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Three nights ago, exactly, I dreamed 
the woman from five years ago 
whom I've lost to Germany, married 

to a man my jealousy--
    how it shames me to myself 
    that one word over which anger 
    appears more dignified or honorable--

could easily stain undesirable,
something I nonetheless do not do.
Knowing it is my own ego

at fault and not the man himself 
who, on an even keel, I hope would
love her more than she does herself,

which is really another way of saying
more than I had, could.
Three nights ago, exactly, I dreamed

her, with a face I have never ever seen
before but still easily recognized
in the way of those eyes, those cheekbones,

those lips, and arms, and the very is-ness
of her. In the dream, she has grown
more toned, stronger in the way I have

no knowing whether it is out of brokenness
or something finally better. Knowing only
how it was so long ago since 

her dancing was a way to
punish her own body, wring out and into it 
the pain of her psyche:

The weight of words, she called it.
One day, she said, you'll never 
see me again... Three nights ago, exactly,

I saw her again in the dream:
the toned muscles, the scent of her,
"air ballet" I thought,

all that cloth, and all that wringing,
lifting as though made light
the weight of being.

Was she happy? I could not ask
in the dream, our faces were so close.
We could kiss, were about to, would

kiss I do not remember upon waking.
Only the recurring sense, as always,
that I had a chance and I chose

to lose it.

The snowflakes that wait by the road

Dear Friend,

Are the leaves falling where you are? The view of the mountains where I am are beautiful in a quiet and almost sad way whenever it is autumn. Mountains in autumn remind me of both hope and bruise, and that space in between them without a name. Also of Native Americans and the colored people, black, brown, yellow. The weight of history is heavy and long, and though we may want to refuse it, the times remember for us. The length of its memory, the memory of an elephant. Have you ever placed your open palm on a grown elephant? Gentler than the dog's, the dog who loves you and sleeps by your side as though there is nothing else in the world to ask for.

The tree right across my window is black and bare. It is sleeping now that winter has begun. Since my arrival, I have noticed two stray cats called by their names at night by a woman's voice. The cats are not hers. I have seen her on an occasion feeding them in a corner. Sometimes the cats are by porch steps when I arrive; they look at me and I try to put a name to what I feel. I am wary. Though I can count by years the length of stay, moving is always inevitable and necessary. Someone, many years ago, engaged against it: she said there are things that cannot be changed. I let her have her way, though I did not agree and still don't; although admitting, I must say a part of me wants to believe it.

I think about the birds, and the squirrels, and the stray animals at times these days, their lives no more lesser or greater than the lives of those in the Third and war-torn worlds, in conditions where gentleness remains to exist.

On the last days of this semester, students tell of long and heavy histories of themselves; art, again, as always, a catharsis, although...you must have sensed by now I remain grappling: to old to believe and un-believe. Hope. Is Always An Expensive Thing. We buy in exchange of spirit.

There is plenty of sadness and pessimism to share. And yet there remains joy in things so little, like the snowflakes who lives ever so momentarily only to fall and wait by the wayside, to lose itself and rise again.


Signed, P

the teddy bear and the doll

Simone de Beauvoir might as well have corrected 
Freud, showing him without raising her voice, 
how the lack is not the girl's, but the boy's.

Freud had glorified the boy's little thing which
Simone describes as wart, in other words,
insignificant. She says

everyone begins protected and pees sitting down, 
until the boy 
is weaned again and is told

"Stand up, you are a man."
"Stand up, be a man."

And so the pain is converted, becomes aversion.
The want, into compensation. 
And then both of them meet, Freud and Simone,

on the same road noting the girl with her doll
and the boy with his penis and his animal toy,
the teddy. Notice

it is Freud, as nearly all men, who is trapped
in his family name; it is Simone who has her own.
As nearly all women, able to move fluidly

one house into another, belonging truly to
no one but herself. Her own name she keeps
no matter the changing family names.

It is all, really, a matter of perspective.

