the silk road

Names are always beautiful. As beautiful 
as we can imagine them to be. Framing 
them with the lines of our wants, the unsaid 
and unanswered needs. We tell and we do not
tell; the yearnings are always difficult,

no words come, they balk at the touch.
If I may be direct, how will you respond?
If I tell you I wonder how it will be
to be right across you, the table meant
for two? It is possible.

All these exchanges happening while sharing
a metaphysical table. So it is this, we
have no bodies, no faces, no names; but
how the words flow. Moving and always
in a state of unsettled be-coming.

The silk road can be seen from outside
our window; a candle flickers, you unfold
a table napkin; I search for a word trying
to find an excuse to look at you.
Someone comes close, asks what we'll have
for dinner. 

light

The conversation tonight was about light. How temporal it is. Like body, like breath. Like how two people meet. Living, and then, also, leaving. Both. Always happening at the same time. This mad provision 

we call here, now, what exists, merely passing in time & space, brushing, lingering, lingered, in transit, a longing, through the vastness this presence, phenomenon, is-ness, then gone, to where? from where? extending, to nowhere, elsewhere, liminal, between, nuance, distance, distances, horizon, eternal.
The commonest road has no name. It is a road that is not a road. It is light. That stretches. A beam, a bridge, crossing, reaching us at the selvedges, where we are on the folds of happenstance, wrinkle in space, in time, breathing each other, are you there? am i there? here i am. here you are.

a dark impenetrable forest

It is raining now where I am. 
The heater hums, the gray will not leave
until the weeks of winter will finally
exhaust themselves. In the meantime

the tea, the sound of rain, the days
in the calendar filling up
like things to do that march on and on.
I sense my right eye stooping now
like an old working dog. It means
the glasses will have to be changed.

In the meantime, how to talk about
translation? When everything 
we manifest are truly incomplete.
A student, armed with practice and theory, 
argues: translation is always a gain.
In time

one will know gentleness; and why 
the horizon is what it is: something
perceivable, what we can move towards
eternally, as we would a dream, 
as we would each breath. Always beyond. 

There are many ways to live.
Even the one who ruminates drinks tea,
the bag possibly packed in a factory 
filled with underpaid men and women,
children too, in some developing country 
never far beyond.

All in an open circle.
Echos-monde.
The water from this rain.
Me. You. What the limitations I have
make of You other than the You
that you actually live. What we imagine
of ourselves, of each other. 
To one another.

In the meantime, I write a letter
to a You.
Letter without postal stamp, physical 
address, even a legible name. As though
believing the tangible is an organic case 
always subject to decay, unable to contain
what we are truly trying to reach.

how would you want to be born

If you were to decide, would you want to be born
into exactly the same way you are now?
There is a correct answer and there is 
a truthful one. The correct answer is

always a Yes for all believed-to-be moral
reasons including resignation to fate.
The more truthful one, far from it. Why
would you choose again exactly the same

circumstance that led you beating your own breast
calling out to a universe that does not answer
why all these senseless pain (war-torn refugees,
hunger, true hunger and true abandonment) while

others worry more wind to sail their yacht?
The young people at the university yesterday
organised themselves and came to the streets 
raised their fists in claims of revolution.

Some of them took their poetry and slammed,
invited me to come and speak (with them).
I could not place a word to what I feel.
Perhaps I have grown too old:

I still want to believe, but

welfare of the world

Had I still been younger, I would have
still wanted to change the world.
Time has a way of showing a little
at a time, moment to moment 
letting me scale what can be done, 
what can't.

I write quiet poems now. Burning still,
I'd like to believe, in an almost imploding
kind of way; far from what I once had been:
immortal in being 

so much younger. wide eyed
out in the streets.

It has been years. 
And I have come to understand the way
the body, too, comes to understand:
how some stories are longer than we are.

Like violence.
Kindness.
Unconditional.

Some moments I wonder if a poem 
does make a difference in the world.
The kind that is enough to move a shadow.
Or are we deluding ourselves
believing we worth as much as a star.

It is possible
we don't. We are 
alive anyway.

Like every other little thing everyday:
leaf still on a twig, blade of grass,
weed, ant, housefly, guinea pig, 
farmed chicken, stray dog.

Who gets to say which life matters more.

Some stories, by their nature, are
truly longer than we are...
No one can really save the world and live 
to tell all the stories beginning to end.

from a hut overlooking part of the ocean

After all, we share a common journey.
When traveling together, it's normal to talk,
exchanging remarks, say, about the weather,
or about the stations flashing past.

We wouldn't run out of topics for so much connects us.
The same star keeps us in reach.
We cast shadows according to the same laws.
Both of us at least try to know something, each in our own way,
and in even in what we don't know there lies a resemblance.

Just ask and I will explain as best I can
what it is to see through eyes,
why my heart beats,
and how come my body is unrooted.

From Wislawa Symborzka, "The silence of plants" pp 76-77

The ways we go

Two nights ago, I dreamed of pulling a tooth---
two, an incisor and a molar.  There would have been
third, but in the dream it stopped being loose---

and I woke up distraught.  Dreams of teeth

are not good in this country of dreamers, they mean
death.  I spent the rest of the hours watching
for light.  Morning, she tells me, 

death in the family, but it could also mean simply

change

exactly the way I was told the first time
a reader explained the cards before reading.
A transition, she had said, gesturing at a cup.

