the long drive from Saavedra

And it comes to me again.

Even not yet absolute, 
the one remaining 
year in this country. 

From Germany, J sends
congratulations saying
his own return after

Denmark and torn Israel. 
Till we meet again, I say
motioning the years 

near a decade or so. Or
so. G is now rarely
mentioned, left

(after retirement) several
pages back. In Spain. 
In other points elsewhere.

The marching continues
off from coast to coast.
In middle, Raymund

takes his off-road motor
to return to his kids--
a last save before

they are all grown.
G had always said
about the passing

of grace, nothing 
permanent except what
the moment has. 

And it comes to me again.

Even not yet absolute, 
the one remaining 
year in this country. 

During the not-long-enough

drive from Saavedra

to her warmth.

And it comes to me again. 

Nights 

we hold as long as we can.

sometimes bolder

after a number of drinks
and right before
a single bed

a conversation with
half-meant debate
about the matter

of it all: art
and change
to what

extents

can men go on 
and on ignoring
libido 

loneliness
and the liveable
change

the discussion of philosophy

is probably meant not for everyone.  some 
work for the next meal, and this is enough.
the barber whom i see more than the church
tells five reasons to live, in specific order:
college, work, marriage, kids, house.
a man of his world, he is.  tells about his rise
from employee to owner of the salon.
also how to conserve water,
through homebuilt-system of gallons and pipes.
the house needs everything, he says.
and i do not argue with him.  having respect 
for what he does, meticulously.  with heart.

the man does not know hugo or kant.
does not bother with art or phenomenology.
but he thinks not only of his next meal.
and values work.  and honesty.
and also his kids, two of them, whom
i haven't seen.  he probably meant them
when he talks of his house.

and we do talk about the weather, the expected
changes in it.  also the leaving and arriving
that i do, although we never get to specifics.
i do not know if he sees the blue 
of the clear blue sky in this country.
do not know if he thinks of the line
as both phenomenological palimpsest and
illusory divide of consciously built boundaries.

he may not think of these, or of feminism.
although
i think we all do.  between the hours of rain
and morning or the hours of stars and night.
with enough solitude, we all do

discuss philosophy and question
laws, existence, universe, our selves.

the short history of tractors

a funny book.  this book
of humour and history.
also secret-keeping
and family.
how the humble agricultural 
tractor meant to feed thousands

became prototype of a tank
meant to kill countless
in a world war.
and the child who 
wanted to know the family

secret, found what needs to be kept.
and the funny father at last freed
of the burden of memory
raised both hands to heaven,

freed of gripping sanity.

In Blackwater Woods

In Blackwater Woods



Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.





- Mary Oliver

edit

write drunk with passion, edit sober.  how often is this told.  to the beginners, this is still something new. when does a stone turn? when does a thing become old from being once new?

and how many times do we have to edit ourselves?  revise and revise to make something new.  out from the old.  consider a lizard shedding skin.  an animal from an egg, evolving.  everything always

turning gradually into something else.  although: sometimes it is not always the new that works.  grandmothers say if it's not broken, why fix it?  jim said a poem is only really done 

once you've given up on it.  not a surprise to this day he keeps revising and revising.  and he stops sometimes in the middle of conversations to think.  no one knows.  some may have lost count 

after all the revising.  simultaneous revisions, all.  the young ones tire of hearing the same old.  lines.  always moving for new.  but who is keeping tabs?  and does it even matter  given 

we are a community of forgetful.  see how everything repeats itself.  yesterday, in a discussion weaving literature and history, do you see a pattern? repetition in different forms. several 

editions.  all that changes:  our positions.  places and decks from where we view the stars.  see how ursula once wrote a story six different times, in six different versions of worlds existing 

as we must do now.  under this particular sky.  why not write a poem then about rebirth?because haven't we all been told:  you and i, stardust.  and if there really is a constant amount 

of energy in the universe, then at some point of these all, you and i must have had shared the same soul.  how we must have drunk ourselves in passion.  then we edit ourselves sober.

palimpsest

Perhaps the reason why we are not meant 
to live longer than we have to is the burden 
the weight of years, in incremental memories
layering one on top of another.  