Whenever I see a woman, I know how small I am
against the mystery of worlds, the layers
she knows of life and living and loving, depths

I can never be, trapped on the shallows.
How I compensate, like everyone else.

what the mind says

what the minds says/ is altogether different.

i take walks in the morning, walks

in the late afternoon towards evening, evening late

the lights becoming/ is altogether different.

i have to keep remembering now, nearly

all the time what made the decision to keep on 

this way beyond distances and times of day, past

the roads seen ahead/ what the mind says

is altogether different.

jade

Carve out a hollow into your existence

You will find there is no difference 
between you and the American woman
who touched the Maneki-neko,
unashamed to ask for luck and fortune.

    outside the lonely shell of you car

You will overhear two colored women
tell each other organic food is luxury,
will read an unadorned student's poem
say thirty dollars a month for food.

                         through the steady pace of your feet

You will see the question is never too far, 
it is always here, no matter
the whitewashed porch and the flowers 
blooming quiet as if in peace.

                                       this blooming day of falling leaves

You will touch what is intangible, this
palpable need to fill in the hollowed out.
Not unlike how you felt as a child pouring sea
from cupped hands into the hole in the sand.

More nights ahead

We can put together a hundred or more possibilities,
letting two characters meet, in spite the number
of ways, streets, corners, bars, restaurants, cities.
Did you not once say you will have a hard drink
at the bar at the edge of your sleep? Even though cold,
I have returned to the uncertainty of outdoors now, 
stopping at diners where tired men and tired waitresses
call each other by name. The home fries both nostalgic
and sorry. Something always pulls me back. 

Sometimes I look up and watch flocks of birds, mostly
when flocks of young people pass by. Do they
know how we can devote our entire lives
to a cause truly lost?
How the foolish idealism of our once immortal
sense drove us to where we are now. Here...

And is it wrong to think women like you will always be
less lonely? I have come to deny myself. But 
how it bangs its fists on my door wanting
to be let out, telling me 
I am human, human, human. 
So I try to keep away from the door,
away from the bar at the edge of your sleep.

After, Then

There will be no return, woman. 
No knock on your door, my once beloved.
We both are too weary to attempt 
Any more old familiar dance.
Any better man knows, there really is
No more having back what was lost.
What was lost impossibly scattered now.
Irretrievable. Irredeemable.
All that we have left, you and I
Are the remains. Only another form
Of ashes. Arms wrapped around yourself
Standing by the closed front door. 
I, looking back at you, at the porch, 
The yard, the house, the neighborhood, 
The curb, the life,
From the rearview mirror.

The Act of Remembering

A dangerous thing, this act.
Betrayal to one's own mind who
once decided and precariously
ordered the will to 
severe part of itself, 
preserving most 
of what spirit remains.

And then suddenly this-- 
re-collecting, bringing back
to make as part again
what had been 
intentionally let fall away.

When still young, there was 
so much strength to push
ahead, against the gusts.
To keep forward the head
steady from not looking back.

Perhaps because the road
was still long, the young
eyes still unable to sense
what lies by the by, 
by the bend.

Our immortal's time.

Now here we are. Here I am.
The familiar autumn 
on my back. I try, I try
to push against the gusts.
To keep away from the act,
from surrendering to
remembering. I do not want

to say I am afraid that come
this winter, the bones will,
on their own, remember.











  

born not a woman

Should I be born again, I do not want
To be a woman.
She is capacity of the world and in it.
The weight of the sky
In her eyes

Even when she laughs and she smiles at you
Like you have given her the world,
You'd know you didn't, couldn't.
How she can carry 

Worlds and give birth to them, allowing
To take parts of herself she can
Not ever grow back.
Beside her what is a man

But an illusion of grandeur. Safely
Ignorant in this way, his sound deep 
Like a log hollow
Allowing him through all seasons

To stay afloat, surviving better
Ever on the surface, lacking depth.

the seat, the leaves, the squirrel, the flowers

1
From this distance, a handmade paddle and paddle boat,
the sound of waves to the shore in the early evening
while Venus or a waxing moon appears
is almost an imagined thing.
This is what distance does to a finite weathered body.

