the young lives forever, not seeing
beyond an hour or two, seeing a year at most.

The years, at the onset, can stretch so long
every thing was possible.

Until father asked to keep away his white hair.
And mother made gentler by wear.

I look at the mirror and at the crow's lines
that appear even as I smile.

A weariness.  A heaviness.  This body
having lived and seen too many lives.

geminid meteor shower

when was the last time you really took time to look at stars?  look up and stare at the night sky and wonder about those lights.  so many light years away.  a literal seeing of the past in the form of a speck of light.  when i was in third grade, every night i would lay on my back and watch the clear night sky for hours, figure out constellations, memorize star-speck positions, wondering about Big Bang, black holes and the actual size of the universe; all the while hoping to discover a new star the scientists must have missed.  i made charts and diagrams, drawing positions of constellations as seen from an angle, made notes on how they "move" by the hour.  a kid dreaming.                                      why did i stop? when it dawned that nobody i knew knew how to be an astronaut.  

when was the last time you really took time to look at stars?  

this friday night (december 13-14), many of the stars will fall.  the geminid meteor shower.

between four and six

Afternoons on Mondays and Thursdays between four and six,
I teach a class of "internally displaced."  Especially opened 
for university students who survived the storm, who wanted to
          move          forward         with the Haiyan on their backs.  

Their stories of back home are still on our TVs.  
On prime time news, their gutted city and wiped out towns, 
their people, families, love ones           bodies 
unidentified in body bags       while the rest 

of us watch while eating our dinner.  How art is a therapy. 

 A week ago in an earthquaked city still pitch dark
without electricity, even fireflies, children held on
to Crayolas and brushes to story-tell.  The artists 
supposed to show them how, ended as audience instead

or bearers of stories of stones the children had carried
like body bags on their backs.  Losing their parents,
siblings, friends.  Some or all of the people they knew.
Horrors no longer unfamiliar to us.

What is the human spirit really made of?

In class, the conversation of the day was Another Country,
a story about the many kinds of displacement, 
the many kinds of understanding      home and       
love.  Its varied complications.  Nobody talks

about death       and the drowned bodies on the streets
the looting, the aftermath, the forced migrations,
homesickness like palpable emptiness       
in this another country with its strange language.

How art is therapy.  How it tears raw

wounds just trying to heal         a day at a time.
A kind of patient confrontation.  "Too soon," I had said
to the student guidance counselor whose eyes
have long been softened on the edges by blunt blows.

She said yes and no.

mirror

it  struck me, just as i was about to leave the office, in the restroom, looking up after washing my hands, and seeing myself on the mirror, with the indistinguishable light from the very very late sun mixed 

with the onset of dusk.  how i folded my crisp sleeves at the elbows, the wristwatch half glinting, how, while the rest of what i own shades of white and blue, the only pink shirt so suddenly reminded me.  

a moment, when the face on the mirror is of someone older, a once-upon-a-long-time-ago childhood hero.  wasn't i told many times how we could be so much alike.  the smile, maybe, other expressions 

on the open face, two left feet, an awkwardness when dancing, humor, carefully tempered temper and impatience, a proud sharpness when angry...how i carefully reminded myself to constantly remember

how he was so i would not follow.  consciously not follow and be better.  like a constant keeping of distance from a dark corner shadow.












  

the ephemeral

there is constant death one undergoes every waking moment.  a death and a rebirth happening in nuances, so that one changes, ever so subtly.  noticeable only after a certain time has elapsed, a certain event has happened to mark a kind of ritual.  even though the constancy is there.  every waking moment.  or even when one sleeps, in dreams.

the self, then, is always an ephemeral state.  always in transit, in passing.  and all the thoughts it bears, and by bearing the thoughts i mean both the carrying of it and the giving birth to it, are fleeting.  formless.  weightless, except when they are forged into form.  and by forging, i mean to wield it, to wrought it into shape.  be it action, or art, or word.

the word as a vessel for the ephemeral, else, the abyss of nothingness.  or is the latter really?  sometimes, when it is late like this, the hour that is both very very late at night of now and very very early in the morning of now, i remember Plato's immaterial world.