What do I know?  What do I know?

I called my mother in the dark of morning
she replied, pray.
In the corner I watch the stillness and the quiet

Who knows?  Who knows?

J-- had a stroke of luck right after our meeting, 
and passed away.  A woman with terminal cancer
brought her oxygen tank to listen to a poetry reading.

The Danish neighbour hit the truck at the freeway

the same day my new motorcycle arrived.
His wife and months-old child I had greeted just that morning,
and she had spoken kindly to the dogs.

Who knows?  Who knows?

There is an envelope upstairs waiting for the last paper.
There could be a leaving, but do I dare 
finally go?

a passing away before midnight

The first thing I did was to give her an instruction.  In a voice
collected, not unlike the last time I heard myself doing 
the same when an entire block was burning and she 
had refused to leave the room where we were, seated

hands on her lap, eyes there and not there saying the fire 
will burn itself away.  I heard myself say yes you are right

but let's anyway bring outside a few things like this see?

And so when it happened when the dog, after three hours 
nestling on my arms, gasped for air finally letting go itself
to become warm and limp on my lap, she broke crying 
and the first thing I did was keep still 

to keep myself, quietly closing a number of doors from 
feeling.  It was not yet time.  A bag, a phone call, 
an arrangement and a truck driven under the first of January stars

outside a few things like this see?

floating on water

in between long tables of conversations about plights, i remember the open waters from a photo by sue, two dolphins meeting, closing distance.

Exactitude

Is it possible to know what we want?
Don't we still get ahead of ourselves
not at all unlike

a five-year-old child who thinks it knows
what it wants, if only for a moment
an hour, a minute 

before it finds itself wanting something else
yet again.  How we spent years trying
exactitude.  I think I know

as I've been taught, and learned:
to envision the map, to draw it carefully 
as a CV, a bio, a folder of

accomplishments, works in progress and 
downplayed failures, silent emptinesses.
And when the map

is finally done and we stand right at mark
the middle of X, we find ourselves:
the audacious asking:

do you really know what you want?

stone turning

Stone turning after a year

There is a theory in stone collecting.  Collect only the ones that tell their stories.  Press your ear close 
to their heartbeat, close to the bone made heavy by the weight of restraint and the years

spent waiting underneath, underwater.  Only the sun and rain know the way of their travel, 
labyrinthine to the surface.  Collect only the ones that sigh over their long lost limbs that remain alive,

fragmented somewhere else, continents away, to dream just the same.  The same dream of origins and 
sky.  Collect the ones that continue to remember, in a fitful wakefulness possibly as old 

as stars.  How they still carry all shades of light and dark, blooming a softness sharp on your palm

you can only mistake it as warmth or pain.  Collect only the ones that call out to you, as if waving

for rescue; you, a gunwale now, remains of the small boat that used to be your self in a dream in 
dreams many lifetimes ago.  Before you, too, were once that very same stone chipped from

the broken shoulder of a universe, awakened by a tree in a garden by a lake, turned over and made 
part of a fire place, a house, a mausoleum, a cathedral, before finally taken to the edge of land

where a child casted you to the waters, saw you glide and fly

shane

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.

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.

how do you divide time

do you read every day? a beginning writer asks by way of conversation.

i try, i say.  not telling him of the three books on the bedside table, the five on the next tabletop, the new one in my bag i am just beginning to read the introduction.

*

how do you write? i once asked a friend, who was a mother, a wife, a lawyer, a writer, a graduate student.
i've forgotten her reply.















 
 

de luz

Imagine dos orillas en dos islas diferentes, separadas en el tiempo por exactamente medio día: así, cuando una soñaba despierta, el otro estaba a la deriva en al sueño.

                                                                    *

Las nubes se incendian
como enamorados
desnudos en el rio.
Cuando caiga la tarde
se convertiran en un rio de estrellas.










                                                                                                           

(Marjorie Evasco & Alex Heites)

if you see the world a reservoir

how no love is ever lost



who was it who said everything has to go somewhere.  that nothing disappears.  in this world, in this cosmos.  even the chromium and cadmium may find themselves in the bodies of weeds, absorbed by plants, long after they are disposed on garbage heaps.  how nothing disappears.  no matter the ephemeral.  every thing a palimpsest.  even this world, layer after layer of events, known as histories, known as peoples, also known as love.  do you believe in energy? in warm thoughts, as well as warm bodies?  do you believe in the vast-ness of this universe, in the minute-ness of atoms, in the indefatigable force that binds us all?

         

pilot lights

we write letters to the universe.  thoughts into the flesh of words.  no matter the words, too, no longer assume a physical mold the way they used to do when books and their pages were tangible.  still, we write the words and flung them out into space, into the vast expanse of the Net like a wide lake, like an ocean, often folded, keeping in its bosom both the shipwrecked and the sails.  we look up the stars, who live longer than our lives, and who have been pilot lights to the many more others before us.