forty-so degrees

The temperature still has its cool hand
pressed flat against the surface of air.
Though the sun is bright
and gusts come not infrequently.
Dog walkers are out, their dogs patient
with the slow stroll; more lovers
are out nights. Their soft warm glow. 

I work continuously for days now,
trudging 
over translations and retranslations,
that the sun also keeps longer hours.
Outside the large windows, there may be
no indication of evening, not even 
when sometimes I feel my palms cold.

There is an end, though not in sight.
There will be summer, though not yet.
At the moment, here, 
forsythias in bloom.

a long goodbye 3

Dear Friend, I fancy meeting you in a very crowded street in an intersection of peoples when the red light turns green and everyone including ourselves rush forward to our own elsewheres. 

The preciseness of things will allow us not to see each other unlike the way one morning on a particular June day I met again at once four people in a corner paces away from ---. 

One I was with about two years in my early twenties with no love lost between us at parting. One met in the late twenties leg of whitewashed paintings. Another through her large scales paintings of cats and flowers. The fourth mere hours from an airport. 

What are the chances we meet again? Together in a spot as if rehearsed sometime somewhere. If at ten dreaming in California someone tells us we will commit suicide at 26 and have PhD at 36 and then be half way around the world bearing a kind of slowness of

Being, that there will be sunshine and sea and we will wonder if this is still life or dream. Why should we not fancy multiverses where in another life some things did not happen and all these merely a child's wondering. A child still must be dreaming elsewhere 

On a bed with starships taped on the ceiling and midmorning flooding in a roomful of books. Or must it be a dog, one of the hundreds of strays in a Catholic country with least love for the least. I fancy hectares of land where dogs run and not only dream. When I move 

From one place to another and meet people and memorise faces in spite myself I fancy meeting them again in another life. One where hurriedly passing the crisscrossing pedestrian lines we are less estranged from ourselves.

public, private, and secret

Gabriel passes away at 87



So a storyteller passes away.
into an other world where perhaps 
there would be no more need 
for stories.  This world we have,
so needy for a better place.
'Though sometimes we forget--

or perhaps because we remember--
we celebrate what brightness
survives in the dark.  A piece
of fleeting life.  He says,
"All human beings have three lives:

public, private, and secret."
And so we live each and each.
A tight exclusive circle.

the displaced

it is difficult to love this country, i thought many times, one afternoon walking through the heat of molten air.  but the people are always warm, no matter the odds and flaws.  and that is why, maybe, not far away a foreigner has decided to stay.  carrying his toddler child, he points at a very clear blue sky and a bird and speaks his German, his child happy with him.  an other world fitting itself in.

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.

on essentialism and selves

possibly not the same person who takes the foil and the épée and point at another's chest to kill.  for sport.  a physical version of another involving the killing of hundreds and millions in several stages until one's own pawn becomes greater than another's king.  plans for war.  kill time while sharping the mind.  possibly 

not the same person who tends the basil, the tarragon, the wild mint, the parsley, the dill.  who takes time to watch the sunrise glow and dreams of sea.  not 

the same person, angry and a vise, who throws without regret, lines, lives.  not the same one who collects.  memories and serenity, joys in souvenirs.  the one who sings with a guitar and writes

the world as it is as is, and life as is, it is. 

translating understanding

1.
exactly how does one "experience" the worldview behind a particular language?  i do not know.  even though this i believe:  being able to understand another language, to speak it and/or write with it, is to be able to pass through a glass wall.  i think of this now because of where i am these days, speaking another tongue; because of the manuscripts that need to be read of the same language, but different because written and crafted; because i remember understanding a spoken another and being able to rudimentary speak it, too, even as being unable to read it.  and being able to read another language, and yet neither speak it nor understand it spoken.  what is the measure, then, of multilingualism?  and how true this experiencing of a particularity, a worldview, behind a language?

some time a long time ago, i understood and speak sign.  but when the hands-talking stopped, the understanding was lost.  the skill of trans-lation, gone.

Abad said the first language is feeling.  everything else used to convey it is translation.


2.
a brave young writer's collection reached me this afternoon.  i am asked to comment on it.  the works are burdened with the weight of its words.  the printed attempts to grasp Universe into one's left hand.  in her note, she said she meant to explore divinity and "sense and essentiality, existing and occuring (sic) within the utmost prosaic, but also poetic, function of language".  she called her collection "Quintessence".  i do not understand what she meant.  do not know what to say.  maybe.  to take life and language and poetry less seriously.  sometimes.  and maybe, too, that poetry may possibly be all about simply sensing the outside through looking in.