Imagine
the skin of the world seen by your mind's eye
and the thousands more associations
only you can conjure.  How at times they come

and go only when they so pleases.  Such that
in mid of something else entirely, you remember 
the minute details of her and of the scene
surrounding her.  In a vividness that could

outlast the very strength of you, finally
grown weary with all the years.







 

cape town

if you come to visit a city, do so not as a tourist.  
else there will be many things you will miss.  

the tourist is always asked to see
the many beautiful things,  

of course he is also asked to see
the beautiful only.

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.

after city

The children are dead.
The news does not say
even though their bodies
are all around.  In parts,
in missing wholes.
The entire city has begun
to smell of loss.  There are 
arms, dismembered, waving
at Red Cross trucks carrying relief.
Too many bare feet, caught 
cold in the act of running.
Everybody is howling.
But there are not enough names.

At the centers, the lines are long
for food, for water, for medicine.
Also for calling God.
But the telecommunications 
are all down.  
And the entire city is dark.








(Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, Philippines)
 







by shane

birth-day

Here it is a travesty.
That life goes on for a number.
That celebrations are called 
for some other reasons
if one does not care to remember.
In another place, entire towns
and cities are awashed.
Only the memory have names.
Too many bodies are found,
cold and strange. The loved ones
remain missing.  Underneath
all the mud and debris where 
those who survive must stand 
go on living.





(Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, Philippines)




by shane





















 

design

"Art as life is design," I recall saying, "an appearance
of random.  Even though it is not."  
What would I have thought if I were across the room,
thinking of the pieces of today:
a conversation on diplomacy, a paper stack,
a calendar with running days, an unanswered letter.

























  

on questions with no answers

1.

this business with poetry.  almost no wonder why 
poets were sent away from the republic.
all questioning that could, on any day, be meant
to mean subverting  what has been 
a long held belief.  e.g. the world is flat. 


2.

this city is connected to the others by two steel bridges.
mornings and evenings, people fall into long, long, long lines:
all in a hurry to leave at first light
all in a hurry to return by dusk fall.
they all curse under their breaths in between.


3.

in poetry reading class, the students' thoughts
are thick like fabric.  the professor has opened
a window, has let something in: 
postmodernism:  a poem in footnote form;
gender theory:  a poem on the satire of normative roles;
philosophy:  a poem on memory's palimpsestic quality.

the students' thoughts
clutch their bibles, reciting verses.

not one of them has ever seen a firefly.




 

how we move forward

In "Another Country", the son of an exile grows up in a country not of his father's.  His father constantly dreams of coming home, to a place that before long only he and his generation know.  But the son does not know this, and mistakes the place for a place, a mass of land, a point in geography.  The son travels and discovers for himself what alienation is.  How it is to belong to a Some Place without a name, to search for it where even cartographers do not know where.

But home is where the heart is, someone says.
Home is where one is most secured, another pipes in.

What do they know of homes that are not what they are supposed to be.  And what do they know of life's constant irony: to search for that which cannot be found; to leave places that refuse to be left behind; to flee only to return again.

The country of our forefathers, the country of women, the country of childhood, bittersweetness, trauma, nostalgia.

The day we met, the city was in pain, begins the story.

How we leave places.  And how, no matter we leave, the places do not leave us.


















 

a good book

read illustrated shakespeare at almost the same breath as the comics.  snippets of greek mythology like fairy tales too.  they are among the many in the house of shelves.  many books has since followed long after the bobbsey twins and the hardy boys, and nancy drew who must be pretty but who never seems to grow old (the give away: how many cases could be had in a year?).  including what was once mistaken as must-be porn: the only forbidden books in the house.  these about men and women who arch their backs in throes (what are throes? and throes of passion? and what does this mean: to hold, to tighten, to gasp, to thrust?) 


to read 

is to suddenly have no body, no couch, no bed, no room

only mind, wandering, not lost, in somewhere they call clouds

where there is an old man, a big fish, and the sea.  a boy, a whitewash, a picket fence.  a tale, a revolution, a beheading of nobles, and two cities.  an escaped convict, and a guard.  a white fang.  a mockingbird, a house of the seven gables, a family stranded in an island, a man alone in an island, a story of a man who became buddha, and a man who became the greatest salesman in the world.

