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.

on mothers on Mothers' Day

Because I will never be a mother, 
I can never bear
the true weight of the world. 

On Intimacy

Because in the darkness on a sea of sheets we cannot help 
remember even without remembering to, in the night

to step out of our bodies palming our way back to origins. 
I, blind and hungry, feel the shadows for curves, touching familiar

strange landscapes, the soft places I've always known
long before any knowing. Woman, her entirety

the tangible universe and the only god I could bury myself into.
Because the darkness keeps the secret that I could never 

fully grow apart. Helpless, I nestle on her warmth,
suckle at her breasts 

We must have met the same woman on the same day

An hour shy of a full day, I find the note you tacked on the wall
It has a picture of a tree where you met her, the woman sometimes
Called Fate. I reckon you noted your conversation about the same

Time I read in public, while accompanied by a painting, poem
I've written about her, and the bush, and the snake. Such happenstance
Did you ask her why she stayed where she'd go

Not for the first time I see the wall and knock at the cosmos divide: 
You, there
I, here

And our notes free on a boat bridge under moon and wind.


























          

built for the boulders

My mother once said men are stronger than women
only "from the waist up."  She meant the shoulders.

She added women are stronger than men "waist down". 
"To bear children."  And meant the legs.

Or perhaps she meant something else entirely
I did not understand.

Maybe men bear what men can and must.
And women are able to keep a stable ground

in spite of what moves:  changes, seasons, quakes.

Atlas can shrug.
Woman keep her ground.

This is all a matter of conjecture.  Of course.
Not at all unlike Hugo's.

I think about the many women I know.  
Steadfast, how they hold the center:

mother, sister, friends.  And she
who smiles at me when I tell her:

This is the street where that restaurant is.
And even though am not sure, she holds my hand

in the humid, windless night and says, "Let's go."

the counsel of women

I sat hearing the counsel 
of women heads close

together 
feeling for the sense of

"right" justice
in the middle of dark

words in the middle of 
known procedures 

for discipline. 
The crime grave

the freshman too young
and remorseful. 

How much of heart 
must be involved.

The wisdom to know
when the "right" procedures

could be wrong.

"imagine"

And because my wife is here, I would like to say I'm sorry for the times when I wasn't what I supposed to be, said Ray in words that in one way or another must have been like it.  He then took his saxophone and, beside two guitarists and a pianist, began.  No words, just music.  And the entire Solidarity affair held in abeyance.  I found myself finding the words:



Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace

You, you may say 
I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world

You, you may say 
I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will live as one

ways to see

1.  i met A* in a poetry reading, she has two sons, both of them with autism, and she writes poetry.  on her page, she posts Mary Oliver and photos of her sons.  recently she tells about doing a little grocery with the boys, and posts another photo of them playing with water at their front yard.  

2.  in a documentary about children with autism, i thought about their parents and the strength of unconditional love.  maybe reasons had been asked, but expectedly no direct answers were given.  still, the carry on.

3.  a student wrote on her paper that faith is learning the imperfections and still believing in it.  i wrote nothing on the margins.

4.  when i was growing up, about eight or nine, there was a boy who was about four or five years my senior.  he was always in bed and his large frame always carried around by the small woman who was his mother.  i always wondered why he wouldn't just move himself, always wondered why his mother was always so kind.  it took many years before i understood the kindness of a big heart.  and love was not even yet mentioned.

5.  in many torn countries, there remains being a mother.  when they tell stories about carrying and giving birth and raising children in extreme conditions, it is unimaginable.  the strength of a human heart.  

6.  in the early of mornings, when flying flocks can still be seen on the sky and the new sunlight is soft, some young mothers in the neighborhood can be seen carrying their babies for sun, for vitamin D, i am reminded my own paucity. 

this world as a fold

teach me how to fold origami, fold this paper
piece the way slender fingers do

they are graceful as a woman's,
as precise

as her heart the way it holds the brim of a world
into a cup of her hand.

loose change

have begun working on the floor.  barefeet.  laptop on a portable table knee-high, legs that can be folded.  

the lampshade appears like an afterglow from this angle.

w* sits beside me, is currently engrossed at the house lizard.

j--'s one-man exhibit is open for a month.  last saturday, thought of writing an essay on his recent works:  abstract, several washes, cloudy effect, beautiful texture, balance, zen, transcendence.

bought a painting yesterday.

the other day, lost my temper.

a couple of meetings tomorrow afternoon.


how these july days burn the skin like summer.

must remember not to forget the affidavits.

dawn these days chanting from the mosque can be heard.  ramadan.
 
still wonder at women and their dysmenorrhea.

come, next-weekend.  a roundtrip flight, a ballet show, a birthday gift for a date.

also planning a trip south at the coves.  still to calendar. 

some days, too often these days, feel old.  hard thai massage, replete with all the stretching, didn't help.  

note for this week: haircut.