2
When I was much younger there was a girl with whom
I had wine with at the rooftop of an apartment.
No moon, not even a folding chair, but a clothesline 
of damp clothes behind us. A concrete step of some sort
and there we were -- while I was seated.

Like in the movies, you know, so I now try every time
to substitute the word to love.

3
Do women used to (always) think of "marry"? 
Do they count people they (once) love?

4
I've had a drink a number of nights with the person
one woman slept with, loved with. It was all very well. 
The entire time I could see them in my mind's eye 
and I wanted violence
I held the clear glass, there was lemon, salt, rocks.
And I wiped off the grin on his face.

5
In my thirties, I thought of "marry".

It meant sitting, chair, porch, dusk or early evening
with a woman I am sharing quiet with.

6
She sends a photo of her green garden.
From where I am, the leaves are falling.
The squirrels are brave. Because they do not hibernate.
Flowers know the number of days even though
no one bothers to ask.

7
There is a back pain. There is 
an invitation to read a poem. I wrote 
a poem about a body. A body. A body.

Preface

If you were to devote only one time to read 
a piece of Hegel's, take the Preface: it may be
the actual body of what he may have meant: how 
always it appears in the beginning of any book
yet, not the first thing to be written.
What he found 
was a horizon where conflicts settle themselves 
to remain settled as conflicts. A horizon 
we keep moving towards, in spite ourselves, 
we cannot ever reach. He died, the book 
unfinished. Might as well be. 

Do not give up on poetry

because sometimes it is so much easier to
start the car and drive it
than walk to the station for the bus.
What are the ways we meet others?

On the street the car is parked by a tree.
There is a squirrel, a tabby can pass by.
I do not think of the deluge 

of work that knows I do not forget.
There is an opera next month
and the leaves are turning.
What moves us?

And does poetry matter when a mother looks
at her son in a real and palpable world?

"And what did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?"






lines from Robert Hayden

Do not strain your ears

Something is happening next door. 
Since the young woman with large hair
moved in, there has been cat sounds,
one time even a baby's. The young man
who grows edible mushrooms, dropped by
one afternoon to give home baked
brownies, still warm with
Brownies for everyone. Love Joe 
in red marker. I never got around

thanking him, missed the chance to
when we briefly met. 
I was opening my front door, he was
on his way to "the forest".
The weather forecast said rain.
Who am I to know?
The first sound of fireworks I mistook
for faraway gunshot. Not even 
their festive lights bring me back
to childlike wonders. 

The flowers are still abloom, yes,
but the gusts have come, leaves turning
slowly. I tell myself to return again
to the habit of running or walking
accompanying the self.
The young man next door has taken into
playing New Age music, early evenings
the young woman calls out a name
and a stray cat named Oliver appears.

body of reason

She does not know Hegel. That beautiful woman
at the screen I speak to, the screen a window
if only possible to get through. What else

does she not know. She does not preoccupy
herself with is-ness of things, abstractions
and smiles at me, my follies. Talks instead

of government politics and the series on TV.
Her work on people, the current music,
the produce market that is newly opened,

transplanting the herbs in the garden, the rain
this monsoon, and sending the dogs for groom.
These things now without me.

Where I am now, the leaves turn. Tonight
it rained on the way home. The phrase remains
no matter what it means.

It goes the same way

and the professor says Hegel,
I understand, is a difficult
read, that
Derrida, afraid, couldn't
count the times he revised
his work on Hegel. Hegel 
anticipating our responses
still 
two hundred years later.
No change then, this 
phenomenon that is ourselves. 

What does it mean, this line?

The room remains quiet. 
Graduate students now past 
the courage of teenagers
(who saw futility 
on first day and left)
wrestle within themselves.
Mostly looking away.

Karl and Mao, Fanon, Butler...
The professor, his 
three translations
and academic German.

The room where empty chairs
outnumber the class
below the first floor
where one entire wall is
glass windows looking straight
at an unpainted concrete wall.

