the space between cities

The space between cities is a body of distance
hardly translatable into a map we can pretend
able to transverse by way of roads and rails,
ports and piers cohering so-called boundaries

of what is there and here and then and now as
east and west and north and south referring to
sun and wind and seasons, the way we attempt
landmarking passages if only to remember all 

places we've been, also those never been to 
except heard by name or gestured at in story.
The space between is body of distance, tunnel
lighted dimly: memory and dream, both palpable

to skin, real enough to hear the laugh from
a mind's photograph of one's own ageless self 
in a moment everlasting. Who else is there?
an entire library of snapshots handwritten in

cursive with names, some clearer than others, 
invoked often as bridges over which one's own 
mind and body travels, loop of a map a place
only in river-spaces crossing between cities.

I meant no harm

I meant no harm when I talked about the window pane
gentle to dust resting themselves a carpet on its lid
half open to sun, half closed by curtain sheer enough
letting in a pool of light on the floor where the dog
who meant no harm, settled patiently for breeze
and perhaps a bird chirp from outside the window pane.

frames of mind

I don't mean the flowers, I say, when I meant how the day was. We were at her little yard, a patch of grass trying to populate in spite lack of water and too much sun; it has a few herbs here and there, spots of turmeric and also what resembles dill. Not too long ago, I helped tend her basil. The jasmine tree, flowering this time of the year, has a series of firefly lights. Twinkling now and making mellow glows, making being in the yard feel it is those years again. Letting some part of the evening seem to wait for the sweet telltale scent of pot.  

She brings a dainty white pot of oolong tea; on her other hand, a book she is about to finish: about a man proving evil in the world. I am cynical about it: evil needs no proving; but keep peace anyway: she most likely is as cynical about poetry.

I think instead it is quite an evening. Remembering the time we had wine and talked--while embers used to grill the fish for dinner slowly turned to ash--about things forgotten now. What did we talk about?

This evening it is about a possible trip to C: the guide says white sand beach, waterfalls, springs. There again the pictures of sunsets, horizons and outrigger boats. In essence they mean leaving. I notice the slice of red watermelon on a plate placed on the table for me and the palm-size local papaya for her. I think about what I might not have for a long time soon. What we try not to talk about.

The slight headache I have had earlier returns. A breeze passes and the bamboo chimes on her doorway make their water sounds. I pet one of the dogs. It is quite an evening. I shove the rest of the papers and things to do in a full drawer in mind.

a clearing in the woods

Let me tell you a secret. This

          is my clearing in the woods

                       shared only by you.
          
                               Three years now.


I have grown a little too old for public 
announcements, the way younger ones have made 
out of the internet: a potted plant, a garden, 
a landscape, a directed trail to the woodshed 
by the lake right after the painted sign 
on reclaimed wood: Welcome Crowd 
tail as they hunt in search of themselves.

Consider the woods at the back of my house
through the screened door opened by keypad.
A password uttered in silent type.
The woods, metaphors of the real: the steel gate
needs fixing; the few garden herbs that survived
the yard onslaught of a playful young dog; 
list of things to do including translations

of poems for anthology, necessary visit
to the bank, call from the secretary, 
a last stretch of familiarity. I walk through
the woods throughout the day 

with some moments of clarity as when 
being in transit between actual places,
as when I hold my oldest dog 
who (I am afraid) I might not see again.
As when I allow myself to be fragile 

to a woman's love. As when I sit, seemingly 
alone in this private clearing in the woods 
in quiet company with a fellow soul.

Fate

When you meet a gypsy, on the road you begin to wonder
at your own rootedness, the way you have chosen to 
never stray at the straw path the maps gestured at with the stars.
They sometimes call it destiny.
Although whether it is the meeting her or the crossroad 
you may never know, standing at the foot of some bridge
you have constructed in mind. Fate

has a way of being many things at once strange and familiar
an open face of someone once dreamed about.
She has a tambourine, a ukelele, and a stray dog.
You have a compass, a dream, and a fear.