   

another variation of The Story

Another Variation of The Story as Seen from
The Scene of A Poetry Reading  




the man, after having a stroke
of genius, takes his seat 
among the crowd.  his wife
beside him attempts to cover
the length of his left arm
because it had freed itself and
acquired volition.  she made it
keep still.  like a child 
who obeys only with a look.  

at last, the man is called. 
his turn to read his work
because he's been around 
the circuit long enough, and
the young writers, still
trying out the ropes, wanted
someone distinguished.  he
begins by saying how,
these days,

he's much pushed around 
on his wheelchair.  how he has 
become so courteous 
he brings his own chair on invitations.
the crowd laughs, carefully,
at his own careful joke.  he continues
saying he is forty-three and
has had many firsts
he has forgotten. 

anyway, he says, the firsts
are not important.
i'd rather the second
being in itself an affirmation
of the first.  and he carries on
long after the first hour.
the crowd understands, 
claps at cues
to later turn polite.

the wife knows.
the man doesn't.
and his freed arm
slithers off from the cover.  
and without his knowing,
moves
shuddering, slithering
closer and closer 
to the closest woman still. 




C. Carreon













 

a women's month celebration

Last night, a celebration of "the woman" whoever she is or may turn out to be.  Every one did their bit of praise:  for the mother, the lover, the daughter...all of these faceless.  All, generic tags on the body.  One patron introduced her piece saying how, when she was young, she had always engaged in a battle of the sexes: the women better than men.  How the poem she was about to read was her epiphany:  proudly she read Hugo's "The Man and the Woman".  A long reading (but she was an art patron, excited in her own participation; and so she was let be) I suffered hearing.  A Catholic priest (also a patron) elevated a self-less old maid all alone on her deathbed.  Nobody said anything about cruelty.  

I would have wanted to do something on the body.  Strip it.  And make it talk about desire.  Make it say the things before it had taught itself self-censorship. 

But I couldn't, having had no idea the celebration was going to be that way.  Instead, I was there: a comic-tragedy.  

image from The Pillow Book

Eve, the garden, the bush, and the snake

Before the year ends, the project will have been completed and the marsh, reclaimed.  Funny that word, "reclaimed"; as if someone had previously taken the land and turned it into watery nests.  How I would have liked to ask where did the previous inhabitants go, now that the humans have "reclaimed" the land.  The frogs, the crickets, the snakes, among others.  Around the same time last year, I found a snake close to the window, looking in.  It was light green, no thicker than my finger, and had climbed its way up the bush.  Displaced, did it want to come in?

Some nights ago, a cricket found its way in the bedroom.  I let it go. 

The snake, a man killed it with a stone and placed its body in an empty liquor bottle.  Like a prize.  He later showed it off to anyone who cared to look.

One friend, he lives alone with a tely, his father's urn, and a gecko.  He said:  one night, the gecko was nowhere to be found; and the house felt deserted.

I told him there is The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, where there is just a man like him; and a gecko living with the man.  And the gecko, in its previous life, was Jorge Luis Borges, the author my friend most admire. 

The road work for this project is nearly done.  A number of men already doing the road humps and the yellow and black stripes.  If one doesn't care to look, it is easy to mistake this place was never once a marsh.   

Instead of cutting the bush by the window, I let it grow.  And in spite of what might be better ideas, I let open all the house windows.  Sometimes, in the wee hours of early morning, I come downstairs and wonder what would I do: when I open the door and see a snake lying, waiting for me.








  

time keeping

 there is a kind of peace in running and in being with one's dog.  in spite of all the humidity one tries but cannot avoid.  and later, in the high of noon when every thing is so bright it hurts the eyes.  and every thing else is lazy, and balmy, and not wanting to move.  good to sit on the couch by the window with a glass of water.

(and come friday, a performance for women's month.)


(come saturday, the beginning of the graduate school trimester.)

(tuesday, T to fly over and talk about graphic illustration.)
     

but in the mean time, here.  zagajewski in his so many things breathing in between the said.  the consciousness and the sense of present-ness a construction from memory.  lewyka, the comic(?) banality of the tangible  where "[c]urls of apple peel slide off the table on to the carpet, where they are trodden into a fragrant mush."