since then a longer string of names met while being without body.  names of people with birthdates and graves and histories of the real.

and in between, books of poetry.

to read

is to suddenly have no body, no couch, no bed, no room

only mind, wandering, not lost, in somewhere they call clouds.
 
and what did you get after all this reading? they ask, they who did not know
the art of disappearing.

on possibly being lost in the city

it begins as an invitation, the city.  waving at you from across the narrow strait where there runs a ferry twice daily.  from across the steel blue bridge, visible for a few more miles because everywhere else around is as flat as the island.  all the mountains are across.  all the terrains, including the bowl of clouds where trees and streets play corners.  the city a bit hazy at the mountains' feet.  a bit teasing.  a bit farther from easy reach.  a bit closer than you can possibly imagine.  also, a bit safe from the humdrum, from the saltiness of sea breeze, from the roads that are still in states of ongoing construction.  from the humidity of it all.  

if you heed what begins as an invitation, the city becomes.  what it turns into, the moment you cross the strait, narrow despite the ferries, in spite of the stillness of the steel bridge, and all its promises of clear visibility.  it is not really: by the mountains' favored feet.  not really in a terrain you've known; not really.  not inside a bowl of cumulus clouds, not anywhere near.  not hazy, no longer teasing now that it is no longer waving at you from across.  it has turned itself into:

a labyrinth

of streets, of walls, of people lost walking and working.  where exit doors are farther and farther from easy reach.  only as close as you can imagine.

you hear:  a false fire alarm, a few laughter from a building; and the you in your mind begins to dream of the saltiness of the sea breeze and all the roads you once knew that were in perpetual states of ongoing construction.

how good is an old place

maybe only as good as the people you once knew.  or still know.  maybe only as good as the corners and little places, the landmarks that remain.  still there to help you not get lost.  because cities can change over a night, over a blink of an eye.  and streets can always disappear.  buildings too.  whole towns.  countries in mind.  in the same way as people.  as pasts.  especially when forgotten.  or buried under tons of debris.  if everyone else insists, bus routes could remain.  and you can find yourself holding on to the comfort of once again being a stranger familiar to the new old place.

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?

often we forget our age

except when we run in attempt to catch that ride.  or see playground bars we know we could still lift our bodies in our minds.  when we see kids bemoan their teenage loves and cry "forever" and tellies say stay believing in your own heart.  when we hear someone say "eternity" and how no one could ever tear their love apart.  we remember.  the too many times and too many things we try to un-remember.  and how often we succeed, at times, to forget our age.  when she laughs finding you funny without your knowing in the middle of a conversation; or unconsciously takes your hand without a cue, in the middle of a mall, or a crowded station, or in a car, without so much as the setting of a dinner, candlelit or otherwise.  when you see her performing the feat of braiding her own hair in front of a mirror, hairpin tucked on lips, or at the end the night, just a plain schoolboy kiss, you forget your age.
  
and also except when you have to file those forms and fill the details birth date please and age please, thank you.  

palimpsests

some days ago, two young men made a performance called "white wall".  it was made of a white sheet held high and wide, with two cuts on it where the men placed their lips and talked between themselves.  the audience were meant to overhear.  their conversation short: about how nothing signifies something; how something could be anything; and anything, nothing; and how even nothing means something; and something, anything...finally the men ended their play, possibly out of breath chasing their own conversation's tail.  i thought about bertolt brecht.  and waiting for godot.  someone from the audience whispered virginia woolf.  i said nothing, thinking of the young man who thought of the performance.  how difficult it is to be "new" these days.  how the world must be older than we think.  older than it lets on...

yesterday, a korean artist brought out her painting of a girl whose head was lost inside the clouds inside an upturned fish bowl.  the goldfishes swimming on air outside the glass, swimming beside her ears. her other painting was of a girl with extra large rabbit ears.  surrealism.  how she recalls dali in the background of her figures, in the strokes and colors she chose.  how her portraits call frida in the length of her women's necks, the slopes of their shoulders, the immobile staring of their heads. 

today, i begin reading The Portland Vase...