When you meet a gypsy, you wonder 
at your own rootedness. They sometimes call it
destiny.

beginning at forty

This terrarium is called Night Walk with Mishima.  It has come to this.  Working earth in smaller quantities.  Taking things, perhaps, one pair of morning and night at a time.  The day she turned forty, she had a photo of herself among her terraria.  Face hidden by shadow, dancer's feet poised ready to dance in sunlight.  I am happy she is beginning to be happy.  How it was not so long ago when we met outside the hundreds-year-old wall and she was all in white.  Then, there was nothing else to offer for comfort--not even words--except the blunt presence of a listening warm body for which she could beat her grief on.  The words fled her, the writing, the poetry.  And yet, the art soul survived: in her home-made, hand-beaten memories-in-ice creams that she poured herself into.  This lady is cold, she said.  It has been awhile before it has come to this.  Finally growing gardens in smaller quantities as new beginnings.

other lives and finally

Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what's happening,

it's what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of "Old Battersea Bridge."
I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed

anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
something in the womb

but couldn't hang on. One of those other worlds
or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother's belly
she had to scream out.

Here when I say "I never want to be without you,"
somewhere else I am saying
"I never want to be without you again." And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet

in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

 


Bob Hicok

white nest mornings

you and i on an eternal morning, bright and white the scent of fresh linen, white sheets, a curtain bask in early daylight, the scent of your skin, soft, the gentle outlines of your curves, a geography of light, woman, breath, and warmth, and the oh so beautiful tangle of wilderness.































 

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.

rocks, water, light

photo by A.L. Abanes (may you and your family be safe)

at what point the anger? 

the resignation, the calm? 

how aptly it was said: 

when you know the storm is coming, 

the quiet has a shimmer. 

and shimmer it did; and Haiyan 

took many lives: children, 

men, women.  

no mention of countless pets,

no word about lovers

only strangers with unknown names

in a city nearly wiped unrecognizable.

was it only half a year ago i came 

backpacked to visit and stand

to admire the sunset at their pier?

no news, only reports of dead 
bodies in evacuation centers,

trying to explain the unknowing-ness

of storm surges. of divine plans.

but the footage of a man

the body of his six-year-old 

daughter in his arms, cold.

a shimmering light with it all.

  

morning walk

on gray mornings like this, i remember some place else.  although remembering could mean a whole different, whole new thing.  not the kind that re-collects the past, and assembling it into some kind of fiction in the prose of thinking.

in some other place, it is also gray like this.  maybe also in the middle of june, or the beginning.  and there is always the promise of rain.  maybe there is also a cool breeze, the kind that partly bites and i am wearing a sweater, the reversible kind.

when it is gray and quiet like this, i imagine walking to a place somewhere else.  the time would stretch into a stillness, the sun would never rise.  keeping low like this, behind the clouds that are gray.

there will a few trucks on the road and their cargoes heading to destinations far.  still, a number of cars, glassed, just as isolated.  there are a few wet leaves on the road, a few branches that had fallen.  and if paid closest attention to, a hint of salt in the breeze. 

i imagine remembering a dock at the far end of the road.  and a bar where one could order a hard drink.  there, there are no mornings, just dusk.  and the at windows, a skywide picture of an eternal sunrise or sunset.

a kind of be-ing

shouldn't we try, at least, every day, to keep a pace apart from the clocks of the world?  

see the things must to do, all the people to meet, the things due.  how they never run out
how they always manage to outrun.  everyone. 

it is a kind of be-ing.  to keep still.  to watch:  the world running around, chasing
its own mad tail.




























 

looking for and keeping traces

how reliable is memory?  it is so malleable.  so subject to change and to internal reverberations.  subject to certainty, to doubt, to nostalgia, to loss, to moments of eureka.  subject to internal resistances, to an extent of shared remembering, to a body or bodies of traces, often lost, often kept, often made.  so that.  sitting on this very same seat, by the very same window, at the very same time of the day on a summer, like now, like this, the same furnishings, the same tone, it makes you playfully wonder:  did it really happen?  did you really leave?  did you really just came back?

Things of Light

Lately I’ve been remembering things
Of light: Sundry shining things:
Coins, pebbles, marbles in a glass,
Fleeting glimpses of mottled mornings
Of floorboards newly waxed,
April shower dripping on a poinsettia path,
Shafts piercing a maculate afternoon of acacias.

Clouds roil and rain stains the parchment
Sky of a dry season (thunder rolls
Across the horizon), but the glinting discs
Of lightning long remain in my recall—
The moment glancing on the well-worn
Edges of my window sill—still chasing me
In my smog-blurred somnambulant noons.



Marne Kilates