What does it mean, this line?











  

It goes the same way

and the professor says Hegel,
I understand, is a difficult
read, that
Derrida, afraid, couldn't
count the times he revised
his work on Hegel. Hegel 
anticipating our responses
still 
two hundred years later.
No change then, this 
phenomenon that is ourselves. 

What does it mean, this line?

The room remains quiet. 
Graduate students now past 
the courage of teenagers
(who saw futility 
on first day and left)
wrestle within themselves.
Mostly looking away.

Karl and Mao, Fanon, Butler...
The professor, his 
three translations
and pocket German.

The room where empty chairs
outnumber the class
below the first floor
where one entire wall is
glass windows looking straight
at an unpainted concrete wall.

What does it mean, this line?











  

half a world away

My friend says You're back.

Over unlimited nationwide call
We talked politics for hours.
He impassioned, myself spectator
Just returned. Two days later
I received his wedding invitation.

My friend asks Will you make it?

I do not tell I do not want to go.
Maybe the mind will change itself
And give my childhood friend
Our being at the same place again.
When I fly to see him

And the person we both knew
From high school I did not expect
He will marry twice,
Something inevitably will change.
I will feel ever more

The gray hair and the distance
Of what was, has been, will be.

woman with the sun behind her

How could your photos be so
beautiful your life
an entire summer

There must be no worries
they do not exist
they touch you not

There you are at play with
dog at the shore
one sunset

Your laughter and your memory
of it as well as my envy
will last very very long

crossing a body of water

Something always happens when 
water crosses over another 
body of water

This body over an ocean which
is really merely a river
of time 

Memory reaching out as far
its hand could go holding on 
the last shore it has been

Water crossing water
dreams
staying the same and not

Who can tell 
water from another
water?

The difference in time makes
worlds apart and presences
similar to ghosts

We keep
out of fear or love
both

















    

Love

On better days it is easy to remember
as though never forget
                       love
a clear thing
like the awareness of a lovely day
like this
without that cat across the street
                       black and passing

a matter of time

And does he tell you he will return?
In what words, scattered like rain or
Clumped together like flowers in bouquet,
Predictable as the swinging of a boy
Just small enough for the set, too old
The year after this next. In what words

Does he tell you he will return?

I move through water filled with pansies
And daylight that spills into the night,
People without colour in a language
Familiar yet strange; how do I tell her

I will return?

She waves her hand, says name no month.
There is a garden beside her, constant 
Sunshine above, occasional rains, 
Eternal stars. The dogs lay close to her.
I dream.
Watching the night here remain light.

no water but space

What separates us now is space.
Like air   like blank   like nothingness
Not a void   I think  for it too must have
Some vague directions pointing which way
One must go 

Home for now is a transitionary word
Much like the lengthened stay at airports
I have nearly forgotten how it feels like
The not quite entirely have moved in

What sense is it
The mind always knowing this is not the place
Even though it is where the body is
And will be   for years

I try not to think of her warmth 
Realise it has always been this way--a distance
Metaphorical or otherwise

Here  it is the tail end of summer
At 8 PM the sky remains light
I have not yet looked up the skies at night
Knowing there are no stars

So far away from her

(ants in this world) a long goodbye 9

I can count now on one hand
The number of days left on this little island
Of sweets. Days the colour of turmeric.
(It rains just now, wet monsoon has come)

This is a place of hope, no matter
What its people say. More than half its year
The bamboo chimes hanging on my front door
Sounds of water. The shore half hour away.

When the breeze blows on your beloved's hair
And when you see grown men and women
Come out at downpour, play with their children,
You will know why 

Tired white men find their way here
To rest at last from the world at large.
But I leave. By the cosmos' grace, I leave.
(An ant's work what we do. So little
         
To add to so much more.)
And two days before I leave, I shall ferry
Visit a spider woman in these islands, 
Who wrote poetry of memory, being, becoming

It shall be a moment in her herbs garden
Where there will be no promise
Only a doing by understanding
This so much work, this so much work

More than an entire ant's life can do.